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:
“Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies
and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
with its store of food and little cooking pans
and change of clothes,”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The food of thy soul is light and space; feed it then on light and space. But the food of thy body is champagne and oysters; feed it then on champagne and oysters; and so shall it merit a joyful resurrection, if there is any to be.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them
be well used, for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)