It Had to Be Hitchcock

One of the cool things about my new job in New York is that one of my new colleagues is a big Alfred Hitchcock fan. In her honor, here's a photo I took in New York's Chinatown last week.

© Peter Rozovsky 2018

Copy-editing error turns up in classic movie

Alfred Hitchcock's movie Shadow of a Doubt is all about a young California woman's realization of the shocking truth about her beloved Uncle Charlie.

Just as shocking is bald evidence that bad copy editing goes back at least to 1943. A pivotal scene has Teresa Wright's Charlotte learning from a newspaper article about the past that Joseph Cotten's Charles, for whom she was named, so desperately conceals.

The article trumpets the quest for the notorious Merry-Widow Murderer (with a hyphen), who is referred to later in the same article, however, as the hyphenless Merry Widow Murderer. A competent copy editor would have caught this inconsistency. The reassessment of Hitchcock's critical reputation begins now.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Happy birthday, Hitch!

The man who directed Rear Window, Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble With Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Thirty-Nine Steps and many more of the most exciting, most technically proficient, and most enjoyable movies ever made would have turned 108 years old today. Happy birthday, Alfred Hitchcock!

(Hat tip to Poe's Deadly Daughters.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Alfred Hitchcock

Title changes that drive you nuts (or not)

Why do publishers change a book's title when translating or reissuing it? Why does Åsa Larsson's Solstorm become Sun Storm in the United States but The Savage Altar in the United Kingdom? How about The Smell of the Night and The Scent of the Night? Again, same book.

And could political sensitivities lie behind the change in title of Matt Beynon Rees' first crime novel set in the Palestinian territories? The Collaborator of Bethlehem in the U.S. became The Bethlehem Murders in the U.K. (The British edition also changes Rees' name, dropping Beynon.)

Sometimes a change is easy to understand. Fred Vargas' Have Mercy On Us All made a better English title than a literal translation of the French original would have been: Leave Quickly, and Return Late. And Cornell Woolrich's story "It Had to Be Murder" is more easily found these days under the title of the movie that Alfred Hitchcock made from it: Rear Window.

OK, readers, what title changes delighted or infuriated you — or made you scratch your head or roll your eyes?

And here's a special Detectives Beyond Borders quiz: Adrian Hyland's wonderful Australian debut novel, Diamond Dove, will be published in the United States as Moonlight Downs. Why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

The 39 Steps on stage

The 39 Steps has been a novel, three movies and now, as winner of a Laurence Olivier Award for best new comedy, a farce.

The current production, at London's Criterion Theatre, offers clever staging, deft character and costume changes on the fly from the cast of four, and a lead actor whose mustache is strikingly similar to Robert Donat's in Alfred Hitchcock's great 1935 film version.

It also offers a corpse that keeps waving one of its arms, Scottish and other accents milked for laughs, gay and straight sexual winking and nudging, and an old man running around in boxer shorts. What it does not offer is any but the slightest hint of the suspense that marked either John Buchan's 1915 novel or Hitchcock's very different movie. (I haven't seen either the 1959 or the 1978 movie versions.)

The show, crafted with apparent affection from the important bits of the Hitchcock, turns those bits into a long Benny Hill sketch. The mix works, to judge from the explosive horselaughs and deep, rich and rasping snorts of merriment from the two men who sat right behind me. But it has little to do with crime fiction despite the influential novel and superb movie from which it borrows its name.

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An essay in the play's program proposes Buchan's hero, Richard Hannay, as one of the most enduring and influential heroes from the Golden Age of the thriller. Hannay, according to the article, "formed the blueprint for a whole gallery of similar characters," including Bulldog Drummond, the Saint, and, as the type mutated, James Bond, Len Deighton's unnamed hero and John Le Carre's disillusioned protagonists.

It's a stimulating article that may interest readers of my recent comment about the most influential crime writer ever.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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John Buchan