Transcript: Murder, But Make It Funny

'Breaking Bad' as a comedy? How Hollywood reduces, reuses and recycles ideas

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

Three years ago, I spent my Christmas holidays getting Covid. It was a mild case, very few symptoms, I got over it pretty fast, but there was a certain scary movie quality to getting it.

Everyone in the doctor’s office when I got the news got very grave and serious.

And then, every tickle in your throat, every mild ache or pain and you think, is this… it? Is this about to get very bad?

It was like going through your day with a scary musical underscore going on in your mind. It’s like living your life as if it’s a suspense movie.

For instance, there’s a great, creepy moment in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 thriller, Suspicion. Cary Grant — in one of his very few bad-guy roles — carefully walks up a grand staircase carrying what we think is a glass of milk laced with poison, with which he is about to dispatch his wife.

As everyone knows, Hitchcock was a great director. But his real talent wasn’t working with actors – “Actors are cattle,” he was once overheard to say — but in the more technical aspects of film. He was great with lighting and fast camera work, and his ability to wind up the tension with fast cuts and sharp angles pretty much defined the film vocabulary for the next generation of directors.

He also knew how to improvise. In order to draw attention — but not too much — to the glass of milk, he dropped a small battery-powered (and, presumably, milk-proof) light into it. As Cary Grant ascends the staircase, your eye is drawn irresistibly to the glass of milk. It glows, with menace and, well, suspicion.