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Arts & Entertainment

Jamestown Arts Center Presents: Hitchcock Festival!

Jamestown Arts Center, 18 Valley St., Jamestown, RI
Ticket donation $10 at the door, Senior/Student $5

Both film nights will have indoor and outdoor (weather permitting) seating. 

While the British Film Institute in London celebrates the films of the incomparable director Alfred Hitchcock from June through October, the Jamestown Arts Center will be showing two of the filmmaker’s classic films this month. On Tuesday August 14th at 9:00pm the 1959 North By Northwest (136 minutes) will be shown, with film historian Mike Fink’s introductory discussion at 8:45 pm.  The consistently cool Cary Grant stars as the innocent adman Roger O Thornhill who is mistakenly identified as a secret agent by international spies, and as an assassin by the police and chased by both parties.  The now- classic scenes of pursuit include Grant being dive bombed by a crop duster in a cornfield and dangling from the edifice of Mount Rushmore.  Mixed with tongue in cheek comedy,  Hitchcock’s mastery of nightmarish scenarios such as mistaken identity, the fear of pursuit with nowhere to hide, conspiracy and paranoia, are at the heart of this classic with co-stars Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, and Martin Landau.

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On Thursday August 16th, the 1940 black and white feature Rebecca (130 minutes), Hitchcock’s first American film, will be shown, also at 9:00pm.The film stars Sir Laurence Olivier as the enigmatic widower Max de Winter who marries the youthful, naïve protagonist played by Joan Fontaine, and brings her to his English country estate Manderlay where she is menaced by the sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) and the spirit of Max’s deceased wife Rebecca. The tormented young bride is brought to the brinks of madness in this adaption of the classic gothic novel by Daphne du Maurier.  This masterful  psychological drama, dealing with fear, guilt, power and class, won the 1940 Academy Awards for Best Picture and Cinematography. Alfred Hitchcock was born in August 1899, a greengrocer’s son from Leytonstone in east London.

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