This is a big year for the Hitchcock revival at Canadian art galleries. Douglas Gordon's 24-Hour Psycho was a big hit in Hamilton and Toronto, and now the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has just opened Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences.

The exhibit was lucky enough to have landed Psycho's star Janet Leigh as a guest at last week's grand opening. "I'm so distraught, so disturbed, that they are not going to show this in the United States," Leigh told The Montreal Gazette.

According to the museum, the show illustrates "how the major currents of painting - from classicism to symbolism to modernism - run through the films of Alfred Hitchcock." The curators, Guy Cogeval and Dominique Païni, were big film buffs, both working at the Louvre when they realized that Alfred Hitchcock was a bigtime art collector. He owned Klees, Rouaults, a Dalí, and a fake Picasso. The two art experts then went back to study the master's movies and find what they could find.

"The exhibition is conceived as a sort of three-way "split screen" to provide both movie fans and art lovers a view into the filmmaker's work, his imagination and hidden connections with nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and literature. The exhibition also shows Hitchcock's influence on contemporary artists."

For those who can't make it to Montreal, check out the Museum's website and click on the Interactive Exhibit. There's a dandy little Flash montage on the themes most recurrent in Hitchcock's work: terror, women, anxiety and spectacle.

Man of Letters:
When Judith Skelton Grant started her biography of Robertson Davies more than a decade ago, she had a reluctant subject who at first wasn't too keen to cooperate. A bit of a control guy, he probably didn't like the idea of turning his literary life over to another writer ...even though he must have known it was an inevitability. The eventual book, Man of Mystery, was a professional enough bio, though a little on the dull side and perhaps more the fault of her subject.

Now, it turns out, Grant got a second book out of her efforts, something with a little more life in it -- or at least, the tone of the master himself.

She's just published For Your Eye Alone, a collection of the Canadian authors' personal letters from the mid-1970s until his death five years ago. "In the absence of an autobiography," Skelton writes, "this book shows you the real Robertson Davies, writing about his everyday life. Here we see Davies as a father writing fondly to his daughter in England, as a husband constructing a hand-written circular card as a birthday message of love to his wife, as a university administrator complaining to a friend about the miseries of fundraising, as a novelist struggling with his new books and admitting to his doubts about them, and as a writer paying tribute to fellow writers he admires."

Grant's work was to introduces each of the recipients of "R.D.'s" letters, and provide extensive notes to explain some of the inside references.

Much More Mahler: You have a few more days to enter CBC Radio's Mahler contest. The radio nets One and Two have been airing a series of specials on Gustav Mahler's life and music, which wraps up Dec. 4 with the Ideas documentary, A Tale of Two Mahlers. Meanwhile, the series continues. The contest features a number of prizes including a book by the renowned Mahler scholar, Henry-Louis de La Grange, and several CDs featuring the music of Mahler. Check it out online: