The Weekend Alternative: Hitchcock Knockoffs

The most glaring Hitch knockoff is also one of the best.  I bet most people who know this movie don't even realize it was someone else (Stanley Donen) who directed it.  Even the Saul Bass titles are misleading.

Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn run head first into international Cold War intrigue and mistaken identities.  Turns out it's all about stamps.  (It's not a spoiler when the movie is from 1963.)

Perhaps to a detriment, Brian De Palma wears his love of Hitchcock on his sleeve.  Some critics are too busy pointing out the story/psychology similarities to recognize that the dude's true connection to Hitchcock is that of a visual storyteller.

That said, you can't help but compare Obsession to Vertigo, Body Double to Rear Window and Dressed to Kill to Psycho.  I picked Dressed to Kill because it is the only one with Michael Caine in drag.  (Dammit, another spoiler!)

A theme running through so much of Hitchcock's work is that of a man wrongly accused. The most obvious example of this being Henry Fonda in The Wrong Man.

This conspiratorial dread is used to wonderful effect in what might be Harrison Ford's greatest non Indy/Han performance, Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive.  We can joke about H-Fo being a wooden codger now, but the scene where he realizes the cops think he is a suspect in his wife's death is some damned fine acting.

Another recurring theme in Hitchcock's work is that of the common man thrust into a larger than life, unfathomable conspiracy. (See The Thirty-Nine Steps, Saboteur, North by Northwest.)

In Marathon Man, Dustin Hoffman plays a normal guy grad student who likes to keep fit who winds up at the center of Cold War crosses and double crosses.  Laurence Olivier, right, just has to shoot you one look to with those old man frames to show you how evil he is.

The movie is chock full of paranoid and terrifying moments - proving that Columbia University really has an awful dental plan.

The Law Firm of Caruso and LaBeouf have incorporated twice to appropriate stories direct from the Hitchcock Estate.

Disturbia took Rear Window from Greenwich Village to the California sprawl.  Eagle Eye took North By Northwest from New York City, Long Island, Chicago and South Dakota to Stupidville.