Personal Narrative: Alfred Hitchcock Movie Marathon ! Free Admission

When I was eleven years old, my dad, after growing tired of watching Good Luck Charlie and The Suite Life of Zack and Cody every day, decided that he wanted to introduce me to what he described as “real cinema”. Unfortunately this was before Netflix’s ubiquity and my dad was unwilling to pay for a DVD, so he shelved the idea for a few weeks. Then, when he made a trip to the local library to return an overdue book, a flyer stapled to the bulletin board at the the entrance caught his eye. It read: “Alfred Hitchcock Movie Marathon! One Movie Every Week! Free Admission”. He grew naturally excited (especially at the “free admission” bit), and immediately signed everyone up except for my mother, who had conflicting yoga classes. My younger brother was not particularly thrilled at sitting through movies filmed before God had invented color, but my father wouldn’t take no for an answer. I was somewhat indifferent to the idea, only reacting with mild annoyance at the idea of missing time that could have been spent playing video games with my friends.

Some dismiss it as a shameless work of propaganda, but that’s what I love about it. When movie had stopped and everyone began to shuffle quietly out the white painted doors of the library, I went to the front desk and plopped down a thick book on World War II. And thus, my love affair for both films and history began. I spent the majority of that summer devouring books and films on several historic time periods, from Ancient Greece to the Cold War. When I asked my dad if I could watch Saving Private Ryan, he began to worry that his attempts to introduce me to cinema had worked a bit too