Alfred Hitchcock's Opinion of Actors
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Hitchcock's infamous reference to actors as cattle was the inspiration for an online article which modestly proposes that, in order to improve critical judgment of their performances, actors be categorized as "Good and Bad Cattle...the article actually deals with some important issues about film acting, such as the role of the film star in movie marketing, the perils of typecasting and miscasting, the politics of acting awards, and the difficulty of assessing performances. for insight and technical terms, how do you think Hitchcock felt about his actors and why?
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Solution Summary
Hitchcock's statements about actors as children or as cattle means that they cannot possess the mature authority that only an accomplished director has. But even children may be very inventive, and no cattle of any breed can perform as professional actors do.
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Hitchcock's statements about actors as children or as cattle means that they cannot possess the mature authority that only an accomplished director has. But even children may be very inventive, and no cattle of any breed can perform as professional actors do. Hitchcock is obviously being facetious when he denies having said that actors are cattle and then adds: "My actor friends know I would never be capable of such a thoughtless, rude, and unfeeling remark; that I would never call them cattle. . . . What I probably said was that actors should be treated like cattle" (Gottlieb, p. 257).Immediately afterward, however, he gets closer to what he really must have meant when he tells said: "I will admit that I have, from time to time, hoped that technology would devise a machine to replace the actor" (Gottlieb, p. 257). In the film, Foreign Correspondent, he took a step in this direction by having Joel McCrea play a scene with a windmill, and in North by Northwest he shot the ...
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