The Paris Review - Dial D for Dinner - The Paris Review
Alma Reville with a wax figure of Alfred Hitchcock’s head, 1974. © Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos. Within the shifted reality of an Alfred Hitchcock movie there is no steady fact of existence that cannot be undermined. The ambiguity extends even to food and drink. In Notorious, Ingrid Bergman’s heroine is poisoned in her own home by a cup of coffee, while homebodies in The Man Who Knew Too Much feel discomfort in foreign lands because of the exotic food they are fed. In mid-twentieth-century America, nothing could be more wholesome and nourishing than a glass of milk—except when it...