Foreign Correspondent

Far from Alfred Hitchcock's best film, Foreign Correspondent is just okay. They can't all be zingers. However, you do get Joel McCrea here. If McCrea isn't one of the best "everyman" leading men of all time, then I'll eat my hat.

You might know McCrea from perhaps his best film, Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels. That's a film I watched for the first time in grad school. At the time, I wasn't sure what to expect, but Sturges' film combined just the right amount of humor and pathos without being too maudlin.

McCrea worked with Hitchcock on Foreign Correspondent a year earlier. The plot is pretty convoluted; for an older film, I had trouble keeping up with what was going on, and really only remember a few pivotal scenes. The film seemed a bit unnecessarily long, and I found myself not invested at all here.

Of course, that's not really much of an indicator. I've had trouble focusing on films lately, often sitting in front of the TV with my laptop out, surfing away. I find myself answering my own questions with quick Google searches. When did Joel McCrea die? Which film came first, this one or Sullivan's Travels? Did Hitchcock do other films with McCrea in the lead role? What in the world is this film about, anyway?

I sit and type and don't really watch as intently as I should — and I'm not just doing this with older films, or DVDs that I own, but with movies I rent. Last night, the wife and I rented the Liam Neeson flick Unknown, which couldn't hold my interest and left me unimpressed.

Then I re-watched Errol Morris' Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, which was considerably better and got me thinking like a film scholar again, what with all that Eisenstein-y montage-y stuff going on. Still, I had my laptop out. I even took notes!

When Apple introduced the iPad, Steve Jobs talked about how our computer use has changed in recent years. Now that wireless routers are ubiquitous, we use laptops (often with extended battery lives) in front of the television. We seem to watch with one eye on the TV, one eye on the computer screen, one eye on our smart phone, and one eye on the rest. Wait, how many eyes do we have?

My wife isn't a movie person. Her viewing habits are quite similar; she watches television with her laptop out, frequently checking Facebook or her e-mail, or surfing any number of Web sites that catch her interest. If a question occurs to me and I don't have my laptop handy, I ask her to look something up. Within seconds, I have my answer.

That's when we watch television. When I watch movies, especially ones for this project, I tend to have my laptop out, clacking away. This maximizes my time, you see. If I watch my movies and then type an entry like this, I'm looking at as much as twice the running time of the film. If I write while I watch, I get done quicker. I can move on to other things.

As my viewing habits have changed considerably, so too have my DVD buying habits.  I continue to shift toward Blu-Ray instead of downloaded media (a whole other argument).  I haven't bought a plain old DVD since the Great Hitchcock Binge of 2011, which resulted in my adding 50+ films to my collection, many of which I've never seen.

Because I find no real personal attachment to some of the films I'm watching, making time for them has gotten less and less interesting. I suppose this raises the question, why collect all these Hitchcock films if you don't want to watch them?

Put simply, I got started. I had to see that through. I had to see what else he had done, even if his minor works pale in comparison to his masterpieces. Hitch's oeuvre was a blind spot and I needed to fix that in a big way.

Also, you can't very well develop a personal attachment to a film unless you watch the film. (Okay, maybe you can with imagery or a soundtrack or something, but still.  Watching is better.)

Foreign Correspondent, although nominated for several Academy Awards, is a minor film by Hitchcockian standards, but in my twisted, completist view, is still a film worth owning, because even minor Hitchcock is still Hitchcock.

I treat three great directors with such reverence: Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, and Stanley Kubrick.  Even watching their worst films, I find the time well spent.