By Day Five of our Holiday Cook's Tour we might begin to feel a bit peckish, no doubt. What's a holiday without a feast, you may well ask? Well, if you'd dropped into the '21' Club on West 52nd street in Manhattan in December, 1956, you might have encountered director Alfred Hitchcock, the facetious gourmand armed with that deadly looking fork, who chose to hide his underlying seriousness and himself behind his camera in many instances, but who posed instead behind this sumptuous turkey at that popular watering hole on this occasion. A glimpse of Hitch's "hide and seek" act inspired the playful poet Ogden Nash to write:
"Pick a Hitchcock of opulence rather than corpulence,
just pleasingly plump, with a snug silhouette,
To embellish the board when the places are set.
For the ultimate test, more closely examine it.
The Hitchcock supreme has a wide streak of ham in it."
Perhaps the finest repasts served up by Mr. H. were the layered, delicately flavored, beautiful looking feasts that he put on celluloid. While we may decide in passing that the English director's shy pose has a disingenuous air, it is his enduring movies, such as The 39 Steps (1935), Rebecca (1940), Notorious (1945) and Vertigo (1957) that linger, unreeling in cinematic memory as among the best ever made. Even those films deemed as failures, such as personal faves, The Paradine Case (1947), which includes an uncharacteristically vulnerable Ethel Barrymore and a malevolent Charles Laughton, has moments of transcendent black and white beauty, as does I Confess (1953), filmed in darkest Québec City, trying to capture on film that elusive human quality that complicates most of our lives, the conscience.
Around the same period as this photograph, Mr. Hitchcock's anthology program began to make the mass medium of television seem less of an "idiot box", and more of a window into the frustrations, delusions and obsessions that the average flawed human being might experience. Always a fellow looking for a way to amuse himself, his colleagues and friends, Hitch's Christmas greeting cards were always sent out without the letter L. It was the director's esoteric joke to eliminate that character, creating a pun on the word "No-el."
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