The first one asks, 'What's a MacGuffin?' 'Well,' the other man says, 'it's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers, 'Well then, that's no MacGuffin!' So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all. One man says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh, that's a MacGuffin'. It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. Hitchcock explained the term MacGuffin in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University in New York City: The name MacGuffin was coined by the British screenwriter Angus MacPhail and was popularized by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s.ĭirector and producer Alfred Hitchcock popularized the term MacGuffin and the technique with his 1935 film The 39 Steps, an early example of the concept.
In the 1930 detective novel The Maltese Falcon, a small statuette provides both the book's title and its motive for intrigue. The World-War-I-era actress Pearl White used the term 'weenie' to identify whatever object (a roll of film, a rare coin, expensive diamonds, etc.) impelled the heroes, and often the villains as well, to pursue each other through the convoluted plots of The Perils of Pauline and the other silent film serials in which she starred.
The 'Maltese Falcon' statuette from the film of the same name
