Spellbound, Shadow of Doubt, Saboteur

In 1942 Alfred Hitchcock released the film “Saboteur”.  This World War Two film begins by having a huge fire that occurs in the in an airplane hangar.  When watching this film, and since all of these blog are about birds, I did not notice any occurrences of birds by any means.  It truly made me sit and think for a solid minute, or why Hitchcock would have such an intense fire scene, and show the death of a person without having anything with birds to do with it.  So after re-watching it multiple times I came up with the idea of, Hitchcock was trying to tie together airplanes with birds.  For one, this entire scene takes place in an airplane hangar.  Secondly right before it shows the huge fire, and all the smoke it has a shot 0f the hangar with all the airplanes stored in it.  (As shown below)

Screen Shot 2015-11-27 at 1.46.53 PM  Also, for this film being released during World War Two, airplanes could easily be called birds, just depending on the person.  I find this extremely interesting that Hitchcock would tuck this into this film without actually going out and showing a real bird.

Next, in the 1943 Hitchcockian film Spellbound.  Although this film was released during World War Two, Hitchcock decided to go an alternate route and not base it off of war like recently talked about Saboteur.  There is a scene during “Spellbound” when Dr. Edwards awakes from slumber and makes his way downstairs carrying a blade used to shave.  His intensions were to kill Dr. Alexander.  However Alexander was an old man and says that is the reason he cannot sleep.  So instead he give Dr. Edwards milk and crackers, and Dr. Edwards passes out on the couch.  That next morning when both men wakes up Dr. Alexander asked Dr. Edwards to explain about his dream he had, no matter what it consisted of.  When Dr. Edwards described his dream, it was absolutely creepy and disturbing to say the least.  He gets to a part where he said he was being chased by a pair of wings above him.  This makes me believe Hitchcock put this in as the bird theme to show how Dr. Edwards is a psychotic killer and complete and utter chaos.

Screen Shot 2015-11-27 at 1.37.42 PM

Last, also in the year of 1943 “Shadow of Doubt” was released.  During this flick, their are two characters named Charlie.  One is Uncle Charlie, and the other is young female who’s given name is Charlotte, but she goes by Charlie after he Uncle, Charlie.  We find out that Uncle Charlie had committed a murder, and is running away from the authority.  On arrival he find that Charlie is similar to the woman he murdered so he attempts to murder her.  However through clues from the newspaper Charlie starts to piece together that Uncle Charlie is actually a murderer.  There is a scene when it is all coming together, and Charlie has to rush to the library to look at old newspapers.  During this scene she is wearing metal pins of birds flying on her left shoulder.  This is interesting to have Hitchcock show physical birds in this film.  The other two films discussed in this blog did not have them, making me think that maybe it had something to do with the time era.  However Hitchcock was not hiding anything for this movie. Screen Shot 2015-11-27 at 4.37.30 PM

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