Great ArtSome Came Running by Glenn Kenny

Image of the day, 6/11/09

By June 11, 2009January 12th, 20267 Comments

AH M

Alfred Hitchcock (float­ing, far right) in Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year At Marienbad, 1961. Shortly pri­or to this shot, the film’s nar­ra­tion men­tions “a gray sil­hou­ette of a man…” And there it is!

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7 Comments

  • Matthias Galvin says:
    June 11, 2009 at 10:18 am

    When I first saw the film, I had thought that looked remark­ably like Hitchcock, but always thought it was a stand-in, because I nev­er recalled see­ing veri­fic­a­tion in any mater­i­als that it was Hitchcock being men­tioned anywhere.

  • Glenn Kenny says:
    June 11, 2009 at 10:56 am

    @Mathias—well, in a sense, it is a stand-in—if you look care­fully, par­tic­u­larly at the feet, you can see it’s a life-size card­board depic­tion of Hitchcock, no doubt a rem­nant of an ornate lobby pro­mo­tion­al dis­play for one of his films.
    When I get the time I’ll find the shot-by-shot homage to “Gilda” in this thing, and post a comparison…

  • Kent M. Beeson says:
    June 11, 2009 at 11:31 am

    Thank you for this. I’d read, via Jonathan Rosenbaum, that Hitchcock makes a “cameo”, but even after see­ing the film twice (once in the theat­er), I could nev­er find him. Even in your screen­grab, even with dir­ec­tions, I had to scan it for a few seconds.

  • Catherine Grant says:
    June 11, 2009 at 12:24 pm

    Maybe the best screen-grab I’ve ever seen. Thanks. Like a magic eye pic­ture! One that truly packs an auteur­ist punch…

  • Tim Lucas says:
    June 11, 2009 at 9:17 pm

    Are we sure this isn’t some­thing those jokers at Criterion added to this mas­ter­piece digitally?
    This has got to be the first time a film has been so cleaned up for DVD that sud­denly a Hitchcock cameo became visible.

  • Glenn Kenny says:
    June 11, 2009 at 10:05 pm

    @Tim: I amm sure! The blink-and-you-miss-it AH ” cameo” is a legendary bit of cinema lore, men­tioned in “Midnight Movies.” I believe it came up in my inter­view with himm too. This might be the first time it could be pinned down, though.

  • Jonathan Rosenbaum says:
    June 14, 2009 at 12:45 pm

    Hi Glenn,
    For whatever it’s worth, this frame grab was also repro­duced in the English trans­la­tion of the screen­play pub­lished by Grove Press as an Evergreen paperback–which is where I first found it. And, as I believe you already know, there’s also a Hitchcock “cameo” in MURIEL, with a Hitchcock blowup right out­side a restaurant.