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:
“There is such a thing as food and such a thing as poison. But the damage done by those who pass off poison as food is far less than that done by those who generation after generation convince people that food is poison.”
—Paul Goodman (1911–1972)
“For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)
“War. Fighting. Men ... every man in the whole realm is in the army.... Every man in uniform ... An economy entirely geared to war ... but there is not much war ... hardly any fighting ... yet every man a soldier from birth till death ... Men ... all men for fighting ... but no war, no wars to fight ... what is it, what does it mean?””
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)