Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980), was a film director famous for skillfully wrought suspense thrillers. He was essentially concerned with depicting the tenuous relations between people and objects and rendering the terror inherent in commonplace realities. B...

"I am out to give the public good, healthy, mental shake-ups," the late great film director Alfred Hitchcock once said back in 1936. The quote is taken from Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, a collection of interviews, essays, and...

MIAMI In September, Gov. Jeb Bush named Rebecca D. Mattingly as Florida's first film commish in the executive office of the governor. Mattingly hung up her Mouse ears by leaving her Orlando-based job as manager for broadcast alliances for Walt Disney Attractions...

(MYSTERY; ROYAL GEORGE THEATER, SHAW FESTIVAL; 328 SEATS; C$70 ($47) TOP) NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ontario A Shaw Festival presentation of a play in two acts by Daphne du Maurier. Directed by Christopher Newton. Set and costumes, William Schmuck; lighting, Elizabeth Asselstine. Opened and reviewed...

In the final months of Rebecca Riley's life, a school nurse said the little girl was so weak she was like a "floppy doll."The preschool principal had to help Rebecca off the bus because the 4-year-old was shaking so badly.And a pharmacist complained that Rebecca's...

A mother charged with killing her 4-year-old daughter with an overdose of prescription drugs now believes her daughter was probably misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, she said in her first interview since her arrest.Carolyn Riley said she believed a psychiatrist's diagnosis of her daughter, Rebecca, but...

With Rebecca, the "Hitchcock touch," which has previously been merely a distinguishing feature, becomes a vision of the world. Spontaneity submits to a system. This is a critical moment for an artist, for he must not develop tics, a pedagogical fury. Hitchcock was to avoid these traps. From now on, the two poles of his future work—because we can now talk of a body of work—are clear. One is fascination, moral captation—in other words, depersonalization, schism: in psychoana...

When we speak of [Hitchcock's] camera, of course, we are speaking of an amalgam of director and audience: the director's eye and the eye of the beholder welded into a single screen image. The nosy, rubbernecking camera of the opening montage of Frenzy is an admission from Hitchcock that he is a thrill-seeker at heart (his is the most prominent of the gaping faces on the screen) and a reminder to his movie audience that they are no better: a serio-comic blending of 'I confess' and...

"Rebecca," the novel by Daphne du Maurier, for all its great popularity, limped badly and never really came completely to life…. But in the motion picture version all this is brushed aside by the understanding and literary style of a greater craftsman than Miss du Maurier. Alfred Hitchcock has made of "Rebecca" one of those perfect things—one of those masterpieces that we remember, like his other perfect cinema entertainments "The Thirty-nine Steps" an...