Guest Lecturer: Olivia Landry, Associate Professor , Virginia Commonwealth University

Hitchcock's German Flop
This lecture compares the two films that constitute Alfred Hitchcock's first and only dual-language film project. He released Murder! (1930) in English and Mary (1931) in German. Hitchcock scholars and the director himself have maintained that Mary was a flop because it was "too English" for the German screen. A focus on the thematization of the voice, gender, and race permits an examination of the significant discrepancies between the two versions and their possible meanings. Mary was not only abridged, but the motive for murder was significantly altered-from concealing racialized identity to concealing a criminal past.