Looking for Alfred

2005
 

 




It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, “What’s that package up there in the luggage rack?” And the other answers, “Oh, that’s a McGuffin.” The first one asks, “What’s a McGuffin?” “Well” the other man says, “It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.” Then the first man says “ But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,” and the other answers “Well then that’s no McGuffin!”


 

 

Alfred Hitchcock in: ‘François Truffaut, Hithcock Interviews’, (New York: Touchstone Edition, Simon & Schuster, 1983); After the MacGuffin story by Angus McPhail.