IMMORTALITY: Hitchcock/Truffaut and He Never Died

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Warning: SPOILERS

hitch 1One of the great Woody Allen’s more well-known quotes is his musings on the end of life. He said: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying”.

Recently, two films have played in which the central characters achieved immortality in one of those ways.

The documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut is based upon a series of interviews that the great New Wave French filmmaker, Francois Truffaut, had with one of his most important influences, the more polished Hollywood filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock.

It was an attempt in a way to save the master of suspense. Up until then, though considered one of the most reliable and successful filmmakers of his time, Hitchcock still really wasn’t taken as seriously as he is now for the simple reason in that he made “thrillers”, a genre that was not considered something that filmmakers who took the art form seriously entered into (back in 1940, Gary Cooper turned down the lead in Foreign Correspondent, a role that went to Joel McCrea, because he felt that this genre of film was unimportant and beneath him—a decision he said later was his greatest mistake). Read the rest of this entry »