Hitchfork

A piece I've had milling around my brain and/or hard drive for the past three years is up over at Pitchfork today. About how Hitchcock used music in Rear Window to echo his feelings (most defnitely not mine, though) about mass-cultural passivity. Music from radios ironically soundtracking your activities, that sort of thing. It's one of my personal favorites of the longer pieces I've written, and although I've watched RW about 30 or 40 times now, it's still my favorite Hitchcock flick going away. Others in the top ten: The Lady Vanishes, the first The Man Who Knew Too Much, NxNW, Psycho, Vertigo, The 39 Steps, Strangers on a Train, The Birds. Fun fact: it's widely believed that Hitchcock actually made the first British talkie, 1929's Blackmail. The producers decided to add sync-sound after shooting wrapped, and Hitchcock took the opportunity to make sinister use of music right then and there. He scored the lead-up to an attempted rape, the part of the film that haunts its female lead until its conclusion, with the song "Miss Up-To Date," music by Billy Mayerl, known as the "British Gershwin." Cheeky.