The Guardian (28/Apr/2005) - Pick of the day: Parker On Hitchcock
Details
- article: Pick of the day: Parker On Hitchcock
- author(s): Maxton Walker
- newspaper: The Guardian (28/Apr/2005)
- keywords: Alan Parker, Alfred Hitchcock, Bodega Bay, California, Parker on Hitchcock (BBC Radio, 28/Apr/2005), Peter Bogdanovich
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Article
Pick of the day: Parker On Hitchcock
The dry, mellifluous voice that will emanate from your radio at 11.30 this morning on Radio 4 is - oddly - instantly recognisable. Oddly, because Alfred Hitchcock has been dead for 25 years. In Parker On Hitchcock, director Alan Parker who, like Hitch, was a working-class Londoner who worked in advertising before being embraced by Hollywood, offers a personal view of the legendary director's greatest hits.
It turns out to be a jolly (if you share Hitch's macabre sense of humour) romp through his most famous moments. Here are the crows slowly amassing on the schoolyard's climbing frame in Bodega Bay; there's the crop plane "dusting where there ain't no crops". And, of course, there's a stop-off at a certain lonely motel somewhere off the main highway in Arizona ...
It won't tell cinefiles anything new, but the archive tapes of the director politely jousting with his interviewers make it worth the time alone ("All my films are funny," he tells one interviewer who asks why he never made a comedy). And Parker is an incisive guide. Peter Bogdanovich, who met Hitchcock while a film critic, weighs in with his own memories.
