1. The audience's perception of the interplay between a new text and an older text to which it refers is examined in Peter J. Rabinowitz's "'What's Hecuba to Us?': The Audience's Experience of Literary Borrowing." [BACK]

2. For a discussion of the emergence of an American audience literate in the history of cinema (and of the implications for filmmakers), see Noël Carroll's "The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (and Beyond)." [BACK]

3. In fact, Hughes's sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), confirms the filmmaker's intention to place the series in the context suggested above by repeating, when the criminals first confront Kevin, the image of the "M" branded into Harry's palm. Even more telling is a detail in the film's opening. In establishing the sequel's premise, a newspaper's front page announcing "Wet Bandits in Daring Escape" is blown against the McCallisters' door. Beneath the photos of the two escaped convicts are the captions "Marvin Murchins" and "Harry Lyme." Equal to Hans Beckert in the extent of his wickedness toward children, Harry Lime, the villain of Carol Reed's famous mystery, The Third Man (1949), supplies hospitals with stolen and diluted penicillin for children infected with meningitis, who consequently suffer brain damage or die after administration of the adulterated continue

drug. Identifying Harry Lyme, Kevin's nemesis, with both Beckert and Lime, John Hughes leaves little doubt that he wishes the Home Alone series to be understood in terms of a classic cinematic tradition of children imperiled by adults. [BACK]