In our final look at suspense films, I have chosen a somewhat wider variety of movies than in previous sessions. I plan to examine only one Hitchcock film, the later version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, starring Doris Day and James Stewart. Working with a theme that appears in nearly all of his movies, Hitchcock explores, in a variety of ways, the discrepancy between appearance and reality and focuses attention on the kidnapping of a child, a kidnapping that can be resolved only by chance, courage, and the inability of one of the kidnappers to remain as hard-hearted as she needs to be in order for her plot to succeed.

Another of the films I have chosen for study is one of the three movies in history to win all of the major Academy Awards: best picture, actor, actress, director, and film script, The Silence of the Lambs. The suspense in this movie so bothered my wife when she saw it that she refuses to watch, or even talk about, it ever again. It is brilliantly suspenseful—and scary.

The third film in this course is the little-known but riveting The Night of the Hunter, in which Robert Mitchum gives perhaps his greatest performance as a sadistic and murderous phony preacher, who, after murdering his new wife, pursues her two young children—ages nine and four—who know the whereabouts of $10,000 their father, now an executed murderer, secretly left with them.

The last movie in this group of suspense films, The Interpreter, involves a young woman, Nicole Kidman, who is a translator in the United Nations and hears two people whispering about an assassination that is soon to take place. When she tells the police and private investigators what she has heard, the person in charge, sensing that she is lying about something she is telling him (and she is) has to foil a possible assassination and, at the same time, investigate her. His task is enormously complicated and dangerous, both for her and for the countries threatened by this possible assassination.

*NOTE: Each film will be screened in class over a period of weeks, with Dr. Huston pausing throughout providing context and discussion of important directorial choices, themes, and other highlights that make the films classic suspense dramas.

Tuesdays | 12 weeks, January 13 - April 7 | 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
In person