Hitchcock Homage


The wonderfully shot finale with the Magritte dressed "Bowler Hat Men" owes inspiration to Hitchcock's North by Northwest where Cary Grant dresses as a train porter to escape with Eva Marie Saint. After discovering the ruse, the henchman are thus forced to grab all the porters at the train terminal to see which is Grant, much like Dennis Leary is forced to "start arresting" all the Bowler Hat Men. The key to the "disguise" in both films is a coat and hat.

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Good job. You're right on the money. It is almost exactly copied. Both done greatly.

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You're right! I didn't remember that! By far my favorite scene.

Prostitute: What the *beep* are you doing?
Johnny: I'm gonna kill a bunch of people.

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This is not an homage to Hitchcock.

Roger Thornhill does disguise himself as a redcap to escape detection and it works. By the way, it is not Vandamm's henchmen who are looking for him but the Chicago police. They do not immediately round up all the redcaps in the terminal. Why would they? They don't even realize what has happened until it's too late. Only then do they search in vain for the fugitive Thornhill.

Thornhill acts on the spur of the moment. Thomas Crown premeditatedly uses multiple decoys to disguise his actions.

It is not, "...almost exactly copied." The only thing similar between the two sequences is the hide-in-plain-site plot device which was already a bit of a cliché by the time Hitchcock did it.

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