Saboteur

Yesterday evening I ordered a Meltdown pizza (basically it's a pizza with tomato, mozarella cheese, chili cheese slices, ground beef, meatballs, jalapeno peppers, sweet chili peppers, birdseye chili peppers and American-style mustard) it was very hot and spicy. It was nice though.

I played some more on Dante's Inferno later on, and listened to a radio adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes story called "The Musgrave Ritual". I also watched the first two episodes of V, which is a remake of the 1980s science-fiction series. As with the original, the remake deals with the arrival of alien "Visitors" in massive spaceships. The aliens appear human and offer to share their advanced technology and scientific knowledge with humanity in exchange for humans helping them to mine certain common minerals. However it's soon discovered that the aliens have sinister secrets. It is really different to the original series but it's not bad at all.

Last night I also finished reading the book It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock - A Personal Biography by Charlotte Chandler. It was a very good book, mostly made up of interviews with Hitchcock's friends and colleagues, as well as interviews with Hitchock himself who was a friend of the authors in his last years. Mostly the book deals with the films, giving a detailed plot synopsis of each and then accounts of the makings of them, as well as brief details of the important events in Hitchcock's life. Hitchcock comes across in the book as someone who was very private, and very much a family man. The book discusses Hitchcock's legendary love of practical jokes, but claims that most of the stories about them were greatly exaggerated. A lot of the actors who worked with him had quite mixed feeling about Hitchcock because he didn't really talk to them much about their characters and so on. A lot of actors really resented his "hands-off" approach, but some of them appreciated it.

I was off work again today and decided to have a quiet day in. This afternoon I was watching the 1942 Alfred Hitchcock movie Saboteur, in which an aircraft factory is blown up by saboteurs and an innocent factory worker (played by Robert Cummings), whose best friend was killed in the explosion, is accused of being responsible. And so he goes on the run across America, trying to find the real saboteurs in order to clear his name and prevent further sabotage. It actually still holds up really well, it's genuinely exciting and engaging and moves at a good pace with plenty of memorable set-pieces.