They said a number of years ago Phillip strangled a couple of chickens, if that was practice for the strangling of David that would mean they were planning it for years.
shareI don't think so.
I think that it was just a bizarre incident.
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Jim Hutton (1934-79) & Ellery Queen 🎇
Phillip's mother lives on a farm. Slaughtering chickens is a normal thing on a farm so it wouldn't be anything out of the ordinary for someone who spends time on a farm to slaughter chickens. It would make sense that Phillip would have been the "farm boy makes good" who was, perhaps, the first of his family to make it to college. Phillip certainly fits the mold of the gifted young man from a poor family who is very gullible and easily led, fallen under a bad influence in the form of Brandon.
The entire "chicken strangling", however, always struck me as a plot device placed by a screenwriter who hasn't spent much time on a farm himself. Chickens are slaughtered either by chopping the head off OR in some cases by holding the neck and snapping it like a whip. I've never heard of someone strangling a chicken on a farm and if anyone did it would be looked upon as being rather odd. If anyone has any more direct knowledge of this PLEASE let me know.
Well, it was 1948 and personally I doubt the writer would necessarily know how a chicken was traditionally slaughtered or necessarily readily have the means to find out - if the methods back then were even the same as today. It's not as if anyone could have just typed it into Google, after all. To be fair, Brandon initially describes Philip killing the chicken as "wringing its neck" which could mean he was doing it by simply snapping the necks. We never get to hear the end of the chicken-killing incident but it seems as though once Philip didn't do it correctly and simply severely injured the bird which would be easier to do if one was snapping the chicken's neck rather than merely strangling it. However, it's clearly just meant to be presenting a parallel between Philip killing chickens and Philip killing David. I don't think the former was necessarily practice for the latter, but it does help to make sense of why the clearly less emotionally stable Philip would perform the murder rather than Brandon.
shareIn 1948 did "choking the chicken" mean anything but actually strangling a barnyard fowl?
I ask because Hitchcock did like his little jokes.