Screenwriter: Brian Moore

Producer: Alfred Hitchcock

Vidiots is thrilled to welcome film historian, author, podcaster, and Founding Member Karina Longworth for a series of film screenings that tie into the new season of the hit podcast You Must Remember This – The Old Man is Still Alive.

Alfred Hitchcock takes on Cold War paranoia with this taut and tantalizing thriller starring Paul Newman and Julie Andrews. Newman plays a disaffected scientist aiming to play double agent by defecting behind the Iron Curtain. When his unwitting fiancee follows him to uncover his true intentions, they must both play a deadly cat-and-mouse game to make it out of East Berlin alive.

The Old Man is Still Alive tells the story of 14 directors — including Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Huston and more — whose careers began in the early decades of Hollywood, who were still making movies in the 60s and 70s and even 80s. In many cases, these directors, many of them Oscar winners or the men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; sudden-seeming shifts in attitudes towards race and gender; and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be skeptical that an old man had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new “degenerate” cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, “the kids with beards” and tried to keep doing what they had been doing for 30 years; others were quick to try to get with the times by making films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society (even dropping acid as “research”); others fell somewhere in between.

Accessibility Options: Amplified Audio, please see the box office for devices.