How Well Do You Know Your Hitchcock?

Though he never won the Oscar for Best Director in his lifetime, Alfred Hitchcock enjoys an enviable posthumous existence. He may be the most revered of all film directors today. He is my own favorite. Time was, critics condescended to Hitchcock on the grounds that his movies were merely thrillers, and thus either less important or less serious than blockbusters like Ben Hur or message movies like To Kill a Mockingbird. But Hitchcock always used mystery genre conventions to explore themes of deeper significance; he relied on what he called “the MacGuffin,” the merest pretext, as the pivot for a plot involving crime or espionage and ultimately touching on the dialectic of guilt and innocence, good and evil.