Playing the Field: Marital Gamesmanship in Mr. and Mrs. Smith
HtichCon '21: What’s It All about, Alfie?
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20m
When the Smiths’ reliably posh existence is shaken by a legal MacGuffin, they find themselves in a new field of play, scrambling to redesign their rules of love. Ever the master gamesman (and hopeless romantic), Hitchcock puts his own—and only—spin on screwball comedy here, deconstructing the conventions of the genre while scrutinizing bourgeois American society.
HitchCon Advisory Board member. For Elizabeth Bullock, movies are a “gateway drug” to a life of the mind. As an adjunct instructor, Beth teaches cinema, art history, and humanities courses at the City Colleges of Chicago and film studies at Dominican University. Her Hitchcock course surveys the oeuvre and philosophy of the director from Blackmail through Marnie. Her essay "Naughts and Crosses: Marital and Cinematic Gamesmanship in Alfred Hitchcock's Mr. and Mrs. Smith" appears in Hitchcock Annual, 2022.
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Saturday Morning Q&A
Joel Gunz moderates audience Q&A with presenters Elizabeth Bullock, Douglas A. Cunningham, and Thomas Leitch.
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