Food and Death
Food and death are often interrelated in Hitchcock’s films. It features most prominent in his second-to-last feature, Frenzy: the killer runs a fruit and vegetable stall, the body of his second victim is found in a potato truck, and, in a comic sub-plot, the Chief Inspector is forced to endure his wife’s experiments in cooking. It recurs in a number of earlier films, also:
- A bread knife is the murder weapon in Blackmail, and Alice panics while trying to use one during breakfast the next day, as she keeps imagining she hears the word knife when others are talking.
- In Sabotage, Mrs Verloc kills her husband with a knife she has used to serve dinner.
- In Shadow of a Doubt Mr Newton and Herb discuss murdering each other during dinner
- In Rope, Brandon decides to serve dinner on top of the chest where he is hiding the body of his murdered friend, David.
- In Strangers on a Train Bruno asks a judge what it's like to give someone the death penalty and then go home and eat his dinner
- In To Catch a Thief, Robie and Hughson discuss the ethics of murder and the death penalty while eating dinner.
Read more about this topic: Themes And Plot Devices In The Films Of Alfred Hitchcock
Famous quotes containing the words food and, food and/or death:
“Arguably the only goods people need these days are food and nappies.”
—Terence, Sir Conran (b. 1931)
“To give money to a sufferer is only a come-off. It is only a postponement of the real payment, a bribe paid for silence, a credit system in which a paper promise to pay answers for the time instead of liquidation. We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“You know, if this is Venus, or some other strange planet, we’re liable to run into some high-domed characters with green blood in their veins who’ll blast at us with their atomic death rayguns, and there we’ll be with these—these poor old-fashioned shootin’ irons.”
—Edward L. Bernds (b. 1911)