Double Take

This slippery fish of a docu-essay, packed to the gills with stimulating archive footage, is at once fun and deadly serious. It uses the 1960s films and TV shows  of Alfred Hitchcock as a starting point to explore the relationship between the Cold War and the big and small screens, between reality and fear, especially relating to American identity in the 1960s but with some nods to the present. The theme of doubles runs throughout: we meet a current Hitch lookalike and watch as Khrushchev squares up to Nixon. There’s also humour, not least in the chauvinist coffee ads which Grimonperez quotes, which helps to soften the rapid blow of ideas, some of which are clearer on a first viewing than others.