The Perfect Murder
Several of Alfred Hitchcock's movies feature characters who are deeply fascinated with the craft of murder. Murder is often treated as an intellectual puzzle, and several Hitchcock characters seek to establish a definitive "perfect" murder, that is, an undefeatable scientific method of murdering another person that would prevent the police from ever finding the culprit. This notion is a core concept in Rope, Dial M for Murder, Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, and to a lesser extent, Shadow of a Doubt.
Read more about this topic: Themes And Plot Devices In The Films Of Alfred Hitchcock
Famous quotes containing the words perfect and/or murder:
“The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie “answers” questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)