There's No TV in my TV

Turner Classic Movies is highlighting the movies of Alfred Hitchcock during the month of October.

I'm not anywhere near his biggest fan, but I do appreciate his work. At first, I was drawn to his movies because I like Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. Then, I grew to appreciate his wit and how it always related to an uneasy sense of the macabre. And who can forget Doris Day singing Que Sera, Sera?

I'll never forget an episode from his television show that told the story of a bubbly housewife who killed her emotionally abusive policeman husband by hitting him over the head with a frozen ham. She had only meant to stun him a bit but the direct hit to the medulla proved fatal. The clever wife messed up the house to look like an attack took place and then called her husband's cronies several hours later to investigate. They were able to deduce that he was hit by something blunt and heavy, but couldn't find the murder weapon. The policemen worked up a list of people and objects that could have killed him as they at a delicious homecooked meal of, what else, delicious ham.

I don't remember ages (it was sometime in late elementary or early junior high), but I know I was probably too young to be reading about Leopold and Loeb - but I did anyway. It was just too fascinating to not read. Chris was doing a history project about the 1920's so I also got to read the books he brought home from the library about Al Capone, other Prohibition-era gangsters, and Leopold and Loeb. What can I say? Reading about the St. Valentine's Day Massacre was more fun than Encyclopedia Brown solving The Case of the Missing Lox.

We later discovered that Hitchcock made a movie based on a play loosely inspired from the murder Leopold and Loeb committed. So we checked it out from the library and rushed home to watch it. Just as Jimmy Stewart came back to the party to retrieve his hat and confront the two killers, the VCR ate the tape. We missed the few remaining minutes. Somehow, it seemed fitting for the suspense to linger for a few more months before we could find another version of the movie.

I'm not sure of TCM's lineup, but you can check it out at http://www.turnerclassicmovies.com/.

While most of his movies are quite familiar, I am especially eager to record Strangers on A Train, a 1951 movie based on an early novel by Patricia Highsmith before she got famous for her Tom Ripley series.

In the meantime however, I have to slumber through the mindless rubbish that clogs up the airwaves. I mean, television. It's no coincidence that most of the music I listen to and movies that I watch are decades older than myself. In a time when few of our generation's "best and brightest" have no real dramatic flair, I choose my entertainment from a time period when acting was a true craft, and not something one did to jettison a musical career, or vice versa.

It's amazing that flipping through almost seventy stations of cable, the second-best program on right now is a thrice-seen re-run of Whose Line. So, I've chosen Vertigo, and despondently wish for the time when television, and movies, have a balance of witty dialogue that doesn't center around bodily functions, suspense that isn't bloodthirsty, and romance that doesn't result in The Walk of Shame.