Did Alfred Hitchcock meet an older version of himself on the Universal lot one day while taking a break from filming The Birds in the early 1960s?  Director Johan Grimonprez’ film Double Take (2010) uses such a fanciful meeting as the starting point for a story that finds Hitch’s early 1960s work paralleling the real-world politics of the time.

Grimonprez uses newsreel footage, archived television tapes, commercial parodies, Hitchcock impersonators, and footage of Hitchcock himself to create a loose narrative that feels a little more like an art installation than an actual movie.

Viewers with a knowledge of history will enjoy reliving footage of Nikita Khruschev and Richard Nixon’s “Kitchen Debate,” as well as Nixon’s famous presidential debate with John F. Kennedy, as the film follows Cold War politics from the launching of Sputnik in 1955 to Leonind Brezhnev’s ouster of Khruschev in 1964.  The film’s other two narrative threads involve Hitchcock’s growing presence on television (a medium he loved to mock as much as exploit), as host of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and a fictional encounter between Hitchcock and his double that ends with the possible murder of Hitchcock himself on April 29, 1980.

The film of Hitchcock’s that is accorded the most screen time in Double Take is The Birds. Although not generally regarded of as one of Hitch’s masterpieces, recent thought on the film has elevated it from simply being a good scare to a metaphor for the Cold War menace. Those connections are implied rather than spelled out an analyzed in Double Take. That makes the movie a little more of an enigma; it becomes more of a portrait of an era than an actual movie.

Mr. Grimnoprez, a Belgian-born artist, has had a number of gallery installations devoted to the intersection of film and history.  Double Take is not his first encounter with the Master of Suspense.  In 2005, his award-winning production Looking for Alfred also played with the idea of Alfred Hitchcock meeting and confounding his doppelgänger. Double Take is an enjoyable treat for fans of Hitchcock and history.

DOUBLE TAKE on DVD

Special features on the DVD of Double Take include a gallery of images, video of a casting call to find the perfect Hitchcock double, and an audio interview with Karen Black, who was in Hitchcock’s final film, Family Plot, and is bat$%*t crazy.

12/14/2010

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