(side note: I have a new portal story up at Lightspeed as well as an author interview)

We have the occasional family movie night over here, which started as a way for me to keep sane while my husband was in a long distance master’s program which required him to be gone anywhere from 4 days to 2 weeks every other weekend. But it ended up being pretty fun watching movies with the kids so we kept the tradition going. We all take turns choosing the film, meaning our movie watching history is quite varied, encompassing Spy Kids, Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade, Big Hero 6, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Singin’ in the Rain. 

This past weekend was my turn to pick, and I decided it was time to introduce Hitchcock to my kids. My dad is a huge movie buff–he also collects and sells 16mm film and fixes projectors–so I grew up in a house dripping in movie history. My dad’s approach to movies certainly shaped my approach to reading: he loves movies unabashedly, with little regard to genre labels. Mystery, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, literary, classics, whatever. So in addition to watching The Blob as a kid (ah, that movie theater scene with the air vents!), and The Attack of the 70-Foot-Women, and Them!, and some movie about brains from outer space, and a whole lot of Twilight Zones, and The Godfather, Hitchcock was thrown into my childhood at some point, and I have fond memories of watching Rope, and Rear Window, and North by Northwest as a kid. (I do not have fond memories of watching Psycho, as I am forever terrified of hotel bathtubs with shower curtains.) 

So I’ve made a point to expose my kids to older movies as well. My daughter giggled all through “Make ‘Em Laugh” from Singin’ in the Rain, and we all found Errol Flynn’s 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood to be very, very exciting, though the sound quality sucked. I was a little surprised about cocaine’s appearance in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, but, you know, that just kick started the discussion about drugs and addiction that every parent has to have at some point (but did I really want to have that discussion when my daughter was 5? Thanks a lot, Charlie Chaplin).

For Hitchcock, I started off by showing my kids this spectacular preview to North by Northwest:

My 10-year-old son thought Hitchcock was hilarious. My daughter, now 7, got excited about the action scenes. 

North by Northwest went over great. I mean, it’s not the perfect kid’s film using today’s definition of “kid film.” The drinking scene needed some explanation (Cary Grant’s character Roger Thornhill is forced to drink too much bourbon then he’s forced to drive his car in an attempt to kill him). And some of the, what to call it, romantic (?) dialogue between Roger and Eve Kendall was waaaaaaay over the top (Roger: The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her. / Eve: What makes you think you have to conceal it? / Roger: She might find the idea objectionable./ Eve: Then again, she might not.) But I’ll take that kind of stuff to the choppy, non-stop frantic energy of today’s current films that are marketed to children. Kids, it’s assumed, are unable to or unwilling to linger.

What surprised me most about re-watchng North by Northwest is the varied pacing. In particular, when Hitchcock slowed things waaaaaaaaaay down. Take, for instance, the Indiana scene, my favorite in the movie. 

I would describe the scene as David Lynchian or maybe Fargo/Coen brothers-ish, but Hitchcock came first, so that comparison doesn’t work. But I love how everything is held a little too long. Other directors might have had one car pass Cary Grant by. Other directors might have shortened the interaction with the man waiting for the bus. But that slow pace built such tension as we sat watching the film nervously, our nervousness building with each passing encounter, until the crop duster descends and tries to mow Cary Grant down in the scene that follows. I believe something can be gained here from thinking about this scene in the context of writing, and genre writing in particular: that there is a place for moments of languid and quiet pacing even in such stories. (I ponder pacing and genre more here and here.)