Hi Dr Thompson. Am just recovering use of my computer, and access to the 
Internet, after many weeks of being without those facilities.  This 
seems a good opportunity to try them out again!  Your request reminded 
me of an essay called "The Rhetoric of Hitchcock's Thrillers", by O.B. 
Hardison, published in W.R. Robinson (ed.), 'Man and the Movies' 
(1967).  The essay still stands up.  A favourite passage of mine from 
it:  'The thriller explores a spectrum of realities having the common 
characteristic of "strangeness" and varying from the comic through the 
absurd, the sinister, and the daemonic, to the explicitly insane.  The 
theological type of this world is the Calvinst City of Man, a league of 
the Reprobate in which the few Elect muddle through not by reason or 
works but by a divine thrusting on.  It is the world of the Gothic 
novel, of Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend, of The City of Dreadful 
Night, and - if Hitchcock's popularity shows anything -  it is the 
psychological world of twentieth-century man.'

So NORTH BY NORTHWEST or perhaps PSYCHO might possibly fit your bill.

- Ken Mogg (Ed., 'The MacGuffin')
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/news-home_c.html
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Lou Thompson wrote:

>Hello all,
>
>I am teaching a graduate course called Rhetoric of/and Film this fall.  I'm looking for some suggestions for films.  I'd like to cover about ten or so, at least half documentary.  I'm so overwhelmed with the sheer number of options right now I'm having trouble settling on something, so I thought I'd send a request for any suggestions, ideas, etc.  I'm looking for a variety of films that will offer us the opportunity to examine ideology and how it is presented in varying methods and degrees.  
>  
>

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