I have James Agee to thank for some of the background inspiration for this post: in both of his reviews of Phantom Lady, he refers favorably to Harrison's nearly ten-year history with Hitchcock and then suggests, less dismissively in the second review, that her first independent production is Hitchcock-derivative ("nothing that Hitchcock has not done a great deal better . . . a good deal of Hitchcock's sinister melo-realistic melancholy") and I thought, all right, look, if you grant that Harrison was one of Hitchcock's longest-term and most valuable collaborators, and if you praise her for being so closely involved in the production of Phantom Lady that she worked personally with the art director, the screenwriter, the director, and did the casting and some of the costuming herself, then why shouldn't some of the Hitchcockian touches shared between their films be, in fact, Harrisonian? And then I went to see what else she had done besides The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, which I have always wanted to see even though the ending is famously not so much a cheese sandwich as an entire buffet, and I became really interested. I am desperately sorry neither of these projects to which Agee alludes ever seem to have come off: "Her current ideas are 1) a film to be made entirely by women; 2) a murder story involving only children."
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Thank you.
I have James Agee to thank for some of the background inspiration for this post: in both of his reviews of Phantom Lady, he refers favorably to Harrison's nearly ten-year history with Hitchcock and then suggests, less dismissively in the second review, that her first independent production is Hitchcock-derivative ("nothing that Hitchcock has not done a great deal better . . . a good deal of Hitchcock's sinister melo-realistic melancholy") and I thought, all right, look, if you grant that Harrison was one of Hitchcock's longest-term and most valuable collaborators, and if you praise her for being so closely involved in the production of Phantom Lady that she worked personally with the art director, the screenwriter, the director, and did the casting and some of the costuming herself, then why shouldn't some of the Hitchcockian touches shared between their films be, in fact, Harrisonian? And then I went to see what else she had done besides The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, which I have always wanted to see even though the ending is famously not so much a cheese sandwich as an entire buffet, and I became really interested. I am desperately sorry neither of these projects to which Agee alludes ever seem to have come off: "Her current ideas are 1) a film to be made entirely by women; 2) a murder story involving only children."