Titus Techera, who hosts a podcast for the American Cinema Foundation on which he and his guests discuss important films of the past and present, invited me back earlier this week for the latest in a series of conversations about film noir and “noir-adjacent” films. In the latest episode, we discuss Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, written by Ernest Lehman, scored by Bernard Herrmann, and starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, and Martin Landau. Our hour-long chat is now available on line.

Here’s Titus’ summary of our conversation:

Titus and Terry Teachout talk about North by Northwest, Hitchcock’s perfect comedy. We move by way of thriller from the noir to what it would take for a noir hero, betrayed by a beautiful woman, nevertheless to find his way to romance in the element of comedy. Cary Grant pulls off a performance by turns comic and tragic, trying to make sense of life in modern America, and ends up getting married.

To listen to or download this episode, go here.

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Alfred Hitchcock introduces North by Northwest:

An excerpt from Jackson Pollock 51, a documentary film about the artist directed by Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg. The score is by Morton Feldman:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“In childhood, the impetus of conversation is curiosity. The child talks to ask questions. But one of its first lessons, as it advances, is that a question is an intrusion, and an answer a deceit.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, “On the Character of Mrs. Hemans’s Writings”

“There is nothing so easy as to be wise for others; a species of prodigality, by the by—for such wisdom is wholly wasted.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Romance and Reality

From NBC’s Wisdom, an occasional series of TV profiles of older “cultural icons” that aired from 1952 to 1965, excerpts from conversations with Igor Stravinsky, Pearl Buck, Robert Frost, Frank Lloyd Wright, Pablo Picasso, Margaret Mead, Carl Sandburg, Somerset Maugham, Robert Moses, and Marcel Duchamp:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”

From 2009:

Misleading though it can be to read an artist’s life into his work, I’m not greatly surprised that the Rothko Chapel was created by a man who committed suicide a year before it opened. I say this as one who loves Mark Rothko’s paintings of the late Forties and early Fifties passionately. In those days he was full of life, spilling over with the bold, high-key colors that he first saw in the work of Pierre Bonnard. But something seems to have gone badly wrong by the time he got around to painting the Rothko Chapel murals (though there are plenty of critics and scholars who beg to differ)….

Read the whole thing here.

“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it; so that a man rich in such lore, like Sancho Panza, can always find a venerable maxim to fortify the view he happens to be taking.”

George Santayana, The Life of Reason