News and Comment (Home) Page of the Alfred Hitchcock Scholars/'MacGuffin' website, conducted by Ken Mogg. There's also a separate official title-page, mainly for new visitors and search-engines.

The MacGUFFIN


This webpage was last modified 28 August, 2010.

Special item 1.  The copy of Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) currently available on DVD (Region 1) has an aspect ratio of 1.85:1.  This is not how Hitchcock meant it to be shown.  Gus Van Sant, for one, remembers that the original cans were labelled 1.75:1.  The DVD makes the film's compositions too 'tight' at top and bottom.  Visual information that the film's original viewers saw is now cut off (e.g., details on the map of Shasta County in the sheriff's office).  Richard J. Anobile's out-of-print 1974 book of Psycho for The Film Classics Library prints many of its frame stills in the full aspect ratio.  They are clearly 'better composed' than the images in the DVD (e.g., Arbogast in the telephone booth).  Also, in the full-frame VHS tape of Psycho released in 1984, the images are appreciably closer to what Hitchcock intended.  A leading expert on Psycho has told us: 'What obviously [then] happened was the "brains" at Universal took the 1.75:1 and widened it to 1.85:1 for later VHS and DVD releases.  In doing so, they cut off the top and bottom as if no one would notice.'  Here are excellent statements of the situation: http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=406&start=0&sid=28f14044d0f8dd01f990ac37089fa079
and http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2010/06/they_wont_forge_1.php

Special item 2.  Speaking of Psycho ...  Author of 'Psycho in the Shower', Dr Phil Skerry, is preparing a further book on Hitchcock.  He invites people to contact him about, specifically, Hitchcock's 'absolute' camera.  'I'm interested in finding out more about Hitchcock's technical knowledge of the camera and of the fundamentals of cinematography: lighting, lenses, film stocks, etc. I realize that Hitch relied on his cinematographers to create the mise en scène, but I also know that his careful visual planning required extensive knowledge of camera fundamentals. I'd appreciate any information on Hitchcock's technical training in the film industry but also on the training he received for the various jobs he performed before he entered the industry. I have consulted Bill Krohn's "Hitchcock at Work" and Truffaut's book as well, and I will revisit these essential texts again. So anything in addition to these volumes would be most helpful. Andrew Sarris calls Hitchcock "...the supreme technician of the American cinema"; I would like any suggestions, information, etc. that would help to substantiate this claim.'  Dr Skerry can be emailed at <pskerry63@yahoo.com>.


I invite film teachers, film students, fellow-authors of books on Hitchcock, and anyone else, who has some keen interest in the work of the great English-born director, Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980), to email me.  I welcome Hitchcock-related ideas, insights, 'news tips', etc., etc., and am happy to discuss them on-site or by return of email.  Snippets from classroom or conference-hall are especially welcome - not to mention CFPs (Calls for Papers), and announcements of books, exhibits, screenings, and the like.  KM

To contact KM (whose website this is), click here: muffin@labyrinth.net.au

To go straight to the latest "Editor's Week" item further down this page, click here.  (But first allow the page to fully load.  Note: our News section begins immediately after "Editor's Week".)

Click here to go straight to bottom of page, where you'll find links to our other pages

An 'advanced' Hitchcock discussion group, strictly for articulate film academics, scholars, writers, professional filmmakers, etc., exists. Here's the URL: http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/hitchen2/
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Rare Hitchcockiana, from DVDs to scripts, obtainable here (mention us): www
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• We understand that the 'Hitchcock Annual' #16, which is now to be published by Columbia University Press, will finally appear in September 2010.  For details of how to obtain copies, click the following link to item "The other Hitchcock journal" at the bottom of this page: rates and contact details for 'Hitchcock Annual'.
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'For those who care': Ken Mogg ('MacGuffin' Editor) writing elsewhere on the Web about Hitchcock:

1.
First, there's my monograph (35,000 words, including notes and appendices) on Hitchcock's The Birds.  Dr David Sterritt (Chair, National Society of Film Critics) calls it 'top drawer stuff'.  Australian film scholar Dr Adrian Martin considers it 'a fantastic, finely written, brilliantly researched piece'.  Australian filmmaker Peter Tammer thinks it 'extraordinary'.  I am happy to further quote Peter.  'Like you I have seen the film many times, probably not as many as you, certainly not ... but many.  All of the things you point to are there, clearly for us all to see and experience, and to draw interpretations from, no matter what sources [Hitchcock] was absorbing and transforming into his film.  So that gave me great pleasure to know that what I had taken from the film in the past was often in accordance with what you felt he was doing and why he was doing it.'  To read the monograph, click here: 'Senses of Cinema'

2.  Also, there's my long profile of Hitchcock's life and work (containing analysis of The Lodger, Murder!, Jamaica Inn, Rope, Vertigo, Psycho, and The Trouble With Harry, and referring to opposing literary influences on Hitchcock, viz., Oscar Wilde and G.K. Chesterton).  Film historian Thomas Elsaesser calls the profile 'definitive indeed'. 
'Senses of Cinema'
 

3.  On The 39 Steps (book review):
'Screening the Past'
 
4.  On I Confess
'Senses of Cinema'/ Melbourne Cinematheque
5.  On The Birds (and the critics):
'Screening the Past'
6.  On Psycho (book review): 
'Senses of Cinema'
7.  On "Banquo's Chair" (episode of 'AHP'):
'Senses of Cinema'/ Melbourne Cinematheque
8.  On "Back for Christmas" (episode of 'AHP'):
'Senses of Cinema'/ Melbourne Cinematheque
9.  On Hitchcock and Charles Dickens (book review): 
'Senses of Cinema'
10. The 'ten greatest films', including two by Hitchcock: 'Sight and Sound'
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Important.  The old (1999) US edition of 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story', by Ken Mogg, et al., was a drastically cut, reduced, and even 'bowdlerised' version (which its author disowns) of the original UK edition (also 1999).  However, the full book has now (2008) been re-issued world-wide, including in the US.  American readers can obtain it from Amazon.com and other booksellers.

Testimonials about this site from readers

These haven't been updated with a new selection for a while, but here goes (May 2009 - remember that our blog "Editor's Week" has been inactive from August 2008 until now).  Btw, if this weren't the Web, where a certain amount of author-promotion seems needed (against a billion 'competitors'), I most certainly would not have broadcast these testimonials (and, yes, some are from fellow authors and/or friends!).  KM

'Excellent Hitchcock website.  I've been a regular visitor for years and look to your site first for news and information on anything related to Hitch.  Your commentary is consistently enlightening and rewarding.' - C.S., Florida, USA, 2009

'I think that you are not Jeffrey Archer's "First Among Equals" but first among unequals since your knowledge is so astounding.' - Prof. T.W., Illinois, USA, 2008

'I want to compliment you on your erudition in the sense that you move easily from the macro to the micro, and back again.'  - B.H., USA, 2008

'Over the years, I have found you to be very receptive to theories other than your own.  Your disagreement with such theories is always supported with [citation], and the presentation of both sides allows the reader to make up his own mind.' - N.A., USA, 2007

'I salute your splendid website and your continuing scholarship.' - D.S., Denmark, 2007

'Your website is a pleasure for true fans!' - G.R., Israel, 2007

'It is an amazing job you have done for anyone interested in Hitchcock.  It is also an act of love!' - A.S., Venezuela, 2007

'I must say that I have been pleased (yet again, and again) by recent "Editor's Day" [items] - I was especially happy about your pieces on Under Capricorn.' - D.F., Germany, 2007

'The world's greatest expert on Hitchcock's sources and influences is the Australian scholar K.M., and his ["MacGuffin"] site is well worth visiting on this point, as on all others.' - A.M., Australia, 2007

'Thanks for the website that is still the best Hitchcock-related place on the Internet, after all these years!' - N.B., Hungary, 2007

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That's quite enough.  It's fair to say that a good deal of this site's reputation for providing quality information about Hitchcock rests on the 'blogs' that have been appearing for over a decade in the "Editor's Day"/"Editor's Week" feature on this page.  (Sometimes, of course, it has been "Guest Editor's Day"!)  For reasons of space, it hasn't been possible to simply cache the entire feature, nor has there been time to regularly update a Selections page based on it.  However, the information isn't lost, and much of it will undoubtededly feature in forthcoming publications.  Also, we anticipate various new pages appearing on this site from time to time.  KM
    
'[Y]our site [is] one of the best on the Internet ... for quality, accuracy of content, presentation and usability.' - Britannica.com
                                Britannica award to this website

What you'll find on the remainder of this Home Page includes:

1. 'Editor's Day'/'Editor's Week': June 12, 19, 26, July 3, 10, 17, 24, 31, August 7, 14, 21, 28.  2. News and Comment (last revised 7 August, 2010).  3. Links to our other pages.

And what you'll find on our other pages includes:

1. About 'The MacGuffin'/ How to Subscribe (revised 8 June, 2004).  2. About me (skippable).  3. ACADEMIC HITCHCOCK 1 - TMWKTMACADEMIC HITCHCOCK 2 - Vertigo. ACADEMIC HITCHOCK 3 - Marnie.  4. EXCERPTS 1 - "Confined Spaces" in Hitchcock.  EXCERPTS 2 - MarnieEXCERPTS 3 - Irony; Jamaica Inn. EXCERPTS 4 - Mr and Mrs SmithEXCERPTS 5 - critical writing on Hitchcock.  EXCERPTS 6 - Stage Fright.  EXCERPTS 7 - Franz Waxman and Suspicion.   5. About Arthur Schopenhauer (who? why?).  6. Alfred Hitchcock and Charles Dickens.  7. Article: Hitchcock on melodrama.  8. Screenwriter Charles Bennett on "Shakespeare, Melodrama, and Hitchcock".  9. Two-part 'Report' on Patrick McGilligan's biography of Hitchcock (including film-by-film, to 1950).  10. The original, previewed ending for Suspicion (script excerpt + Bill Krohn's research).  11. Notes on all of Hitchcock's films (1: the silent films).  12. Notes on The 39 Steps.  13. Notes on Rear Window.  14. Notes on Vertigo (and Strangers on a Train).  15. Two discoveries: (1) Frank Baker's novel 'The Birds'; (2) Wanted for Murder (film by Lawrence Huntington).  16. Hitchcock's villains.  17. Kim Novak interview.  18. Interview with Psycho screenwriter, Joseph Stefano.  19. Long article: "The fragments of the mirror: Vertigo and its sources".  20. Article by Bill Krohn on Family Plot.  21. Article by Martin Grams Jr: "Alfred Hitchcock Presents".  22. Article by Martin Grams Jr: "Murder and Suspense".  23. Article by Philip Kemp: "Hitching Posts" (on Hitch's 'imitators').  24. New Publications (one of this site's main pages - last revised 18 January, 2010).  25. FAQs page (new material added 12 May, 2006).  26. Links (last revised 18 January, 2008).

Links to these other pages are grouped at the bottom of this page. (If you want to go straight to the bottom of this page now, click here.)


The editor's day/The editor's week

[This feature will cover musings on Hitchcock-related topics and similar matters with which the 'MacGuffin' editor has been occupied lately. Don't expect total rigour - these are basically 'ideas in progress'. Thanks!]

June 12 Let's examine the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much.  Quite early in the film, the significance of the title is felt when suddenly Dr Ben McKenna (James Stewart) must carry a terrible burden.  On holiday with his family in a foreign city, Marrakesh, he learns that his son Hank (Christopher Olsen) has been kidnapped.  In the frame-capture below, he hasn't yet told his wife Jo (Doris Day) what has happened, and is insisting that she take sedatives before he breaks the news.  That fact, in itself, should inform us that relations between husband and wife are somewhat strained.  In a line cut from the script, Ben wonders how Jo can bear 'sleeping with a man who always smells of ether'.  He is not always at ease in social situations and is given to outbursts of impatience; Jo, deep down, harbours some resentment that marriage to a dedicated Indianapolis doctor has stopped her resuming her career as a musical comedy star.  Such is life, and watching again the first half hour (or so) of the film has convinced me how well it depicts the, yes, beauty of a typical bourgeois family in all its complex interactions - and strains.  (The Wrong Man would follow.)  As for Ben's occasional social maladroitness, and his impatience, these are traits that we can readily believe stem from the demands made on him by his profession; but they are precisely the things that will work for him at the climax when he hits on an unorthodox way for him and Jo to rescue Hank (where Scotland Yard fears to tread).  But I was talking of how Ben suddenly feels weighed down.  Hitchcock gets this right too, not just in the chilling line delivered by a hotel employee about how the Drayton couple (Bernard Miles, Brenda De Banzie)  - entrusted to look after Hank - have 'checked out' (a line good enough for re-cycling in North by Northwest), but in the dissolve-shot of Ben's bowed head against the gardens of the Hotel Mamounia.  (Aside: the dissolves and fades in The Man Who Knew Too Much are, as always in Hitchcock, exactly timed and organic to the film; some Hitchcock scholar should study several of the fims to reveal the aptness, and intelligence, of the use of such devices, and their contextual 'meanings'.)  Of course, later in the film, at the Albert Hall, it is Jo's turn to be placed in a similar position where the weight of the world seems to be pressing on her shoulders alone.  As the 'Storm Cloud Cantata' nears its climax, she must wrestle with her terrible dilemma: should she intervene to save a statesman's life when doing so must jeopardise the life of Hank, who is being held hostage?  The music itself speaks of the life force in all its terrible - sublime - indifference.  As the philosopher Schopenhauer said, music 'parallels the world'.  And as in Lifeboat, the life force is the very subject here - indeed of the film - and now it is Jo's turn to feel it, and shudder - and scream.  (Readers may like to recall what I said above about the manhunt novel 'We, the Accused', and how it is a key to Hitchcock's films and their compassion.)  Aptly, in this film about marriage, a further climax follows at the foreign embassy, one which allows husband and wife to act in concert, and thereby to save Hank.  But notice one other thing.  As I say, the film is about 'life', and systematically exhibits it to us as different forms of (notably) religion, music, and social class.  Thus the real 'man who knew too much' is Hitchcock.  He has seen the way of the world and shown it to us.  From reports, he was a lonely genius.  More next time. 

                                                                            Doris Day and James Stewart in TMWKTM (1956)                       


June 19 The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) is a Hitchcock paean to marriage (ending with Doris Day singing "We'll Love Again"), and I can't do better, for starters, than refer readers to Catherine Blythe's article "Why marriage matters" posted on the BBC News website this week: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8745000/8745287.stm.  Quote: 'With a spouse who has sworn to support you, it's easier to take decisions that are difficult in the short run ...  But [the] magic only works if you believe in it, if you don't simply work at marriage, but play at and relish it.'  TMWKTM begins by showing a mildly dysfunctional family, the McKennas, who have the usual quota of strains and resentments (see last week's entry) but are basically a loving, intelligent couple who are prepared to do what it takes to make their marriage succeed, insofar as that is in their power.  (There is an element of grace incipient in TMWKTM, as in several Hitchcock films, given a pragmatic basis by the sermon on 'adversity' delivered by, of all people, Mr Drayton, the kidnapper of Hank.  At Ambrose Chapel, in Bayswater, Drayton dons a clerical collar and tells his drab congregation that 'the average life is often harassed and perplexed by disappointments and cruelty beyond our control' which, however, may work to 'make better men and women of us'.  The sentiment itself is unassailable - vide a famous passage in 'As You Like It' - but Drayton's hypocrisy recalls that of the Cornish villagers in Jamaica Inn who pray for profitable wrecks, or like that of the treacherous Milly in Under Capricorn who recites Cowper's hymn about how 'God moves in a mysterious way/ his wonders to perform'.)  That Jo McKenna is prepared to knuckle down to continued married life, and motherhood, is shown by her question to Ben in Marrakesh, 'When are we going to have another baby?'  Unfortunately, Hank is kidnapped shortly afterwards, and for a time wife and husband find themselves at cross-purposes (shades of Rich and Strange) emphasised by both Hitchcock's cutting (e.g., in the fiacre on the way back to the hotel from the police station) and by events themselves (e.g., the separate excursions in London by Jo and Ben in search of Hank).  Wife and husband finally come together as a team in the foreign embassy, even as their opposite number - the Draytons - are separated for good.  (Lucy Drayton's disgust at her husband's actions has been developing gradually.  In this respect, she is like Nancy, mistress of robber Bill Sikes, in the Dickens novel 'Oliver Twist': both women finally take pity on the respective kidnapped children, Oliver and Hank, and facilitate their escapes.)  I'll discuss the remarkable embassy scene next time, but here's a thought or two on the earlier London scenes.  As I note in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story', the taxidermist's sequence in Gulliver/Camden Town may have its own 'Dickensian' inspiration, namely, the taxidermist's shop of Mr Venus in 'Our Mutual Friend', crammed with stuffed animals, preserved babies and articulated human skeletons.  At one point, someone slams the street door, and the whole grisly population is shaken into momentary 'life' ('paralytically animated' in Dickens's phrase).  Such an effect, obliquely reminding us of how important real life is - it's there to be seized - is central to both Dickens's and Hitchcock's respective tales.  Ambrose Chappell Senior (Hitchcock's equivalent of Mr Venus) pointedly isn't keen to 'rest' when his son, Ambrose Junior, suggests he go and do so.  'I've centuries of rest ahead of me, thank you', he responds.  Mind you, both Dickens and Hitchcock were masters of what Siegfried Kracauer ('Theory of Film', 1960) calls 'psychophysical correpondences' - roughly, making the very stones (or brickwork or house-fronts ...) speak.  Furthermore, Hitchcock always knew how to set up such effects.  Ten years before Antonioni's Blow-up, set in London, with its celebrated painted trees and paths, Hitchcock in TMWKTM was doing the same thing.  In the frame-capture below, showing house-fronts opposite Ambrose Chapel, he uses a drab palette of just greens, greys, and browns.  His Camden Town and Bayswater (the latter actually Brixton!) exteriors are all like this, until, for example, Jo must make an urgent phone call from a brightly painted red London phone-box.  I'll suggest next time that such effects contribute to the film's emphasis on the value of marriage.  Meanwhile, here's Catherine Blythe again: 'Married couples can ... widen each others' worlds and reap the benefits of shared meanings and memories.'
                                                    
                                                                            Brixton street in TMWKTM (1956)


June 26 (revised) I had occasion tonight to post on our 'advanced' Hitchcock group my dissatisfaction with an article that Laura Mulvey wrote on Psycho for 'Film Studies', Spring 2000, and reprinted, with few changes, in her book 'Death 24x a Second' (2006).  The article (on "Death Drives" - that's a Mulvey pun) seems to me 'seldom attentive to the film itself but only to a broad abstracted description of it that I find dulling-down', not opening the film up to the full scope of Hitchcock's imagination and Symbolist conception.  I must add that many academic articles on Hitchcock strike me the same way (would you believe, some of my best friends are academics?!), and attempts to grapple with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), which we have started to discuss here, aren't an exception.  In 'CineAction' #50 (1999), Robert K. Lightning argues at length for TMWKTM as pro-feminist, with Jo and Ben in competition for the love and guidance of their son Hank who represents 'the phallus'.  There's some truth in that, but the film as a whole has been overlooked.  The characters in this (and many another) Hitchcock film are at the service of, not ideology, but an imaginative conception and an effect.  For a start, I can't repeat too often that the overall tendency of a Hitchcock film is to affirm nothing except the life/death force itself, which is neutral.  In turn, I believe Hitchcock represented what the poet Keats called 'the poetic character', capable of turning one way, then another - even almost the contrary way - as it suited the particular effect the occasion required.  Author Charles Dickens was the same.  Now, last week I suggested that both he and Hitchcock were interested in exploring in certain scenes (e.g., the taxidermist's scene in TMWKTM) the boundary between the animate and the inanimate, thus 'obliquely reminding us of how important real life is - it's there to be seized'.  Laura Mulvey notes similar moments in Psycho (e.g., its climax with the skull and the swaying light bulb), and says that they mark 'the boundary that cinema itself blurs'.  True enough, confirming what has often been noted (e.g., by Taylor Stoehr), that Dickens was one of the most (pre-)cinematic of novelists.  But that can scarcely have been Dickens's intention, nor do I think it was entirely Hitchcock's.  Both of these entertainer-artists maintained a very special attitude to their respective audiences, an attitude which I can inadequately suggest by using words like 'goood-humoured' and 'responsible'.  I hold to my point above that in the scenes mentioned they were sharing with us their sense of their personal endowment with 'life' (Dickens indeed described himself thus) and in turn energising us.  Note that Ben's 'wild goose chase' in the taxidermist's scene fires him up for what is to come, even as it readies him to work with Jo to finally rescue Hank.  'Sweet are the uses of adversity', as Drayton tells us.  Somewhat differently, in the 'Storm Cloud Cantata' scene (frame-capture below: note the contingents of both male and female singers plus both a female soloist and a male conductor) everything combines to speak of how the life/death force (emblemised by the storm and its passing) can at best be fleetingly 'mastered' by a composer's genius wedded to his instruments.  (Hitchcock's favourite composer was Wagner ...)  Finally, with no time this week to fully comment on the embassy scene, I'll just single out the line in Jo's lyrics: 'Now I have children of my own ...'.  This picks up on the scene in the Marrakesh marketplace where Jo had asked Ben, 'When are we going to have another baby?'  I see little reason to think that she has now changed her mind and wants to resume her pop-singer career - though such a course is not ruled out.  She may well have originally asked her question out of boredom or 'pain' (her expression).  Here, think of the climax of North by Northwest where Thornhill, clinging to Mount Rushmore, recalls that his previous wives had divorced him because he 'led too dull a life'.  An implication is that he may finally be ready to try raising a family.  (I'm reminded that Buddhism plays on this secondary meaning of 'birth' superceding 'ignorance' in its Twelve Links of Dependent Origination ...)  On the other hand, there are exceptions to every rule, especially for genius.  Next time: I'll try to tidy up!                                                       

                                                                            Albert Hall climax of TMWKTM (1956)


July 3 Owing to indisposition, the entry this week is held over ...


July 10 Okay.  The embassy sequence that resolves The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) is an impeccable sequence in its own right.  Following hard on the Albert Hall sequence, it features another solo vocalist but this time it is Jo McKenna (Doris Day) acting in tandem with husband Ben (James Stewart) to locate and rescue their kidnapped son Hank (Christopher Olsen).  Note that it's likely that Hitchcock intended the monumental quality of the Albert Hall sequence and the 'Storm Cloud Cantata' to comment on Jo's ambitions as a pop singer - all very fine, but hardly more than the proverbial 'hill of beans' in the greater scheme of things.  (As for Ben's abandoning his patients at the Good Samaritan Hospital, Indianapolis, and moving to New York, as Jo had half-seriously proposed, I suspect that Hitchcock saw that as roughly the equivalent of the Robert Donat doctor in The Citadel selling out his Welsh mining-village patients and moving with wife Rosalind Russell to Harley Street.  King Vidor's film clearly influenced a key scene in Hitchcock's Mr and Mrs Smith.)  Now, in the frame-capture below, note the Ambassador on the left, next to his wife (who could almost be his mother - something I'll come back to), and then the Prime Minister slightly behind them.  And against the wall on the right is Ben, waiting his opportunity to duck out and locate Hank.  The pov is that of Jo at the piano.  Once Jo starts to sing - loudly, to give Hank the best chance to hear her and respond - she ignores the shocked glances of some of the audience and keeps on belting it out.  Whereupon, as if wafted on wings of song, the camera moves out and progressively upwards, landing by landing, until it arrives at the room, two stories above, where Hank is being supervised by Mrs Drayton.  Slowly, he rubs the sleep from his eyes, and runs to the door, asking to be let out.  'That's my mother's voice.'  (Earlier, at the Ambrose Chapel, he had heard his father's voice calling his name.)  Nobly, Mrs Drayton lowers herself before Hank and tells him to 'whistle as loud as you can'.  Thereafter, whenever Hitchcock's camera returns to Mrs Drayton, it is careful to centre her or keep her prominent in the frame.  Her mother's instinct, like that of Jo's in the Albert Hall, is being valorised.  Nonetheless, Ben is given equal weight in this sequence.  Back in the room where Mrs Drayton waits nervously with Hank, all of a sudden there is relative quiet again.  Aware that Ben is on the job, Jo has switched to the quieter 'We'll Love Again' number.  We hear echoing steps on the stairs and know that it could be either Mr Drayton coming to dispose of Hank or it could be Ben.  The effect echoes the climax of Rear Window (Thorwald's approaching footsteps) and also picks up on the 'echoing footsteps' scene in Camden Town earlier.  The footsteps prove to be those of Ben who bursts into the room (as Mrs Drayton, fearing it's her husband, screams 'No!').  Mrs Drayton urges father and son to leave immediately, but even as Ben turns momentarily to acknowledge her words, a disembodied gun appears at Hank's head.  (Cf the disembodied gun in Albert Hall.)  Mr Drayton now speaks of using Ben and Hank as hostages in order to make it past the plain-clothes police who surround the embassy.  Ben tells Hank to lead the way as Drayton has requested.  For one-and-half flights the trio proceed slowly to the accompaniment of Jo's singing coming up the stairs.  Then, as she performs a couple of piano trills, and the music seems almost spent, suddenly Ben is able to pull Hank back and simultaneously deliver an upper-cut to a startled Drayton who is spun downwards.  A couple of cut-ins of Drayton's head-and-shoulders show that he's not doing himself any good physically on the stairs.  Then the gun, secreted up his sleeve, goes off.  He lies still.  Mrs Drayton appears at the head of the stairs and takes in what has happened.  Significantly, she is thus shown exactly as the Scotland Yard dignitary Buchanan has been shown at the Albert Hall - the parallel further 'valorises' her.  Next moment, Hank is in his mother's arms.  As for the Ambassador's wife who looks like she could actually be his mother - and suitably dowager-like - you can't help feeling that, out of ambition, she may have put her husband up to the attempted assassination in the first place.  She would thus be like, say, Mrs Sebastian in Notorious.  At any rate, her husband now faces a long spell 'up the river' (in England, or back home), so she may as well get used to feeling like a dowager.

                                                                            Hosts and guests in the foreign embassy in TMWKTM          


July 17 My regular readers know how I admire the writings of G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) and his positive - in every sense - influence on Hitchcock.  Not least, he was a master of paradox.  Here, this week, are just some passing observations.  I'll start with a clever distinction made by, of all people, the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci.  Speaking broadly, Gramsci thought he detected an essential difference between the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle and the Father Brown stories of Chesterton.  Gramsci: 'Father Brown is a Catholic who mocks the mechanical habits of thought of Protestants ...  Sherlock Holmes is the Protestant detective who unravels the tangled skein of a crime starting from the outside, using scientific and experimental methods and induction.  Father Brown is the Catholic priest who uses the subtle psychological experience gained from the confessional and from the vigorous moral casuistry of the Fathers, depending particularly on deduction and introspection while not totally ignoring science and experiment.'  ('The Picador Book of Crime Writing', 1993, p. 203.)  Hmm.  That rather squares, does it not, with Hitchcock's stated disdain, as a filmmaker, for whodunits, which he saw as intellectual puzzles?  And remember Hitchcock's phrase to himself, 'logic is dull!'  Another of Chesterton's admirers was, of course, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.  He saw Chesterton as 'Poe's great successor' ('The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922-1986', 2000, p. 498), certainly not meaning that Chesterton was just a ratiocinator.  He astutely noted: Chesterton always performs a tour de force by proposing a supernatural explanation and then replacing it, losing nothing, with one from this world.'  (Ibid, p. 114.)  Shades of Hitchcock's Vertigo, there.  For an example of Chesterton's own disparagement of some intellectuals, and for his capacity to spot the real meaning in a situation, I might attempt to distill what he wrote in his essay "Cockneys and Their Jokes".  Mother-in-law jokes, and similar 'perpetual jokes in comic papers about shrewish wives and henpecked husbands' are 'all a frantic exaggeration, but it is an exaggeration of a truth; whereas all the modern mouthings about oppressed women are the exaggerations of a falsehood.  If you read even the best of the intellectuals of today you will find them saying that in the mass of the democracy the woman is the chattel of her lord, like his bath or his bed.  But if you read the comic literature of the democracy you will find that the lord hides under the bed to escape from the wrath of his chattel.  This is not the fact but it is much nearer the truth.  Every man who is married knows quite well, not only that he does not regard his wife as a chattel, but that no man can conceivably ever have done so.  The joke stands for an ultimate truth ... [that] even if the man is the head of the house, he knows she is the figurehead.'  For how the people live, suggests Chesterton, 'we shall surely find it, not in the literature which studies the people, but in the literature which the people studies.'  If nothing else, one may feel such sensible thinking on Chesterton's part to be refreshing, and I think it is like Hitchcock's own Cockney good sense and direct observation evident in much of the humour and visual gags of his 1930s films.  Speaking of which ... I like a point made by Gavin Lambert that in the Father Brown stories 'Chesterton's high points are nearly always visual rather than narrative' ('The Dangerous Edge', 1975, p. 74).  One example Lambert gives is this, which surely inspired Hitchcock: 'A photographer with a black cloak over his head apparently focuses his camera - only the unnatural posture of his leg reveals that he was murdered hours ago and propped up against his tripod.'  Surely that inspired the scene in Secret Agent (1936) in which Ashenden (John Gielgud) and The General (Peter Lorre) wait upon an organist in a Swiss alpine church - and wait and wait, because the organist (who is actually dead) seems intent on playing a particular chord that is never-ending.  (See frame-capture below.)  Note: the gag in question is also a variant on the 'One Note Man' (H.M. Bateman's cartoon in 'Punch') that helped inspire the clash of cymbals in the Albert Hall climax of the original The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)!                                     

                                                                            The dead organist in SECRET AGENT


July 24 Watching Strangers on a Train (1951) on a big screen in a friend's theatrette last weekend, I was struck by, first, the engaging performances given by Robert Walker, as spoilt rich-boy Bruno Anthony, and Farley Granger, as the slightly naive tennis-player and would-be politician, Guy Haines.  Also very good was Laura Elliot as Guy's trampish wife Miriam, from whom he is expecting to get a divorce. However, whenever the camera cut to Ruth Roman playing Guy's new girlfriend, Ann Morton, daughter of a US Senator in Washington D.C., the emotional temperature would fall.  I don't attribute this just to Ruth Roman's performance, as the very mise-en-scène of shots associated with Ann is itself relatively uninteresting and barren.  (The frame-capture below shows our first glimpse of her.)  What I think Hitchcock was doing is twofold.  First, he wanted to suggest the rarified atmosphere of Senator Morton's household.  The Senator (Leo G. Carroll), the very opposite of someone like the irresponsible Bruno with his grandiose schemes, seems ultra-cautious, ultra-conservative.  He seems to be a widower (like Guy, he may be currently between wives).  Of course, Hitchcock gives us the outspoken younger sister of Ann, Babs (Patricia Hitchcock), for some comic relief and a break to the formality of the household.  Patricia Hitchcock is another fine performer in this film.  But I think Hitchcock had something further in mind.  By the time Guy first rings Ann, he has spent a long conversation with Bruno on the train - a would-be seductive conversation by Bruno - and also he has learned from Miriam that she has had second thoughts about the divorce.  Guy, in short, is already a man pre-occupied and not entirely sure of his future with Ann.  And that fissure between them will only widen for a time.  After Bruno decides to go ahead with his wild scheme of 'swapping murders' that he had proposed on the train - to Guy's polite amusement - and strangles Miriam at a funfair, Guy is faced with his guilty knowledge of a murder that he can't talk about because he is the obvious suspect.  No matter that it was committed by a madman, a psychopath, and that Guy did nothing knowingly to encourage or condone it!  (Nonetheless, he has said to Ann on the phone that he had felt like strangling Miriam - exactly what happened.)  I'll talk in detail about Strangers on a Train in coming weeks.  I have also lately re-read Patricia Highsmith's intriguing novel, and will comment on that.  For example, the title can refer not just to the initial Bruno-Guy meeting but to the relationship of Guy and Ann(e) who marry during the novel (though Guy continues to be haunted by his doppelgänger, Bruno, and indeed reciprocates Miriam's murder by killing Bruno's hated father).  At one point, Anne tells Guy that there are moments when 'you make me feel we're complete strangers' (#21).  Later, a key passage describes the marriage as a 'condition' in which Bruno is always coming between them, 'something that had always been and always would be.  Bruno, himself, Anne.  And the moving on the tracks.  And the lifetime of moving on the tracks until death us do part, for that was the punishment.'  (#31, my emphasis)  Bruno, then, you could say, is the embodiment of Guy's guilt.  Guy is guilty of murder but also of a susceptability to indulge his 'shadow' side, including a dissatisfaction with the constricting 'rules' and ideals of straight, patriarchal society.  It is in part a homosexual view of life, but is more than that.  (Scottie in Vertigo may be seen to hold a similar dissatisfaction with the everyday.)  Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train crams much of this into one stunning image - of Bruno haunting Guy, watching him from the sunlit steps of the Jefferson Memorial - and it is that image that I'll talk about next time.

                                                                            First view of Ann Morton in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN                


July 31 In a moment, continuing our discussion of the remarkable Strangers on a Train, I'll talk about what I have often called Hitchcock's 'outflanking technique', which in many ways goes to the heart of his filmmaking method.  But as I particularly want to refer to the haunting shot (or two) of Bruno on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C. (see frame-capture below), I'll begin with that.  Robert Corber, in his intense and informative book on Hitchcock and homophobia, 'In the Name of National Security' (1993), suggests that Hitchcock was very aware of how the American public had lately been conditioned to see homosexuals as a security risk, and as a threat to the very fabric of the American democratic way of life.  Understandably, Corber puts this emblematic image of the gay Bruno on the cover of his book.  And he comments on how 'the film positions the spectator as "the heterosexual" of contemporary juridical discourse who is supposedly threatened by the homosexual menace' (p. 73).  It's an interesting view, and accords with how Hitchcock typically sought to appeal to a particular zeitgeist, in each of his films.  (I see Spellbound, made when World War II was ending, with all the mixed emotions of hope and uncertainty then in the air, as representative; its references to things like war neurosis and amnesia caused by witnessing something unbearable were very timely, as was its tone of general optimism, unusual for Hitchcock.)  Bruno, then, is like a stain on the public landscape, and not just a personal threat to Guy whom he is effectively blackmailing (though note: the image of Bruno on the steps is subjective, from Guy's point-of-view in his taxi).  Now, Patricia Highsmith's novel has no reference to Washington D.C., and much of it is set in Texas and New Mexico.  Nonetheless, the filmmakers surely took inspiration for the Jefferson Memorial scene, in particular, from a couple of Highsmith's observations.  For one thing, Guy in the novel is an architect (in the film he's a tennis-player).  After Bruno has begun to haunt Guy (and eventually Guy's marriage to Anne), Highsmith writes: 'The creation of a building was a spiritual act.  So long as [Guy] harboured the knowledge of Bruno's guilt, he corrupted himself in a sense.'  (#18)  Architecture, then, is retained as a motif in the film, and particularly in the Washington D.C. scenes (the Capitol Building, etc.) which express, amongst other things, the stability that Guy seeks and which his marriage to Miriam hasn't given him.  (Bruno's presence threatens to bring everything crashing down.  Interestingly, Strangers on a Train was made the same year as Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still which literalises such a calamity.)  Even more specifically, the novel tells us that Guy is something of a genius whose 'main building [for a golf club] ...had been called "The American Parthenon" ... .'  (#47)  So there you have a direct inspiration for the film's scenes featuring the Jefferson Memorial, whose Grecian columns, etc., speak of the democratic ideal.  But also you have a whole contrast of scale, or several such contrasts, and that brings me to Hitchcock's 'outflanking technique'.  I originally coined that term to refer to how Hitchcock would always seek to stay ahead of the film's viewers in terms of anticipating possible objections, or difficulties, they might have.  For example, I cited how the ornithologist Mrs Bundy (Ethel Griffies) in The Birds is established as very knowledgeable in her field, and then made gentle fun of.  When someone asks what the birds were trying to do, and eyewitness Melanie (Tippi Hedren) answers plainly, 'To kill them [the children at the school]', Mrs Bundy responds, 'Impossible - the whole concept is unimagineable!'  Nonetheless, she proceeds to cite statistics showing that birds far outnumber humans on this planet (and have been around since archeopteryx) - all very humbling and scary.  And we believe Melanie, now that the issue of the birds' intentions is out in the open.  (There's a similar moment in Rope when Rupert finally voices his suspicions of murder, and the film moves to its focussed showdown with the two killers.)  Hitchock's deliberate use of contrasts is another aspect of his outflanking us.  For example, I see Bruno dwarfed by the shrine of democracy that is the Jefferson Memorial, as a deliberate and tendentious contrast by Hitchcock, one comparable to the image implicit in Psycho, of a young Norman Bates playing Beethoven's 'Eroica' Symphony on the gramophone.  That, and analogies elsewhere in Hitchcock, will be my topic next time.

                                                                            Bruno on the Jefferson steps in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN


August 7 What I call Hitchcock's 'outflanking technique' goes to the heart of his filmmaking method (as I suggested last time).  At one level, it involves simply the play of opposites Hitchcock said he used in The Trouble With Harry where he 'took melodrama out of the pitch-black night and brought it out in the sunshine'.  (Compare his description of the sunlit crop-dusting scene in North by Northwest as the reverse of the hackneyed gangster-movie ambush with its 'cobblestones at night washed by recent rain and a black cat slinking by'.)  Mind you, even in The Trouble With Harry, the result isn't so simple!  The play of opposites, or use of counterpoint, serves to 'elevate the commonplace in life to a higher level'.  Those are again Hitchcock's words, but they are close to what Arthur Koestler said about the artist's - or the scientist's - need to bridge the gap between the tragic and trivial planes of existence.  At such a time, the cosmic mystery is humanised while 'humdrum' human existence is seen in a new light.  That's 'outflanking' of a kind, all right, and it resembles the idea of the sublime: an experience that defeats everyday thinking, that defies everyday norms of scale or magnitude or what is graspable, and arouses feelings of awe and reverence.  (The Trouble With Harry, correctly understood, is a hymn to the life/death force.  The very burying and unburying of Harry's corpse, over and over, is an essential part of its - in every sense, earthy - effect.)  But now to the specific contrast in scales I mentioned last time in the image from Strangers on a Train of Bruno at the Jefferson Memorial.  I said it was roughly the equivalent of the image implicit in Psycho, of a young Norman Bates playing Beethoven's 'Eroica' Symphony on a gramophone.  I would also mention the moment in The Wrong Man when Manny (Henry Fonda) gives a piano lesson to his two young sons (see frame-capture below).  The eldest boy, Robert, remarks of the music: 'It says here Mozart wrote it when he was 5, so I should be able to play it - I'm 8.'  To which his brother, Greg, responds: 'I'm 5, so I should be able to write it.'  What do these three moments have in common?  Just this.  There's a simple contrast between the small and everyday and something that is its opposite, grand and sublime.  Remember that Bruno is characterised as a dreamer, the wealthy playboy (and mother's-boy) who already feels that he isn't going to achieve much, despite his talents, and so turns to hare-brained schemes like an invention for being able to smell a flower on Mars - or a bright idea for the perfect murder.  That's one implication, then, of Bruno on the steps, corresponding to how he is shown in the Patricia Highsmith novel to be envious of Guy's genius as an architect.  Also, this at-times likeable man begins to dog Guy's footsteps and threatens to corrupt him (see last time). He is like a blot on Guy's otherwise near-perfect landscape, and we see that too.  Then, beyond both those subjective views (Bruno's of himself, Guy's of Bruno), there are other dimensions again, roughly corresponding to what is at stake for the viewer.  The Jefferson Memorial is like a shrine erected to the democratic ideal.  Suddenly the story we are watching may seem to become nothing less than a story of ourselves and our - individual and collective - places in the world and in history.  (A correspondent on our 'advanced' Hitchcock discussion group this week wrote how enthralled he was by the film's use of the 'criss-cross' motif to express precisely this larger dimension of our shared involvement in the world.)  Now, there is much more to be said, such as how Hitchcock would deliberately tap the particular zeitgeist of the period (as I touched on last time).  But I've space left to just clarify a couple of things.  First, the image containing a deliberate contrast-of-scale is of course recurrent in Hitchcock's work, going back at least as far as Blackmail (the pursuit and flight of the wretched blackmailer into the British Museum where he falls to his death).  It is part-and-parcel of the sequoia-forest scene in Vertigo.  It is evident in such other films as To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The Birds.  Second, there are other instances of, specifically, musical references to make a point that may involve pathos but is also elevating (to use Hitchcock's word again).  Think of the moment in The Birds in Annie Hayworth's house where we glimpse the record-cover for Wagner's 'Tristan and Isolde' and sense a connection of that classic legend of frustrated love to Annie's and Mitch's own story (as seen by Annie, anyway).  More next time.          

                                                                            Piano lesson in THE WRONG MAN


August 14 Our discussion group this week has focussed on the lighter-down-the-drain sequence in Strangers on a Train.  The sequence memorably intercuts Bruno's attempt to retrieve the lighter (which he needs to incriminate Guy by planting it at the scene of Miriam's murder) with Guy's desperate attempt to win a tennis match at Forest Hills so that he can hasten to intercept Bruno.  Such cross-cutting, of course, goes back to D.W. Griffith - Hitchcock has 'merely freshened it up a little' (as they say in North by Northwest).  For one thing, the whole film is about its 'criss-cross' motif, first stated in the cross-cutting of Bruno's and Guy's footsteps in the opening sequence.  For another thing, the criss-cross motif is ubiquitous in the film, accruing meanings like the references to 'vertigo' in Vertigo.  In the frame-capture below, Bruno has just retrieved the lighter and is hastening away.  Note the railway-crossing sign behind him, which has been present throughout the sequence.  Also note the presence at centre-screen of Guy's luggage-handler friend: the intersecting lives of various people constitutes a further part of what the criss-cross motif stands for.  (Another matter of interest in this shot is the sign in the far distance saying 'Metcalf Diner': as Metcalf was a fictional town, Hitchcock clearly had taken pains to make sure details like this were 'right'.)  But I want to hark back for a moment to last time, when we discussed Hitchcock's 'outflanking technique'.  As part of our group's discussion this week, we noted how 'identification' in Hitchcock can be with both 'good' and 'bad' characters.  My contribution was this: 'Notice that the cross-cutting emphasises how both men - Guy, Bruno - are [literally] stretching themselves.  That effort becomes the paramount thing and is not given any moral emphasis.  Just the audience-identification with the effort, the Willing, is what matters here.'  (The cosmic Will, said Schopenhauer, is a blind, amoral life/death 'force'.)  DS had this to say: 'I do not believe that the primary criteria for rooting interest in a character is moral.  We identify with aspects of characters, some of which are moral and some immoral.'  SR reminded me in an email that screenwriters and other working professionals regularly speak of 'space work': 'To draw-in an audience, to engage them in a character's "world" (and it's a trick Hitchcock employed masterfully), bring the camera very close to the actor as he does something arduous and physical.'  That of course is what the lighter-down-the-drain sequence is about - doubly!  (As Bruno reaches down the drain to try and grasp the lighter, Hitchcock cross-cuts to Guy pushing himself beyond his 'usual watch-and-wait strategy' as he hastens to finish the tennis match.)  But here's where Hitchcock may also 'outflank' us.  MP noted that the film is a veritable 'roller-coaster of emotion [and tones]'.  'Identification in this context is [ultimately] with the director rather than with the characters ... as he sets us up, or lets us in on a joke, or horrifies us, using ... character identification to talk to us about larger ideas.'  In effect, Hitchcock himself 'identifies' with both 'good' and 'bad' characters, as he takes pains to portray them with human qualities and with a degree of compassion, and we in turn identify with Hitchcock identifying with those characters and the 'larger ideas' they embody!  Of course, too, there are other technical resources the film can use to encourage identification.  As Bruno stretches his arm and hand those last critical inches, prior to grasping the lighter, hear Dimitri Tiomkin's empathic tuba register his effort!  (This unmelodic sound is a far cry from the solo violin that briefly played so sweetly at the outset of the film's credits-sequence!)  More next time.                     

                                                                            Bruno has retrieved his lighter in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN


August 21 In Strangers on a Train, the first (but not the second) funfair sequence is drawn essentially from the novel by Patricia Highsmith.  Bruno is aroused but relaxed, and accordingly is set in his purpose.  He stalks his prey - Miriam - through the fairground.  All the details speak of alert senses and pursuit of a sexual quarry.  Hitchcock follows the novel very closely, as here: 'They [Miriam and her companions] all bought frozen custards.  Bruno waited boredly, smiling, looking up at the ferris wheel's arc of lights and the tiny people swinging in benches up there in the black sky.  Far off through the trees, he saw lights twinkling on water.  It was quite a park.  He wanted to ride the ferris wheel.  He felt wonderful.  He was taking it easy, not getting excited.  The merry-go-round played "Casey would waltz with the strawberry blonde ...".'  (#12)  (Hitchcock incorporated this very tune into his film, no doubt remembering his symbolic use of the 'Merry Widow Waltz' in Shadow of a Doubt.  Conveniently, Warners held the rights to the tune after using it in Strawberry Blonde [1941] and One Sunday Afternoon [1948].)  Even when Hitchcock doesn't incorporate a detail from the novel directly, he evidently notes it for possible use elsewhere in the film.  (I have always thought that Hitchcock was potentially a very fine literary critic, alert to an author's every nuance or symbol.)  The passage just quoted continues like this: 'Grinning, he turned [his attention] to Miriam's red hair, and their eyes met, but hers moved on and he was sure she hadn't noticed him, but he mustn't do that again.'  Far from transposing this particular detail straight into the film, Hitchcock boldly reverses it: in the film, Bruno does catch Miriam's eye and effectively gives her the come-on - unnoticed by her companions - thus making the sequence even more sexual.  In turn, that moment provides motivation for why, on the Island of Love, Miriam momentarily slips away from her companions and literally into Bruno's clutches - whereupon he strangles her.  On the other hand, Hitchcock isn't finished.  In the film's second funfair sequence, in which Bruno goes back to plant Guy's cigarette lighter at the scene of the crime, Bruno does indeed want to avoid attracting attention.  So he is understandably discomforted when he suddenly realises that he may have been recognised by the fairground employee (an Ernest Borgnine look-alike) in charge of the boats that go to the Island of Love.  Bruno looks away and retreats into shadow, but too late.  It's a memorable moment (see frame-capture below), and Hitchcock almost certainly took it, as I say, from the Highsmith novel.  Now back to the earlier fairground episode.  Before the murder, there is the business of the test-your-strength sideshow, the merry-go-round ride, and the river-caves attraction, and all of them Hitchcock includes in his film.  At one point, Bruno impulsively buys a toy bird with a swallow-tail ('It made him feel like a kid again').  Then: 'A little boy walking by with his parents stretched his hand towards it [the toy bird], and Bruno had an impulse to give it to him, but he didn't.'  Bruno's meanness here is the inspiration for the incident in the film where he uses his cigarette to burst a small boy's balloon (one of several reminders of his fixity of intention - something not to be messed with except at one's peril!).  However, after the murder, just as Bruno has left the fairground, he has another encounter with a small boy.  He leaps onto a passing streetcar.  'A wriggly little boy sat across the aisle, and Bruno began chatting with him. ...  In a burst of well-being, he ruffled the little boy's hair.'  (#12)  So now Bruno can afford to be nice, and this is surely the inspiration for how in the film, after the murder, he helps a blind man cross the road.  (Robin Wood notes how the blind man's dark glasses echo Miriam's spectacles, and how the incident suggests Bruno's need, however partially, to blot out the crime.)  Of course, the film has many nice touches of its own during the fairground sequence.  One I like is the use of voices on the soundtrack straight after the strangling, as Bruno is hurrying to leave the island.  Miriam's two companions are already beginning to look for her.  Someone is heard asking, 'Lost your girl, George?'  The companions call out in succession such phrases as 'Miriam, where are you?', 'Here she is', and 'Look, she's fainted!'  A great deal of Strangers on a Train proves, on examination, to depend on exact timing of lines and conviction of delivery to mask the outlandishness of what we are asked to believe!

                                                                            Bruno  has been recognised in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN                      


August 28 Still on Strangers on a Train, some bits and pieces this time.  First, we noted last time how the initial fairground sequence has two little incidents that comment on each other: Bruno's bursting a child's balloon and Bruno's helping a blind man cross the road.  (They tell us about Bruno's different mind-sets, before and after the murder.)  Hitchcock liked such symmetries.  Another instance occurs in the scene where Ann visits Mrs Anthony to ask her to turn her son in (and thus get Guy off the hook).  In the first half of the scene, Ann talks to the giggly Mrs Anthony and soon finds that she is at least as crazy as Bruno, in denial about her 'irresponsible' son's actions ('He gets into all kinds of escapades').  Very soon Mrs Anthony excuses herself, pausing at the door to give a little shrug (see frame-capture below).  But Bruno has been eavesdropping.  As soon as his mother has gone out, he emerges and tells Ann, 'I'm afraid Mother wasn't much help'.  (He is wearing his long dressing-gown and a silk cravat.)  Quickly he begins to tell Ann a lie about how Guy murdered Miriam and how Guy has been asking Bruno to go to the fairground and recover his lighter which he had dropped there.  'But that would make me an accessory', he adds.  Poor Ann can say nothing.  Bruno speaks of 'an urgent appointment' and starts to leave the room.  However, at the door he pauses to give a little wave from the waist.  This weak gesture is, of course, the equivalent of his mother's shrug moments before, and it nails the point about 'like mother, like son'.  The whole scene is bold and succinct, and clarifies Guy's (and Ann's) predicament before the vital tennis match, which immediately follows.  The second item I want to note this time concerns the initial fairground sequence again.  Readers of Robin Wood's fine essay on Strangers on a Trainin 'Hitchcock's Films Revisited' may have been puzzled, as I was, by a comment Wood makes there on Miriam's dropped glasses with one cracked lens: '... the murder is shown to us reflected in the other lens, inverted and distorted.  The lens itself recalls lake and tunnel and is a further sexual symbol.  The shot is one of the cinema's most powerful images of perverted sexuality ...'  In 2006 I was emailing Wood's colleague, MW, and asked him if he understood exactly what Wood was getting at here, including the reference to the spectacle lens as a sexual symbol.  MW's answer clarified the matter for me beautifully, and I'm taking the liberty of passing it on.  MW: 'Insofar as I can answer for him (and perhaps I'm being presumptuous) I'd say Robin was seeing the whole sequence as like a chain of suggestive Freudian imagery, in which the journey through the "Tunnel of Love" is a "penetration" to the Magic Isle (where one goes for sex) and the lens as symbol is only significant within that chain.  I guess he means it's vaginal, but is not penetrated ... .'  For my part, I have always found the way the whole fairground sequence builds to a 'climax' - including the 'false climax' when someone screams in the Tunnel of Love - to be literally Freudian inasmuch as the scene's narrative mechanism matches that described by Freud for telling a 'tendentious' joke, i.e., one that has a sexual payoff: you start by building a general mood of acceptable good humour, and 'permissiveness', and then move to the punchline.  Also, I have written in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' of how 'The murder reflected in the glasses is like a love scene, and as Bruno lowers Miriam's body to the ground it looks like he is gently putting her to bed [lowering her into bed], or perhaps drowning her' - the water symbolism again.  'Of course, Hitchcock probably had two very pragmatic reasons for photographing the murder like this.  Firstly, he needed to emphasise the cracked glasses, which still have an important part to play in the story.  Secondly, in a favourite phrase of his, he needed to "take the curse off" the murder, which is very sordid, so he photographed it as if in a mirror.'

                                                                            Mrs Anthony in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN   

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News and Comment

(Readers of this webpage are urged to send reports for possible inclusion in this feature. Both general-interest and Hitchcock-specific items are sought.  N.B.: information about Hitchcock DVDs is incorporated at several points below.)

Death of Robert Boyle, aged 100

The gifted production designer Robert Boyle, who worked on such Hitchcock masterpieces as Vertigo and North by Northwest, has died in California.  An appreciation of Boyle will appear here shortly.  (Meanwhile, scroll down to read our earlier item "Production designer Robert Boyle ...".)

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Help the BFI rescue The Hitchcock 9

The British Film Institute wants to restore the nine surviving Hitchcock silent films, and are asking Hitchcock lovers everywhere to make donations to the cause.  For further details, and to see a trailer, click here: http://www.bfi.org.uk/saveafilm.html?q=saveafilm   

(See also the News item below, "Another Mountain Eagle find".)

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Death of cinematographer/director/producer Ronald Neame (1911-2010)

Ronald Neame, who was born in London, and began his film career working with Alfred Hitchcock as a stills photographer at British International Pictures, has died in Los Angeles, aged 99.  As a cinematographer, he photographed David Lean's In Which We Serve (1942) and Blithe Spirit (1945).  As a producer, he produced Lean's Brief Encounter (1946), Great Expectations (1946), and Oliver Twist (1948).  As a director, he made such fine, character-based entertainments as Tunes of Glory (1960), Gambit (1966), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968), and The Poseidon Adventure (1972).

Another of his films was the lyrically-told World War II thriller The Man Who Never Was (1955).  It was based on a true incident (thought up by Ian Fleming when he was working in Naval Intelligence) in which a man's dead body was floated off the European coast with fake invasion plans planted in his briefcase to deceive the Germans.  Hitchcock almost certainly saw Neame's film and was influenced by it to make North by Northwest.

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Another Mountain Eagle find - though still not the film itself

Alfred Hitchcock's 'lost' film The Mountain Eagle (1926) has never been recovered - although the British Film Institute recently announced that they will launch another search for it in 2012, as part of the 'Cultural Olympiad' in London (coinciding with the Olympic Games).

Meanwhile, on eBay earlier this month, a full-size original German poster for the film was auctioned.  We understand that it fetched 66,000 Euros.  Here is a reproduction of it, together with a lobby card for the film.  For information about the latter, scroll down this page to the item "Rare lobby card ...".

                                                                                Original poster for DER BERGADLER/ THE MOUNTAIN EAGLE

                                                                Lobby card for THE MOUNTAIN EAGLE

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Hitchcock on DVD and Blu-Ray

We understand that Psycho will be released on Blu-Ray in Region 1 on 2 August, and in Region 2 on 19 October.  For more information, click here: http://www.thehdroom.com/news/Hitchcocks-Psycho-Celebrating-50th-Anniversary-on-Blu-ray/6685.   Other Hitchcock titles already available on Blu-Ray are North by Northwest (reportedly a good transfer if a little dark) and The 39 Steps (the latter a Region 2 release and reportedly not a good transfer).

Meanwhile, as our regular readers know, Paramount Home Entertainment released a Centennial Collection DVD of To Catch a Thief in March 2009 (Region 1).  Here is what our reviewer, Brian Wilson, wrote:

To begin with, this edition of To Catch a Thief contains a remarkably good transfer.  Since Paramount does not indicate that this release of the film has been remastered in any way, I can only assume that the transfer here is identical to the one featured on the 2007 Special Collector’s Edition.  Unlike that earlier version, however, the Centennial Collection edition of the film is a two-disc release.  Disc One contains the film itself.  It also contains an entirely new commentary by Hitchcock film historian Dr. Drew Casper, replacing the one by Peter Bogdanovich and Laurent Bouzereau featured on the 2007 release.  While I have not listened to that earlier commentary, I have been told that it relies too much upon personal reminiscences and anecdotes without offering consistent insight into the film itself.  Casper’s commentary, on the other hand, offers an extremely detailed analysis of the film.

Disc Two contains several special features, three of these new.  “A Night with the Hitchcocks” is a Q&A session between Drew Casper’s film students at the University of Southern California and Hitchcock’s granddaughter Mary Stone and daughter Pat Hitchcock.  Although this piece has moments of interest, I felt that it was ultimately unrewarding.  “Unacceptable Under the Code: Film Censorship in America” is a short documentary about the history of the Motion Picture Production Code and its specific impact on To Catch a Thief.  “Behind the Gates: Cary Grant and Grace Kelly” is a short celebration of the lives and work of the two actors, featuring several production stills and excerpts from To Catch a Thief.

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Lamented death of actor John Forsyth (1918-2010)

John Forsyth, whose real name was John Freund, has died of cancer at his home in California, aged 92.  Though he had considerable Broadway and film experience, he was best known as the scheming oil tycoon in TV's 'Dynasty' and as the voice (only) of the leader of 'Charlie's Angels'.  But Hitchcock aficionados remember him with affection as Sam, the artist who fell in love one magical autumn day with Jennifer (Shirley Maclaine) in The Trouble With Harry (1955) and as the US intelligence official Michael Nordstrom in Topaz (1969), adapted from the Leon Uris novel set during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Hitchcock also directed him in a classic episode of 'The Alfred Hitchcock Hour' called "I Saw the Whole Thing" (1962).  Earlier, Forsythe had appeared in an episode, "Premonition" (1955), of 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents'.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        .

Korngold opera with a Hitchcock connection receives a different performance in Paris

We have taken this item from the December 2009 issue of 'Positif'.  Yann Tobin writes:

'Saw "La Ville Morte" ("Die tote Stadt"/"The Dead City") at the Opera Bastille.  The powerful score, modelled on the "degenerate art" that was soon to be persecuted by the Nazis, was composed by Erich Wolfgang Korngold in 1920.  The links between this opera and cinema are many.  The opera has been staged in a knowing way by Willy Decker to bring out numerous filmic references, from Caligari to Fellini.  It was adapted from the novel by Georges Rodenbach, "Bruges-la-Morte" (the source of inspiration for Vertigo, via Boileau and Narcejac), but with the ending changed: the hero finally "psychoanalytically" frees himself from the memory of his deceased beloved, whose double he has encountered.  In the 1930s, Korngold will follow Max Reinhardt to the United States, where he will eventually become the epic composer of action films for Warner.  Coming from this genial exile, the original scores for Captain Blood [Michael Curtiz, 1935] and The Adventures of Robin Hood [Curtiz, 1938] retain traces of his hymn to liberty.'

[The above item was freely translated by Adrian Martin, whom we thank.]

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Death of Eric Rohmer (Maurice Schérer), filmmaker, philosopher, author, in Paris

Frenchman Eric Rohmer has died in his ninetieth year.  This prolific director will perhaps be best remembered for the series of films he called his 'contes moraux' such as Ma Nuit Chez Maud/My Night With Maud (1970).  A former editor of 'Cahiers du Cinéma', he co-authored with Claude Chabrol the book 'Hitchcock' (1955), the first full-length study of the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

The following tribute is supplied by Inge Pruks who in the 1970s briefly studied under Rohmer while at the Sorbonne:

‘What a dignified, serene person was Eric Rohmer. He always concerned himself with the important if minimalist things in life: such as conversation (even disagreements) conducted in a civilized manner, like the small white lies we tell and hope that no one notices, like unifying the arts, like what it means to be a social being, or maybe even a human being. This often led him into an exploration of such dualities as young/old, male/female, reflective/active, honest/dishonest, contemporary/medieval, not to forget familial/professional (his own lifelong duality of Maurice Schérer/Eric Rohmer). I can still picture his tall, lean figure, his head on one side, listening with interest to students after lectures, quizzical yet authoritative. A real gentleman, a true intellectual, forever questing and never satisfied with the answer he might have discovered. His death is the passing of an age.’

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Passing of Robin Wood, author of 'Hitchcock's Films' (1965)

English-born film critic and author Robin Wood has died of cancer, aged 78, in Toronto.

This is very sad news.  Wood was the author of several seminal - and influential - books of film criticism, among them 'Hitchcock's Films' (1965), 'Personal Views: Explorations in Film' (1976), and 'Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan' (1986).  Wood's essay on Hitchcock's Psycho appeared in 'Cahiers du Cinéma' soon after the film came out and led to his decision to write an entire book on Hitchcock in English.  The book was ground-breaking and passionate in answering the question, 'Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?'  His subsequent articles on film were prized by journals such as the English 'Movie' and the American 'Film Comment'.  For many years he was a contributing editor of the journal 'CineAction' published in Toronto.  His partner Richard Lippe remains on its editorial board.

For David Bordwell's fine obituary (with further links), click here: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=6483

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Some films recommended by our friends!

Adrian Martin, Senior Research Fellow in Film & Television at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, tells us that he recently saw 'the most profoundly (not superficially) Hitchcockian film made in several decades: [South Korean director] Bong Joon-ho's Mother.  What a brilliant movie this, on every level!' 

Another new film is strongly recommended by Michael Walker (author of 'Hitchcock's Motifs') after seeing it at this year's London Film Festival.  He wrote to us that newcomer Giuseppe Capotondi's Double Hour (La Doppia Ora) was a 'revelation'. Michael added: 'The following day I simply could not stop thinking about it; it's many years since a new film had such an impact on me and was so vivid in my mind afterwards.'  He strongly suggested not familiarising oneself with details of the film's plot before seeing it.

Lastly, our friend Dr Steven Schneider is an executive producer on Oren Peli's Paranormal Activity (2009) which is less Hitchcockian than inviting comparison with The Blair Witch Project.  Roger Ebert's review calls it 'an ingenious little horror film'.

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Patrick Hamilton's 'Rope' (1929) at the Almeida in London

The play that Hitchcock filmed in 1948 works splendidly on stage in its own right.  Loosely based on a US case, but set in London, the play presents a chilling anatomy of an apparently gratuitous murder, and a brilliant snapshot of a jazz-age generation wallowing in privilege, booze, parties, a shallow obsession with fashion and films, and a desperate inner emptiness.  Not to speak of an arrogance that infected many British intellectuals after the First World War licenced, some of them boasted, by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.  (Meanwhile, in Germany ...)

The season at the Almeida Theatre in Islington, North London, runs from Thursday 10 December 2009 to Saturday 6 February 2010.  The play will be directed by well-known stage and film director Roger Michell.  Ticket prices £6 - £32.  For further information, click here: http://www.almeida.co.uk/production_details/production_details.aspx?code=82

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For sale: bronze statue of Hitchcock (here seen in clay, before casting) 

Andrew Gamache is a respected sculptor who specialises in portrait studies, and who has lately turned his attention to Hitchcock.  Seen here are two photographs of the clay model, 30 inches high, from which Andrew will cast his study of the great director.  'I originally created this piece as an exercise to enhance my portfolio with no intent to sell.  I intend to sell only one or two copies.'  Andrew is looking for expressions of interest from prospective purchasers.  'I suppose that I would ask a round figure of 5000 dollars on top of the 1500 dollars for the casting.  This would include the cost of a stone mount.'  Andrew may be contacted by email at <hippjoint@gmail.com>.  Or telephone him in the USA using this number: 386 214 3309. 

                                                                            Hitchcock statue by A.G., before casting in bronze


                                                                            Profile of Hitchcock statue by A.G., before casting

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Another bronze statue of Hitchcock

Speaking of statues of Hitchcock ... the seacoast town of Dinard, northwest France, for several years had a resin statue of Alfred Hitchcock gracing its foreshore.  On Hitch's shoulders perched a seagull and a crow.  The sculptor was Lionel Ducos.  In 2004 the original statue blew away in a gale but this year it was replaced by a sturdier one in bronze, by the same sculptor.  The photo below was supplied by Dr Alain Kerzoncuf, whom we thank.  Note: Dinard is a movie-conscious town and hosts an annual British Film Festival with invited celebrities.  Deliberately, it sometimes shows films with a Hitchcock connection.  According to the recent British documentary Alfred Hitchcock in East London, directed by Bill Hodgson, the young Hitchcock and his family 'spent several happy holidays' at Dinard.     

                                                                              Bronze statue at Dinard, France, of Hitchcock

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Actors campaign to save Hitchcock-connected East London cinema

Actors Tony Robinson ('Blackadder') and Meera Syal ('The Kumars at No. 42') have joined a campaign to stop an historic cinema, the EMD Cinema in Walthamstow, London, from being turned into a church.  Alfred Hitchcock, who grew up nearby, is said to have seen his first movies there.  The cinema first opened as a dance hall in 1887 and finally closed its doors to the public in 2003.  The building was then purchased by a Brazil-based religious organisation, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG).  The organisation's initial plans to turn the building into a church were rejected by the local council, but it is now expected to submit new proposals.  Opposing this, a local film society, the McGuffin (sic) Film Society, wants the council to offer the UCKG ownership of an empty building next to the cinema, allowing the EMD to be sold to operators who would re-open it to show movies.  Tony Robinson calls the cinema 'an exotic masterpiece'.  He says: 'At this exciting time when east London is about to be revitalised, it would be crazy to turn our backs on such a magnificent venue.'

The above item is taken from an article that appeared in the London 'Telegraph'.  To read more, click here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/5184501/Tony-Robinson-campaigns-to-save-cinema-where-Alfred-Hitchcock-saw-first-films.html 

And for an update, click here: http://www.mcguffin.info/

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Premiere of film Alfred Hitchcock in East London

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of Britain's first talkie, Blackmail, the above-mentioned McGuffin (sic) Film Society recently held a screening of Hitchcock's 1929 film followed by the world premiere of the 65-minute documentary Alfred Hitchcock in East London.

'Most people are ignorant of Hitchcock's associations with east London,' says the documentary's writer and director Bill Hodgson.  'My film paints a picture of Hitchcock and his roots which is radically different from previous biographies.'

In Leytonstone the film identifies the old cinema buildings where the boy Alfred was first exposed to motion pictures.  His churchgoing in nearby Stratford and his schooldays in Hackney are also explored as well as his teenage years in Limehouse during the First World War.

Alfred Hitchcock in East London is now available on DVD.  For more information, click here:
http://www.mcguffin.info/

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Deaths of composer Maurice Jarre (1924-2009) and cinematographer Jack Cardiff (1914-2009)

Sadly, both of the above individuals have recently died.  Maurice Jarre composed the scores for Hitchcock's Topaz (1969) and films by such directors as Georges Franju, Luchino Visconti, and David Lean.  Jarre won Academy Awards for his scores for Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1966), and A Passage to India (1984).

The brilliant Jack Cardiff, a regular collaborator with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, et al.), photographed Hitchcock's Under Capricorn (1949).  Cardiff published his autobiography, 'The Magic Hour' (with a preface by Martin Scorsese), in 1996.  He reported that he enjoyed painting and that the French Impressionists had been a major influence on his cinematography.  That may explain why, as Richard Allen ('Hitchcock's Romantic Irony', 2007) has observed, Under Capricorn is atypical of Hitchcock's films visually.  Under Capricorn seeks to convey emotion in its images directly, with suitable use of diffuse colour, whereas Hitchcock's other colour films typically use symbolic or stylised colour, often in discrete blocks, to signify emotion.

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Production designer Robert Boyle, aged 99, further honoured

Robert Boyle, who turns 100 in October, still lectures about his craft to students at the American Film Institute.

In March, he was toasted at a tribute arranged by the Art Directors Guild Film Society and the American Cinematheque.  The same week, the 'Los Angeles Times' ran an article on him (March 27 2009).  It noted that Boyle began his career in 1933 in the art department at Paramount, having just come from USC with a degree in architecture.  At Paramount and later at Universal, where he graduated to art director, he worked on a wide range of movies including horror films such as The Wolf Man (1941), the Alfred Hitchcock movies Saboteur (1942) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and even the old 'Ma and Pa Kettle' comedies.

After working on the two Hitchcocks, Boyle went into the Army during World War II. 'After my discharge, I went back to work with Hitch, who had formed a company at RKO with Cary Grant and that didn't pan out.  The next opportunity to be with Hitch was [when] he called me for North by Northwest [1959] and then after that The Birds [1963] and Marnie [1964].'

According to Boyle, once you worked with Hitchcock you became part of his movie family.  'He was a great collaborator,' Boyle says.  'He would discuss a movie with anybody, including his driver.'

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Death of Hitchcock artist and designer, Dorothea Redmond, in Hollywood

The 'Los Angeles Times' reports as follows:

Dorothea Holt Redmond, an illustrator and production designer who helped visualize several Alfred Hitchcock films and worked with Walt Disney to design a private apartment in Disneyland's New Orleans Square, has died. She was 98.

Redmond came to be regarded as one of the most talented illustrators in the industry, according to research by Tania Modleski, a USC English professor who is documenting the contributions women made to Hitchcock's films.  [Modleski's previous book on Hitchcock was the excellent 'The Women Who Knew Too Much'.]

Working with Hitchcock and an art director, Redmond would create an illustration that became the basis for communicating to the cameraman and others - and essentially set the tone of key scenes, Modleski told The Times in an e-mail.

The artist 'was masterful at working with light and shadow,' Modleski said, 'and deserves credit for working with Hitchcock to convey the German Expressionist aesthetic he has been praised for adopting throughout much of his career.'

Redmond's suspense-filled graphite drawings interpreting a sequence in Hitchcock's 1943 film Shadow of a Doubt helped transform a sleepy town into a threatening locale, which was essential to the movie's evolution, according to the 2007 book 'Casting a Shadow'.

Hitchcock was 'one of her very favorite people to work with,' said Redmond's daughter. 'She just loved his personality and his taste.'

In a film career that started with 1937's Nothing Sacred and spanned 20 years, Redmond contributed to seven Hitchcock films, including Rebecca (1940), Rear Window (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955).
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Hitchcock engages viewers on more levels, suggests a recent study 

Researchers in a new field called 'neurocinematics' use MRI scans to monitor brain activity while subjects watch films.  Recently, subjects were shown 30 minute clips from Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), an episode of 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' ("Bang! You're Dead"), and an episode of the TV comedy series, 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'.

The researchers, from the Computational Neuroimaging Laboratory at New York University, found that the Hitchcock clip provoked the most consistent pattern of brain activity among all subjects studied, 'consistently turning on and switching off responses of different regions in more than 65 percent of the cortex'.  By contrast, the Leone clip produced a score of 45%, while 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' scored 18%.

Quote: 'The fact that Hitchcock was able to orchestrate the responses of so many different brain regions, turning them on and off at the same time across all viewers, may provide neuroscientific evidence for his notoriously famous ability to master and manipulate viewers' minds.  Hitchcock often liked to tell interviewers that for him "creation is based on an exact science of audience reactions".'

To read more, go here: http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2008/06/neurocinematics.php

Note.  At the end of the above-listed report (just before 'Comments'), there's a link marked simply PDF.  Click on that to read the original report as published in a new online journal called 'Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind'.

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Region 2 release of Hitchcock's Bon Voyage (1944) and Aventure Malgache (1944)

Network DVD in the UK have released a double-bill of Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache, the two short films Hitchcock made in England in 1944 featuring the Molière Players, a group of exiled French Resistance actors.  Also on the disc is a brief compilation of newsreels and interviews featuring Hitchcock.  For more information, click here: 
http://www.networkdvd.net/product_info.php?cPath=26&products_id=732

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Passing of Rear Window screenwriter John Michael Hayes (1919-2008)

We are saddened by the recent death of the man who between 1954 and 1956 wrote four classic Hitchcock screenplays (Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble With Harry, and The Man Who Knew Too Much).  Each was noted for its emotional warmth and sophisticated dialogue.  Author Steven DeRosa has paid full tribute to the remarkable Hayes-Hitchcock collaboration in his book 'Writing With Hitchcock' (2001).
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Yet another Hitchcock borrowing? The likely influence of Yellow Canary (Herbert Wilcox, 1943) on Hitchcock's Notorious (1946)

Dear to our heart is a piece of research by film scholar Doug Bonner in Texas.  His paper, now published on the Web, shows that several key sequences in Notorious probably took inspiration from a British spy drama Yellow Canary made three years earlier by producer-director Herbert Wilcox as a vehicle for his lovely actress wife Anna Neagle.

How often Hitchcock resorted to such borrowing!  Often, though, he was only returning a favour to another director who had borrowed from him first!  Robert Siodmak, for example, engaged in a 'reciprocity of influence' with Hitchcock during the 1940s.  (At one point, both men shared the same producer, Joan Harrison.)  Wilcox's Yellow Canary may possibly show the influence of Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942) as well as of earlier British productions like The Spy in Black (1939) and Contraband (1940), both directed by Michael Powell.

To read Doug Bonner's article, click here:
http://www.postmodernjoan.com/pomoYCWEB01.htm   

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Producers of Disturbia (2007) sued for allegedly ripping off the story on which Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) was based

The makers of a largely teenage-actor film version of Rear WindowDisturbia (d. D.J. Caruso), are being sued by the estate of Sheldon Abend (whom Hitchcock once called 'an ambulance-chaser'!).  The estate claims ownership of the rights to the original Cornell Woolrich story.  Strangely, a recent news item names this story "Murder from a Fixed Viewpoint" - whereas we had always understood that the story, originally published in the February 1942 issue of 'Dime Detective', was first called "It Had to Be Murder", then changed by Woolrich himself two years later to the more evocative "Rear Window" when he included the story in his early collection of short fiction, 'After-Dinner Story' (1944), published under his William Irish pseudonym.

We contacted Woolrich expert Francis M. Nevins who told us that the author himself originally chose the name "Murder from a Fixed Viewpoint" for his story but that it was never used - until now, for complicated (presumably legal) reasons.  

For the recent news item, click here:
http://www.reuters.com/articlePrint?articleId=USN0844655020080908

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Online: forum on Psycho's influence

Co-Editor of online journal 'Midnight Marquee', Gary J. Svehla (with Susan Svehla), recently controversially omitted Hitchcock's Psycho from a list of 'the 13 most influential horror films'.  Some of our readers may be interested in reading a transcript of a forum in which Gary defended his list against several challengers.  The transcript is available online as a .pdf document (copy and paste the following URL into your browser): http://www.midmar.com/midmar76.pdf

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'Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection' (seven titles) to be released 14th October 2008 (Region 1)

MGM Home Entertainment has announced the 'Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection' which includes Sabotage, Young and Innocent, Rebecca, Lifeboat, The Paradine Case, Spellbound, and Notorious.  (Also included in the package is the 1944 film The Lodger, directed by John Brahm.)  Each film has been restored and remastered.  Most of the films have new 'extras' (e.g., Bill Krohn and Stephen Rebello discussing The Paradine Case) plus the package contains a 32-page booklet of production notes, etc.  Retail will be $119.98.  For more information, please paste the following URL into your browser: http://www.dvdactive.com/news/releases/alfred-hitchcock-premiere-collection.html

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New editions of Hitchcock's Rear Window, Vertigo, and Psycho, and Orson Welles's A Touch Of Evil to be released on 7th October 2008 (Region 1)

Universal Studios Home Entertainment has announced two-disc special editions of the above four films.  Each will have 'extras', both 'old' and 'new' (e.g., Stephen Rebello's commentary for Psycho), with a SRP of $26.98.  For more information, click here:
http://crimespreecinema.blogspot.com/2008/07/dvd-info-universal-announces-special.html
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DVD release (Region 2) of ten episodes of the 'Alfred Hitchcock Hour'

Koch Media in Munich have announced that on 25 May, 2008, they will release a set of ten selected episodes on three DVDs of the 'Alfred Hitchcock Hour' (which had 93 episodes in all).  The majority of the shows will have German audio soundtracks (no mention of English subtitles); however, four shows will have their original English soundtracks plus German subtitles.  Koch say that further sets will follow.  Here's the list of the initial set, which includes the Hitchcock-directed "I Saw the Whole Thing", starring John Forsythe:

1.  A Piece of the Action

2.  I Saw the Whole Thing

3.  Captive Audience

4.  Ride the Nightmare

5.  Diagnosis: Danger

6.  The Star Juror

7.  Last Seen Wearing Blue Jeans

8.  Nothing Ever Happens in Linvale

9.  The Cadaver

10. The Dividing Wall

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Death of Suzanne Pleshette (1937-2008)

Suzanne Pleshette, the husky-voiced actress who redefined the television sitcom wife in the 1970s, playing the smart, sardonic Emily Hartley on 'The Bob Newhart Show', has died of respiratory failure at her home in Los Angeles. She was 70.

She made her film debut in the 1958 Jerry Lewis comedy, The Geisha Boy.  In Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) she played the schoolteacher Annie Hayworth.  Our tribute comes from Stephen Rebello in Hollywood:

'What a witty, intelligent, and stylish woman she was.  For me, one of the most intriguing things she ever did was to one day turn up on the set
of The Birds with blonde, upswept hair, a new makeup style, wearing a mink coat, Edith Head clothing, and a haughty expression.  She did it, she said, when she realized that Hitchcock only had eyes for the blonde.

'Apparently, Tippi Hedren thought it was hilarious.  Hitchcock, not so much, although I have been told that he saw in Pleshette's directness, outspokeness, and legendarily bawdy language a throwback to the days of stars like Carole Lombard.'


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French-German film coming about the young Alfred Hitchcock

French-German cultural channel ARTE have made a series of short films on the childhoods of "Six Great Filmmakers", including Hitchcock.  Other directors to be featured are Welles, Renoir, Bergman, Lang, and Tati.  The films will be shown in cinemas and on television.

The Hitchcock film is directed by Corinne Garfin and has the title Nuit Brève (The Short Night).  It shows a young Alfred going with his parents to a play starring Ellen Terry (played by Camille Natta) and afterwards meeting the famous actress.  Below is a still.  For more information, click here: http://www.umedia.fr/UMedia/enfances.htm

                                                                            Young actor portraying Alfred Hitchcock in forthcoming production
                                                                  Scene from the forthcoming ARTE production, Nuit Brève

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The stage production of The 39 Steps in Boston (and now Broadway, et al.)

Back in 2005 Michael Walker reported here on the opening in Leeds, England, of a play based on Hitchcock's film The 39 Steps.  (See "UK stage production of The 39 Steps" below.)  Later, in "Editor's Day", we quoted correspondent DN - Danny Nissim - on how the play had transferred to London's West End and had provided an exhilarating night-out for Danny, his wife, and friends.  In 2007 the production crossed the Atlantic and played in Boston.  In January 2008 it will move to New York (see below).  Here's what WB reported in our 'Hitchcock Enthusiasts' Group about seeing it in Boston:

'I went to Boston last Saturday to see a new play entitled "Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps". The title makes clear that the play is based (loosely) on the Hitchcock film and not the John Buchan book, although perhaps a more apt title would add the tag "meets Monty Python".   Citing a Pythonesque dimension, though, doesn't fully suggest the great warmth with which the whole thing celebrates Hitchcock.  Four actors play 100+ roles and do it with great verve and ability.   It's quite funny and wonderful.   It has played for a couple of years in London's West End and one of the original actors from the UK is playing the lead here.  It transfers to Broadway in January [namely, the American Airlines Theatre in Times Square, opening on Tuesday 15 January.  In Australia, a Melbourne Theatre Company production will open in April.] They simulate effects from the film in funny, creative and low-tech ways.  They even pull off Hitchcock's cameo.   My ten-year-old daughter also loved the show.  Given my love for the original, I went a skeptic and came out a great fan.'

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New 10 DVD Hitchcock set coming to the UK (Region 2) in February, 2008

The set will include Hitchcock's first film as director, The Pleasure Garden (1925), from the Rohauer Collection.  All of the discs will have 'extras' (including film analyses by Charles Barr).  Here is the list of films:

Disc One: The Pleasure Garden
Disc Two: The Lodger (A Story of the London Fog)
Disc Three: Downhill
Disc Four: The Man Who Knew Too Much
Disc Five: The 39 Steps
Disc Six: Secret Agent
Disc Seven: Sabotage
Disc Eight: Young and Innocent
Disc Nine: The Lady Vanishes
Disc Ten: Jamaica Inn

[We thank Ryan Hewitt of Sony DADC UK Ltd, and Dave Pattern of the hitchcockwiki.com website, for information in the above item.]

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Art director Robert Boyle to receive Oscar

Production designer Robert Boyle, 98, who first worked for Hitchcock on Saboteur (1942) and who was nominated four times for Oscars in the art direction category, including for Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959), will receive an honorary Oascar during the Academy Awards ceremony on February 24, it has been announced.

Born in Los Angeles in 1909, Boyle trained as an architect.  When the Depression cost him his job, he found work in films as an extra.  In 1933, he was hired as a draftsman in the Paramount Studios art department.  He went on to work on various films as a sketch artist, draftsman, and assistant art director before becoming an art director at Universal in the early '40s.

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Martin Scorsese's new Spanish TV commercial a mock Hitchcock film

Okay, drop everything.  Every year, the Freixenet company in Spain puts out an expensive commercial for the Christmas season. This year, it's for their Reserva wine. That's not important. What is important is that they got Martin Scorsese to make the commercial this year, a nine-minute film that is a tribute to Hitchcock's '50s masterworks. It begins with film preservationist Marty, in Last Waltz style, claiming that he has found three pages from a never-made Hitchcock script called 'The Key To Reserva'. Then it shows Scorsese making the film, and it's a joy. It's full of Hitchcockian color schemes and camera angles, all shot in a concert hall and scored to Bernard Herrmann. It makes visual references to The Man Who Knew Too MuchRear WindowNorth by Northwest and several other Hitchcock masterpieces. Lensed by Harris Savides. Edited by Thelma Schoonmaker. Starring Simon Baker in a Cary Grant suit. Trust us: drop everything you're doing and watch Marty's film here:  http://www.scorsesefilmfreixenet.com/video_eng.htm

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Another remake: The Lodger

Hitchcock was the first to make a film version of Mrs Belloc Lowndes's 1913 novel (expanded from her own short story) about a Jack-the-Ripper killer terrorising London.  The full title of Hitchcock's 1926 film was The Lodger, A Story of the London Fog.  Now writer/director David Ondaatje will attempt his version of the novel - with the setting reportedly moved to Los Angeles.  It will focus on the relationship between a paranoid landlady and her tenant. A second plot thread will involve some personal and professional problems of detective Chandler Manners, hot on the killer's trail.

• Other Hitchcock-related projects are slated or are awaiting release.  The thriller Number 13 takes its name, and setting, from the 1920s film that Hitchcock worked on but which was never finished.  It shows the youthful director (played by Dan Fogler) somehow caught in a love triangle involving two crew members. When the lead actor turns up dead, the film's editor suspects Hitchcock, and tries to uncover the truth.  Chase Palmer will direct the film, starting in January.

• A new version of The Birds is slated, to be directed by Martin Campbell (Casino Royale).  Australian actress Naomi Watts has been announced to play the lead role of Melanie Daniels.  However, according to 'The Guardian' (20 October 2007), the film has already run into opposition.  Co-star of Hitchcock's original film, Tippi Hedren, is quoted as saying, 'Must you be so insecure that you have to take a film that's a classic, and I think a success, and try to do it over?'

 British actor Bill Nighy has reportedly signed to star in Australian director Stephan Elliott's Easy Virtue, an adaptation of Noel Coward's play to be produced by Ealing Studios for 2009 release.  The play casts a critical eye at hypocrisy and upper-class English life in the 1920s.  The previous film version of the play was Hitchcock's, made in 1927 and starring Isabel Jeans and Robin Irvine.

• Another Psycho-related project (see also below) is said to be called Psycho/Analysis from a script by the late Joseph Stefano (who, of course, wrote the original Hitchcock-directed film from Robert Bloch's novel). 

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Coming: Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho: The Movie

'[I]t could never be said that director Ryan Murphy (Running With Scissors) is one to let grass grow under his feet.'  Thus wrote 'Hollywood Elsewhere' columnist Jeffrey Wells by way of 'leaking' some exciting news for Hitchcock buffs: that Murphy is set to direct 'a drama about the making of Hitchcock's Psycho, and particularly the hurdles and roadblocks that the great British director [to be played by Anthony Hopkins] went through in order to bring it ... to fruition'.  Wells also reveals that British actress Helen Mirren (The Queen) may play Hitchcock's wife and collaborator, Alma.

We can add some details.  The film will be based on Stephen Rebello's book 'Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho' (1990.  (Rebello is an Exutive Producer on the project.)  A recent draft of the film's screenplay is said to have a tone closer to The Queen or Gods and Monsters than to RKO 281: The Battle Over Citizen Kane (as named in the 'Hollywood Elsewhere' item).  Apparently, too, the true focus of the film will be on Alfred and Alma and the impact of their intricate personal lives on the creation of the 1960 film.

                                                                           Coming: ALFRED HITCHCOCK AND THE MAKING OF PSYCHO

 

Major Hitchcock exhibition in Illinois emphasises his filmmaking methods

The exhibition in Evanston, Illinois, has now opened.  We hear that visitors so far have included Hitchcock actresses Tippi Hedren and Veronica Cartwright and Hitchcock biographer John Russell Taylor.

Our thanks to Burke Pattern of Northwestern University, Evanston, for these details about the exhibition ...

“Casting a Shadow: Creating the Alfred Hitchcock Film,” from Sept. 28 to Dec. 9, features approximately 150 sketches, designs, storyboards, script pages, and other film production documents from such movies as Shadow of a Doubt (1943), North by Northwest (1959), and The Birds (1963), drawn from the archives of the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the British Film Institute. The exhibition, which will also include film clips and recordings of audio conversations between Hitchcock and his collaborators, will be accompanied by a screening of more than 30 films directed by Hitchcock, an international symposium, gallery talks, and an illustrated catalogue published by Northwestern University Press and the Block Museum of Art.
 
The exhibition will travel to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Gallery in Beverly Hills, California, in 2008.
 
A companion catalogue ('Casting a Shadow: Creating the Alfred Hitchcock Film,' $32.95) features an introduction by Block Museum film curator Will Schmenner and essays by Scott Curtis, associate professor of radio/television/film at Northwestern University; Tom Gunning, Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor, department of art history, University of Chicago; Jan Olsson, professor of cinema studies, Stockholm University, Sweden; and author Bill Krohn. The 160 page-book includes 63 plates and 33 illustrations.
 
To complement the exhibition, the Block is organizing the symposium “Hitchcock’s Myth and Method” at 9:30 am on Friday, November 2. Participants include Curtis; Gunning; Olsson; Krohn; Tania Modleski, Florence R. Scott Professor of English, University of Southern California; and Sarah Street, professor of film, University of Bristol, England. This day-long symposium is free and open to the public.
 
In addition, Block Cinema will screen many of Hitchcock’s films during the fall quarter; some of them will be introduced by noted film scholars. The Block Museum will also offer a series of gallery talks focusing on specific aspects of the “Casting a Shadow” exhibition. Details on the film screenings and gallery talks are forthcoming. Free guided tours of the “Casting a Shadow” exhibition will be held at 2 pm every Saturday and Sunday from September 29 to December 9.
 
The Block Museum is located at 40 Arts Circle Drive on Northwestern’s Evanston campus. Admission to the Block’s exhibitions is free. General admission to Block Cinema screenings is $6 or $ 4 for Block Museum members and students with ID. For more information, call (847) 491-4000 or click here: http://www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/exhibitions/future/hitchcock.html.

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Deaths: Oscar-winner Jane Wyman at age 93, and actor Hansjörg Felmy at age 76

Jane Wyman, who starred as trainee actress Eve Gill in Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950), has died.  The first wife of former US President Ronald Reagan was 93.

She won an Academy Award for her role as a deaf-mute in Johnny Belinda (Jean Negulesco,1948).

Meanwhile, the actor who played the menacing Heinrich Gerhard, head of State Security, in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain (1966), has died in Lower Bavaria after a decade-long battle with osteoporosis.
  
Felmy was one of the best-known and most important actors in Germany from the 1950s onward, including television. One of his most significant stage successes was his role in Kurt Hoffmann's satire 'Wir Wunderkinder'/'We Children of the Economic Miracle' of 1958.

[Our thanks to DF for this item.]

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Articles and reviews wanted by new journal

Dr Mark Bould (University of the West of England) has sent us the following ...

Science Fiction Film and Television is a biannual, peer-reviewed journal published by Liverpool University Press. Edited by Mark Bould (UWE) and Sherryl Vint (Brock University), with an international board of advisory editors, it encourages dialogue among the scholarly and intellectual communities of film studies, sf studies and television studies.

We invite submissions on all areas of sf film and television, and which situate texts, practices and institutions within broader national, historical, cultural, theoretical and critical contexts.

We publish articles (6000-8000 words), book and DVD reviews (1000-2000 words) and review essays (up to 5000 words). Suggestions for papers include but are not limited to the following areas:
•    silent sf
•    European sf (e.g., French New Wave, Turkish pop cinema)
•    East Asian sf (e.g., kaiju eiga, anime)
•    Hollywood sf blockbusters
•    animation and greenscreen
•    adaptations
•    low-budget and independent sf
•    children’s sf
•    costume, design and music
•    spectacle and special effects
•    the ‘soap opera-isation’ of television sf
•    sf and avant-garde practice
•    the relationships between globalisation, transnationalisation, media convergence and sf
•    the science-fictionality of media technologies and forms themselves
•    cross-media and transnational franchises
•    audience, fans and consumption

Articles should be 6000-8000 words (MLA format) and include a 100-word abstract. Electronic submission in MS Word is preferred. The deadline for submissions for the inaugural issue (March 2008) is September 1, 2007. Send submissions to both editors at mark.bould@gmail.com and sherryl.vint@gmail.com. If you are interested in reviewing a book or DVD, or have materials you would like reviewed, please contact Sherryl Vint.

Advisory Editorial Board: Jonathan Bignell (University of Reading), Catherine Constable (University of Warwick), Susan A. George (University of California, Berkeley), Elyce Rae Helford (Middle Tennessee State University), Matt Hills (Cardiff University), Brooks Landon (University of Iowa), Rob Latham (University of Iowa), Sharalyn Orbaugh (University of British Columbia), David Seed (University of Liverpool), Steve Shaviro (Wayne State University), Vivian Sobchack (University of California, Los Angeles) and JP Telotte (Georgia Institute of Technology)

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Farewell Richard Franklin (Psycho II)

Our esteemed director-friend, Richard Franklin, has died of cancer in Melbourne, Australia, a few days short of his 59th birthday.  Among his early films were Patrick (1978), starring Sir Robert Helpmann, and Roadgames (1980), starring Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis - the making of which led in turn to Richard's work in Hollywood for Universal Studios: Psycho II (1983), starring Tony Perkins and Vera Miles, and Cloak and Dagger (1984), starring Dabney Coleman and young Henry Thomas plus John McIntire (the sheriff in Psycho) and wife Jeanette Nolan (who had voiced Mrs Bates in Psycho) playing the villains.  (The film was a re-working and opening-out of the 1949 movie The Window.)  Back in Australia, Richard made such admirable films as Hotel Sorrento (1995), from Hannie Rayson's stage success, and Brilliant Lies (1996), from the play by David Williamson.  No-one admired the work of Hollywood masters Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford more than Richard.  Accordingly, we have lost the one person with whom we were best able to converse about Hitch's filmmaking, and whose many insights on the films were always keen and true.  There is a superb profile of Richard written in 2005 by young Canadian critic Aaron Graham for the 'Senses of Cinema' Great Directors pages: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/05/franklin.html                  

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How tall was Alfred Hitchcock?

We've had this controversy before.  In one of the Second Season episodes of 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' ("Number Twenty-Two"), in which Hitch appears in a police lineup (!), his height is given as 5 feet, 6 inches.  But on his British passport recently auctioned by Juliens of Hollywood (see image below), which is stamped 9 February 1954, his height is entered as 5 feet, 8 inches.  (Mind you, the same passport appears to indicate that Hitch was single, mentioning neither wife nor daughter!  But perhaps that's simply because the distaff side of the Hitchcock family had long ago become American citizens.)

                                            British passport of Alfred Hitchcock   

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A couple of DVDs

Recent DVD releases of The 39 Steps (1935) and To Catch a Thief (1955) have been enthusiastically praised by our readers.

The particular DVD we mean of The 39 Steps is the one contained in the package known as 'The Rank Collection' (which has actually been out for a couple of years).  Correspondent DF in Germany tells us: 'The whole thing appears to be Carlton Video, and I already have The 39 Steps on a DVD from Carlton.  But the Rank Collection version is rather better.  The transfer is beautifully done; the sound has been improved - very judiciously too.  The result is certainly the best 39 Steps that I have had the pleasure of seeing.'  For more information about 'The Rank Collection', click here: http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=57543 

As for Paramount's new release of To Catch a Thief - not to be confused with the one of about five years ago - some reports suggest that it's a considerable improvement on the earlier one.  'The New York Times' review (8 May 2007) quotes Paramount themselves on how this version 'has been taken from a restored VistaVision negative, and [how the result] shows in far crisper detail, much deeper colors, and a new sense of depth'.  The new release, we gather, has a commentary track by Peter Bogdanovich and Laurent Bouzereau that wasn't on the earlier disk.  And our director friend Richard Franklin (Psycho II) emailed us to praise the look of the new version: 'it's FABULOUS!'  For a full review, click here: http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=27798 

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Five early Hitchcocks, fully remastered, coming on DVD

Canadian company Lionsgate Home Entertainment, part of the Lions Gate Entertainment Corporation, will release the 'Alfred Hitchcock: 3-Disc
Collector's Edition' on February 6th, 2007. The set will feature five films: The Manxman, Rich And Strange, The Skin Game, Murder!, and The Ring.  All of the films are said to be fully remastered, and new soundtracks have been recorded for the silent films.

• Caveat.  We have been told by P McF that the edition of Murder! has some drawbacks.  Though in general the restored soundtrack and visuals are superb, 'sound effects' are now sometimes 'severely noticeable'.  And dissolves look scruffy compared to the cleaned-up images on either side of them. Also, reportedly, 'of the last three scenes, the first two are missing!  They are each short, [consisting of] just one shot: Diana leaving the prison gates, and then Diana and Sir John in the car together [as he tells her] "you must save those tears - for my new play".'  However, this last matter is a known issue, and is simply a case of the original UK theatrical release print having been used for the Lionsgate DVD: the two 'missing' shots were ones included only in the original US release of the film.  (For more about the US ending, here's a link to Dave Pattern's Hitchcock wiki-site: http://www.daveyp.com/hitchcock/wiki/Murder_ending.)

• Dave Pattern tells us that sections of the audio track for Rich and Strange appear to have had Foley effects added (notably footsteps).

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New selection of Hitchcock-directed TV programs on DVD can be played without the French subtitles

Congratulations to the people responsible for the Region 2 release (PAL format) of a boxed collection of Alfred Hitchcock's work for television.  The box contains all of the episodes directed by Hitchcock of 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' plus three other items that he directed for television: "Incident at a Corner", the celebrated episode of 'Ford Startime' which Hitchcock made in colour and which stars Vera Miles; "Four o'Clock", starring E.G. Marshall, which Hitchcock directed for the show called 'Suspicion', from a story by Cornell Woolrich; and "I Saw the Whole Thing", starring John Forsythe, which was the only Hitch-directed episode of 'Alfred Hitchcock Hour'.  Note: although the items have French subtitles, these can be turned off if not required.  Price of the 5-disc set is reportedly now 65.00 € (previously 49.95 €).  For more information, click the following: 
Hitchcock selection (Region 2)
and 
How to order (in English)

• Further good news from Region 2, specifically France.  For the first time, the full 80-minutes, English-language version of Hitchcock's Waltzes From Vienna (1933), starring Jessie Matthews, Esmond Knight, and Fay Compton, is to be released on DVD, by Universal.  But note: the release-date has been put back (it was originally going to be 20 June, 2006 - it is now March, 2007).  Also, apparently in this case the French subtitles can't be turned off.  On the same disk: Downhill.  For more information, click here: http://www.dvdfr.com/dvd/dvd.php?id=24556

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A revelation: Maurice Elvey's The Water Gipsies (1932), part-scripted by Alma Reville, screened in London

Our London correspondent, Michael Walker ('Hitchcock's Motifs'), has sent us the following.  'The NFT has just done a short season of quota quickies. The Water Gipsies (Maurice Elvey, 1932) was a revelation. Taken from a novel by A.P.Herbert, it allowed its heroine (played by Ann Todd) and her sister quite astonishing sexual freedom without being punished.  I mention it for two Hitch-related reasons. First, Alma Reville [Mrs Alfred Hitchcock] was one of the scriptwriters (along with Miles Malleson, Basil Dean and John Paddy Carstairs).  I sensed Alma's hand in the liveliness of the two sisters.  Second, Ann Todd projects a palpable sexual desire, which I don't think is a commonly recognised feature of her performances. But I do think it's also there in The Paradine Case (1947), where it contributes to a real sense of a sexual marriage - perhaps the strongest example in Hitchcock.'

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Rare early Hitchcock photo

In the rare 1922 photo below, that's Alfred Hitchcock (with moustache?) squatting beside the camera and gesturing across the road at actress Clare Greet.  The occasion was the filming of Number Thirteen (aka Mrs Peabody) on location outside the public house, "The Angel", in Rotherhithe, London.  The film was never finished.  According to a caption, the director, Hitchcock, had two assistant directors, A.W. Barnes and  Norman Arnold.  Cameraman was Joe Rosenthal.

The photo is reproduced from 'The Cinema Studio', December 7, 1949.  We thank Mr Ray Ridley for sending us the photo.

                                                       Rare production still from the unfinished Hitchcock film NUMBER THIRTEEN
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Deaths

• We're saddened to learn of the death of Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano, on August 25, of a heart attack.  He was 84.  Besides Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), Stefano wrote the screenplay of Gus Van Sant's Psycho remake (1998) and a TV 'prequel' called Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990), as well as such films as Michael Anderson's The Naked Edge (1961), starring Gary Cooper.  In 1963 Stefano co-produced TV's 'The Outer Limits', the successful s-f series for which he wrote several of its 49 episodes.  Our first tribute is from Stephen Rebello, author of 'Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho' (1990): 'Joseph Stefano spoke very much like a musician, with a rich voice and a delivery dotted with jazzy riffs and deep, sonorous chords, often punctuated by the pizzicato of explosive laughter.  I can't imagine Hitchcock not being delighted, inspired, and perhaps a bit perplexed by such a free spirit.  I wish they had stayed together for Marnie not only because Stefano was so good at story structure but because he showed great empathy for tragic, melancholic characters who tough things out with unexpected jabs of dark, anarchic humor.'  Our second tribute is from Dr Phil Skerry, author of 'The Shower Scene in Hitchcock's Psycho' (2005): 'Two years ago, when Janet Leigh died, I wrote to Joe expresssing my sorrow, and he replied, "I still haven't got it into my head and (more so) my heart that I will not be seeing her dear smile again. I feel a terrible loss, and I will never forget her." Joe's words perfectly convey my feelings about this wonderful, generous, talented man.'  

• Actress Kasey Rogers, aka Laura Elliot, died on July 6.  She was 79.  As Laura Elliot, she played the trampish wife Miriam in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951).  On TV, Kasey Rogers was Louise Tate in the hit series 'Bewitched'.  Our tribute is from Richard Valley, editor of 'Scarlet Street' magazine: 'Kasey was a smart, amusing, good-natured woman and we were very, very, very fond of her.  Anyone who has ever met her or enjoyed her fine work in Strangers on a Train or on 'Peyton Place' or 'Bewitched' must feel the same.'

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DVD news: 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents', Season Two, on the way

A year after they released the first season of the entertaining 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents', Universal Studios Home Entertainment have announced that the second season will be released on October 17 (Region 1) ...

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Henry Bumstead (1915-2006)

Henry Bumstead, the veteran Hollywood production designer who worked for Hitchcock on The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1958), Topaz (1969), and Family Plot (1976), has died at the age of 91 in Pasadena, California.

In a nearly 70-year career that began when he was a draftsman in the art department at RKO in the late 1930s, Bumstead's first picture as an art director was the 1948 Paramount drama Saigon, starring Alan Ladd.

Bumstead twice won Academy Awards: for his work on To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962) and The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973).  He also received Oscar nominations for Vertigo and Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992).  

In recent times, Bumstead's longtime association with actor-director Eastwood saw him still on the job into his 90s.  It was while working on Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby (2004) that Bumstead learned that he had prostate cancer.

'Bummy was one of a kind,' Eastwood remembers.  'We will all miss him terribly.'

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Anna Massey reads from her memoirs

Actress Anna Massey (Peeping Tom, Hitchcock's Frenzy, etc.) has just finished reading extracts on BBC Radio4 from her recently-published memoirs, 'Telling Some Tales'.  In one program she talked about Frenzy.

Danny Nissim in London (whom we thank) notes that the Frenzy segment had some interesting material covering Massey's audition: Hitch sat behind a huge desk and spent the first 45 minutes talking about making batter pudding!  At one point, he asked how tall Massey was, explaining that she would have to fit into a potato sack.  But Massey disputed the myth that Hitch treated actors as cattle.  He was patient and helpful, often using a comic irony which put everyone at their ease.

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On Alfred Hitchcock and his screenwriters

We're told that a lengthy article on Hitchcock and his relationships with his writers features in the May 2006 issue of 'Written By', the Magazine of the Writers Guild - west.  The piece is said to be the first that comprehensively treats this topic.  The May issue contains new interviews with Joseph Stefano, Patricia Hitchcock, Norman Lloyd, and Jay Presson Allen who passed away on May 1.
 
The issue is available on news stands or by contacting the magazine at <writtenby@wga.org>.
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Passing of Jay Presson Allen

Screenwriter, novelist, playwright and producer, Jay Presson Allen, has died at the age of 84 from a stroke, at her home in Manhattan.

Her extensive film credits include Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964), Cabaret (1972), Just Tell Me What You Want (1980, from Allen's novel), Prince of the City (1981), and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969).  It was in fact Allen's fine stage adaptation of Muriel Spark's novel 'The Prime of Mis Jean Brodie' which drew her to Hitchcock's attention: he read an advance copy of it and hired her for Marnie.  Afterwards, he commissioned her to adapt J.M. Barrie's play 'Mary Rose' but his cherished project never actually made it to the screen.     

Ms Allen once told an interviewer, 'I never wanted to direct. I always thought that was a brutal job, one that I never had an interest in. A lot of it’s baby-sitting, and I could never stand for that. Hitchcock wanted to make me into a director. But I had a husband [film producer Lewis Allen], a child and a life and I didn’t want to give those things up.'

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Murder! plus Mary on one DVD

Hitchcock's Murder! (1930) and its German version, Mary - which Hitchcock shot immediately afterwards - have now been released on one DVD by Arthaus. Our correspondent, DF, in Germany reports: 'The quality is quite good except for one or two places where the original film seems to have been irreparably damaged - only very short spots, and of little consequence - and among the extras is an excerpt from Hitchcock's interview with Truffaut in August 1962.'  (Regrettably, for our English-speaking readers, we learn that the Arthaus release of Mary does not have English subtitles.)  

• Nor, we now hear, will an imminent French DVD release of Mary have English subtitles.  It will appear on a disc with Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939).  Also forthcoming soon from France (probably in June) are these Hitchcock discs: Under Capricorn (1949) plus an interview with Claude Chabrol; Juno and the Paycock (1930) plus The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934).  Coming later from France are Waltzes from Vienna (1933), as previously announced here; The Pleasure Garden (1925); Downhill (1927).

(Thanks to AK for information about the French DVDs.) 

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Actress Alida Valli dies

Italian actress Alida Valli, star of Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947), Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), and Luchino Visconti's Senso (1954), has died in Rome at the age of 84.

Born Alida Maria Laura von Altenburger in 1921 in Pola (now Pula in Croatia), she made her cinema debut at the age of 15 and appeared in over 100 films.  One of those films was Mario Soldati's exquisite Piccolo mondo antico/Little old-fashioned world (1941), set in the Italian lakes in the 1850s, and described by critic David Shipman as 'a "literary" film but otherwise as near as dammit perfect'.  After the War she was discovered by US producer David Selznick, who put her under contract, thinking he had found a new Ingrid Bergman.  In fact, her English-speaking career did not last long (supposedly due to her thick accent), but she continued to act in Italian and French films, as well as theatre.

She was awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1997 for her contribution to Italian cinema.

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The play 'Hitchcock Blonde' finally reaches the US!

A good two or three years ago we reported on the play by noted playwright Terry Johnson, 'Hitchcock Blonde', then running in London.  (See "Another Hitchcock-related stage play" lower down this page.)  Last year, the Editor of 'The MacGuffin' watched the Australian production of the play, and found it excellent!  So we're happy to announce here that South Coast Repertory, located in Costa Mesa, California (about an hour's drive south of Los Angeles), will shortly premiere the play in America, with Terry Johnson directing.  The supposed excerpts from a 'lost' Hitchcock film that figure in the play have apparently been re-done (using 'state-of-the-art videography') by William Dudley who also did the video for the original British production.  Performances will begin on February 3, with official opening on February 10, and closing March 12.  For more information, click here: 
http://www.scr.org/season/05-06season/blonde.html

• Update.  A review of the new production of 'Hitchcock Blonde' appeared in the February 14th issue of the  'Los Angeles Times'.  Headed "Hitch just a subplot in overstuffed 'Blonde'", the review, by Sean Mitchell, starts by calling the play 'A brainy bit of titillation, salted with some deep thoughts on Hollywood's dark powers and the unseemly genius of the famously morbid British director'. However, though Mitchell praises some of the performances, notably Dakin Matthews's as Hitchcock, he finds that '[playwright Terry] Johnson hasn't located a narrative structure that adequately serves his gifts' ...


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They've made a film of Hitchcock's short story "Gas"!

Hitchcock was still a teenager when he wrote several short stories for the staff magazine of the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company where he was employed.  The best-known of these stories, "Gas", showing the possible influence of Edgar Allan Poe or Wilkie Collins, appeared in the June 1919 issue.  Now there's a 12-minute film of the story.  It was shot in London on 35mm and was directed by Sylvie Bolioli for Polaris Productions.

• Update.  The film had its world premiere in Edinburgh in January.  More recently, it was marketed at the Cannes Film Festival.  An unorthodox cast includes Johanna Mohs as the story's terrified woman, Tony Hadley as the dentist, and veteran actress Valerie Leon (several Carry On films, the original The Italian Job, etc.).  Leon plays two roles in Gas - a prostitute in the anaesthesia-induced nightmare and, back in the real world, the dentist's classy receptionist.

For more information, click here: 
http://www.gasthemovie.com/index.html


Finely scented:  Laurent Fiévet's latest Hitchcock video installation opening in Paris

The third of artist Laurent Fiévet's presentations inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's work, 'Essences de l'image: portraits olfactifs' ('Essences of the image: olfactive portraits'), is a follow-up to presentations held in Finland during 2003-04.  The artist - who has a PhD in film studies - seeks to create a relation between selected shots from Hitchcock's films and some famous paintings which could have inspired them.  Fi
évet's latest presentation will run from February 14th to March 14th at the Galerie La Ferronnerie.  For more information, click here: http://www.associationdesgaleries.org/laferronnerie/

                                                                            Portrait, after A.Hitchcock and W. Turner

Laurent Fiévet: 'Portrait ...', after North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock) and 'Shipwreck' (William Turner)


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Cinematographer Leonard J. South dies at 92

The camera operator on nearly a dozen Alfred Hitchcock classics, including North by Northwest (1959) and The Birds (1963), and the director of photography on Hitchcock's last film Family Plot (1976), has died in California (6 January, 2006).

South began his three-decade association with Hitchcock as cinematographer Robert Burks's camera assistant on the 1951 film Strangers on a Train.  He was soon elevated to camera operator, becoming part of what Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto called 'the ongoing Hitchcock crew who came to know exactly what the director wanted and how to give it to him.'

In a 1979 interview for the 'Daily Pilot' newspaper, South recalled that one morning on the Family Plot set, actor Bruce Dern, 'a very outgoing, nervy guy,' walked up to Hitchcock and said, 'I understand you call all actors cattle. Does that mean me, Hitch?'

'I'd say, Bruce, you are the golden calf,' Hitchcock deadpanned.

That, South recalled, 'came right out of nowhere. Bruce laughed for half an hour.'

South, a former member of the board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, also was a longtime board member of the American Society of Cinematographers, for which he served as president in 1989-90.

(Adapted from an article in the 'Los Angeles Times'.  Our thanks to RC for supplying it.)



Universal's 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents', Season One, discs have flaws ...

Correspondence on our 'Hitchcock Enthusiasts' Group indicates several production flaws in the dual-sided 3-disc DVD set containing the 39 episodes of the First Season (1955-56) of 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' which was released last month in the USA (Region 1).  Problems include discs sticking or not playing some sections, and images breaking up.  One correspondent, after talking to a DVD collector friend, reports similar problems occuring on other dual-sided disc sets of Universal's television shows.

Our advice?  Heed what lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) says in The Birds: 'caveat emptor', 'let the buyer beware'.
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Mike Leigh slights Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972)

At a recent London Film Festival event whose theme was the best and worst of films about London, panellist Mike Leigh (Naked, Topsy Turvy, Vera Drake) suddenly exploded when questioned about Hitchcock's 33-year-old Frenzy, set in and around Covent Garden.  According to Leigh: 'Frenzy is a horrible film. It's sloppy. It's superficial. It says nothing about London life, and it shouldn't be in the Time Out list [of best London films]. I'd be very happy if none of my films ever stoops to the level of Frenzy.'

Hmm.  Come back in another 33 years, Mike, and let's see how your own films have fared against Hitchcock's in the estimation of audiences.  (Meanwhile, to read more about Mike Leigh's outburst - by the person who asked the question about Frenzy - click here:
http://globalnix.blogspot.com.  We thank Nick Poteri for contacting us and for permission to cite his excellent blog.)


More DVD news: 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents', Season One, coming (Region 1)
On October 4, 2005, Universal Studios Home Entertainment will release on DVD the entire first season of 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' (39 episodes, 4 of them directed by Hitchcock himself) plus 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents: A Look Back', a featurette on the show.  For more information, click here:
http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/newsitem.cfm?NewsID=3735


Finally, Hitchcock's Lifeboat on DVD

On October 18, 2005, Fox Home Entertainment will release a 'Special Edition' of Lifeboat (1944).  The disc will include a 'making of' featurette, the theatrical trailer, and a commentary track by Professor Drew Casper of USC.

• Update, February 2006.  The above release-date was for Region 1.  We're told that the DVD is now available in Region 2 with extra material, including a two-part interview with Hitchcock by Fletcher Markle of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.  The Region 2 release is on two discs.   


The shower scene from Psycho: new book

Is this a first?  In October, 2005, Edward Mellen Press will publish a book-length study of a single scene from a movie - admittedly, both the movie and the scene are particularly famous.  'The Shower Scene in Hitchcock's Psycho: Creating Cinematic Suspense and Terror' is authored by Dr Phil Skerry.  As well as detailed analysis, Dr Skerry includes lengthy interviews with star Janet Leigh, scriptwriter Joseph Stefano, assistant director Hilton Green, sound designer Danny Greene, assistant editor Terry Williams, and with the editor of the Gus Van Sant remake of Psycho, Amy Duddleston. The book culminates with first-person accounts of the initial viewing of Psycho and its shower scene - including reminiscences by several readers of this website. For more information, click here:
http://www.mellenpress.com/

• Robert Meyers worked for famous designer and storyboard artist Saul Bass in the 1980s.  He currently owns Bass's sketches - or virtual storyboard - for the Psycho shower scene.  Professor Meyers, formerly of Rochester Institute of Technology, will soon be opening a communication design firm in Pittsburgh.  He tells us he would be interested to receive offers for the Bass sketches.  He may be contacted here: <robertmeyersdesign@hotmail.com>.
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Death of Barbara Bel Geddes

She was superb as the Scottie-fixated Midge in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958).  Stage and film actress Barbara Bel Geddes has died, aged 82 (8 August, 2005).  Besides her work for Hitchcock - which included four episodes of 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' - film buffs particularly remember her for George Stevens's I Remember Mama (1946), Max Ophüls's Caught (1948), and Henry Hathaway's Fourteen Hours (1951).     
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UK stage production of The 39 Steps

Our London correspondent, Michael Walker, reports: 'In last Saturday's "Guardian" (25 June, 2005) there was a review of a theatrical production of The 39 Steps at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds. The review by Michael Billington wasn't that enthusiastic, but what was apparent was that, once again, the adaptor (Patrick Barlow from a concept by Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon) had followed the Hitchcock movie, not the novel: Forth Bridge, handcuffs, peeling off stockings and all. The play is directed by Fiona Buffini; Robert Whitelock and Lisa Jackson (a blonde) are the two stars. It runs until 16 July. I feel encouraged that Hitch has more purchase on the popular culture in general than Buchan.'
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Universal/Paramount (etc.) Hitchcocks in DVD set (Region 1)

Essentially this is a re-issue, though the 14 films are said to be 'digitally remastered'.  (And note the bonus disc.)  Release-date is announced as 4 October, 2005.  The set is available on pre-order at a discount.  For example (and to see details), click here:
http://homevideo.universalstudios.com/details.php?childId=35678


French and German DVDs of early Hitchcock


Courtesy of Dave Pattern's Hitchcock DVD website comes this information on exciting new and forthcoming releases ...

First, there's a French DVD collection of early Hitchcock films, including the previously-unreleased-on-DVD Champagne (A l'Américaine).  Altogether there are 10 titles and a couple of documentaries.  These are split across 3 volumes:

    Volume 1 (Les Premières Oeuvres 1927/1929)
    http://www.daveyp.com/hitchcock/dvds/boxsets/9002/

        The Ring/Le Masque de Cuir (1927)
        Champagne/A l'Américaine (1928)
        The Farmer's Wife/Laquelle des Trois (1928)
        The Manxman (1929)

    Volume 2 (Les Premières Oeuvres 1929/1931)
    http://www.daveyp.com/hitchcock/dvds/boxsets/9003/

        Blackmail/Chantage (1929)
        Murder!/Meurtre (1930)
        The Skin Game (1931)
        52 minute documentary about Hitch's early films

    Volume 3 (Les Premières Oeuvres 1932/1940)
    http://www.daveyp.com/hitchcock/dvds/boxsets/9004/

        Rich and Strange/A l'Est de Shanghaï (1932)
        Number Seventeen/Numéro 17 (1932)
        Foreign Correspondent/Correspondant 17 (1940)
        26 minute documentary about Foreign Correspondent

Dave Pattern writes: 'StudioCanal [the company releasing these discs] was involved in the excellent German Blackmail DVD. ... The new transfers are excellent - especially the 1920s films.  Champagne looks fantastic and it's hard to believe from the transfer that the film is nearly 80 years old!  My only negative comments are that the DVDs have forced French subtitles when you select the English language audio.  Some DVD players
may be able to override this, but neither of my standalone players were able to do so.  Also, the two documentaries have French only audio with no subtitles.' 

Then there's a French DVD collection coming soon from TF1 Vidéo which looks like it will contain the same excellent transfers used in the German 'Early Years' boxset (released by Concorde):

    'Hitchcock - Le Maître du Suspens'
    http://www.daveyp.com/hitchcock/dvds/boxsets/9046/

Finally, German company Kinowelt/ArtHaus are planning a couple of DVD releases:

    1) a DVD of Mary (the German version of Murder!) and possibly Murder! itself on the same disc
    2) a DVD of both Rich and Strange and Champagne

There's no release-date as yet for the Mary DVD, but the other DVD is scheduled for 19 August 2005.


Other Hitchcock remakes?

We have no comment on any of this.  In a recent on-set interview for the thriller The Skeleton Key, Kate Hudson (daughter of Goldie Hawn) confirmed that 'My production company is trying to develop a remake of Hitchcock's Vertigo'.  Also, we hear that, yet again, Warners have said that they're re-making Strangers on a Train.  And Universal have announced plans to re-make The Birds.  

[Thanks to AN, and others, for this information.]

Magazine-issue and book on Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry (1955) both coming

Vermont writer, artist, and film critic Stephen R. Bissette has begun a new magazine, 'Green Mountain Cinema', dedicated to New England movies and video, whose Spring 2005 issue will feature Hitchcock's VistaVision comedy The Trouble With Harry.  The first issue of the magazine has recently appeared.  For more information about it, click here: http://www.blackcoatpress.com/greenmountaincinema1.htm

Stephen is also working on an entire 'making of' type of book about Hitchcock's wonderful film.  He is visiting locations in Vermont, such as Craftsbury Common, where parts of the film were shot, and interviewing local residents.  He would be very thankful to receive any production stills or photocopies of newspaper clippings (especially those of the period).  Stephen may be contacted at <msbissette@yahoo.com>.

[Our thanks to Tony Williams and Nandor Bokor for information in this item.]

Hitchcock biography by McGilligan criticised

Reviews of Patrick McGilligan's 'Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light' (2003) have now appeared in 'Cineaste', the 'Hitchcock Annual', 'Film Quarterly' - and (at great length) on this website.  All have been luke-warm.

For example, Prof. Marshall Deutelbaum concludes his review in 'Film Quarterly' (Vol. 58, Issue 1) like this: 'By choosing to write a biography without attempting to discern any trace of his subject's life in his films, McGilligan has limited Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light to the facts of a life's work without insight into the life itself.' (p. 58).

To read this website's long 'Report' on McGilligan's book, click on the following URLs:

http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/mcgilligan1_c.html  
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/mcgilligan2_c.html  

'Miss Torso' dead at 68

Georgine Darcy was just 17 when Alfred Hitchcock chose her to play the dancer 'Miss Torso' who is seen living opposite Jeff's apartment, and entertaining a string of suitors in the evenings, in Rear Window (1954). 'I had absolutely no idea who Alfred Hitchcock was,' she said. 'I considered myself a dancer and photographer's model and not an actress. I think he was impressed with my portfolio as I paid the extra, and had photos taken of me in colour.' On meeting her, Hitchcock suggested she find an agent, but she ignored the advice - to her cost. She was paid $350.

Georgine Darcy died in Malibu, California, recently.

What is of interest to Hitchcockians is that Hitchcock kept in touch with her after Rear Window.  He told her: 'If you go to Europe and study with [actor and acting coach] Michael Chekhov, I could make a big star out of you.' But she again ignored his advice, and settled into an undistinguished career. Her most noticeable roles came as Gypsy, the secretary to Pat O'Brien on 'Harrigan and Son' on television in the early 1960s, and in such unmemorable films as Don't Knock the Twist (1962), Women and Bloody Terror (1969), and The Delta Factor (1970).

Georgine Darcy is survived by her second husband, the actor Byron Palmer, to whom she was married for 30 years. .

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Another To Catch a Thief coming

There's no word yet on who will direct or star in Paramount's remake of the Hitchcock comedy-adventure To Catch a Thief (1955), now set in Miami.  'Entertainment Weekly' (25 June, 2004) quotes screenwriter Todd Komarnicki: To Catch a Thief is one of Hitchcock's fluffier offerings. 'It was a delicacy on the Hitchcock menu, not one of his full-meal movies.'  A faster pace is promised this time: 'Thievery [must now compete] with alarm systems and bodyguards and everything protected.  We're going to see some really badass thieving this time around.'


Latest DVD news: Hitchcock releases from Warners and from MGM

Warners has announced a Region 1 release date - September 7 - for nine Hitchcock titles on DVD, each with its own 'making of' documentary and other extras.  As previously announced here, the titles include: Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941), Mr and Mrs Smith (1941), Stage Fright (1950), Strangers on a Train (1951), I Confess (1953), Dial M For Murder (1954), and The Wrong Man (1957).  In the case of Strangers on a Train, it will be released on two discs comprising a new Special Edition.  The ninth title will be the previously released North by Northwest (1959): Special Edition.  The discs will sell as a set for $99.92 (SRP).  The Strangers on a Train: Special Edition two-disc set will be available separately for $26.99.  The other discs will each be available separately for $19.97.

We can reveal that among the people participating in the 'making of' documentaries are members of the Hitchcock family, filmmakers Peter Bogdanovich and Richard Franklin, critic Bill Krohn, and various others.

We also hear of titles coming in November as part of MGM's Alfred Hitchcock promotion. These will include: The 39 Steps (1935), Sabotage (1936), Young and Innocent (1937), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Rebecca (1940), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), and The Paradine Case (1947). They'll be available in a box set and separately.

[Thanks to Kristopher Valentine and Richard Carnahan for forwarding information contained in this item, and to the Digital Bits website.].


More on Rodenbach's novella Bruges-la-Morte (1892) and the line to Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)

We'll put a special page concerning the above topic on this website soon, but meanwhile readers are reminded to visit our 'Selections' page to read the article called "The original of Vertigo".  The editor of 'The MacGuffin', Ken Mogg, says: 'It's clear to me that two Belgian (or Belgian/French) literary works, Georges Rodenbach's novella "Bruges-la-Morte" (1892) and Georges Simenon's novel "Lettre à mon juge" (1947) were both influences, probably directly, on the novel by French writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, "D'Entre les morts" (1954), that became Alfred Hitchcock's film masterpiece Vertigo (1958).  However, Boileau and Narcejac's novel was also almost certainly influenced by two French films.  Henri Verneuill's Le Fruit Défendu/ Forbidden Fruit (1952) was an adaptation of "Lettre à mon juge", and it starred Fernandel as the married doctor who takes a mistress Martine (Françoise Arnouil) who from the moment he sees her exerts a strange fascination over him, and whom he eventually strangles.  Also, Robert Siodmak's Le Grand Jeu/ Card of Fate/ Flesh and the Woman (1953) is a classic Foreign Legion story (originally filmed in 1934 by Jacques Feyder) starring Gina Lollobrigida as both a Parisian redhead and her brunette "double" who turns up in Algiers and haunts the hero.  I think it was Peter Cowie who first pointed to this latter film as a possible predecessor of Vertigo.

'Then there are all the literary and cinematic (and even operatic) descendants of Rodenbach's original novella that may have exerted a degree of influence on Vertigo.  Here I'm thinking of the silent films The Unfinished Portrait (1910), attributed to Léonce Perret, and Daydreams (1915), directed by Yevgeni Bauer (both of these works were direct adaptations of "Bruges-la-Mortes"); the novellas "Gradiva" (1903), by Wilhelm Jensen, and "Der Tod in Venedig"/ "Death in Venice" (1913), by Thomas Mann; and the opera "Die tote Stadt"/ "The Dead City" (1920), by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (again this was taken directly from "Bruges-la-Morte" or perhaps from its stage version, "Le Mirage", first performed in 1901).

'Finally, I wouldn't be surprised if Rodenbach influenced Belgian artists, most notably, perhaps, the Surrealist Paul Delvaux (1897-1994), who produced a series of paintings depicting nude and semi-nude women in dreamlike settings, often cityscapes at night.  (Other influences on Delvaux were his fellow Belgian Magritte and the Italian Chirico.)  I'm sure that Hitchcock knew his work.  For example, I detect his influence on the death scene of the Karen Dor character in Topaz (1969).'

For an earlier version of this News story, see below.  And for more information about the novellas 'Gradiva' and 'Der Tod in Venedig', see the article "The Fragments of the Mirror: Vertigo and its Sources" [parts (b) and (c)] elsewhere on this website..


From Rodenbach's novella Bruges-la-Morte (1892) to Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) - firming the line

Dominique Païni's essay "Léonce Perret, le dernier symboliste", included in the anthology 'Léonce Perret' (2003), which was published in conjunction with the 2002 Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy, refers to the short film Het Onvoltooide Portret/The Unfinished Portrait (1910), apparently directed by the Frenchman Léonce Perret (1880-1935).  In a French setting, the film reworks the story originally told by the Belgian Symbolist author Georges Rodenbach (1855-98) about a man whose first wife dies but who 're-appears' in the form of a double, and whom the man then obsessively woos, leading (in the novella) to a bizarre murder.  Rodenbach's story is set in the Belgian city of Bruges, 'a city of silence, ennui and ... desolation', and the story's original publication was accompanied by 35 half-tone reproductions of photographs of the city.  A stage version of the story, 'Le Mirage', was first produced in 1901.

In 'The MacGuffin' #29 (January 2004), Michael Walker described The Unfinished Portrait at some length, and its obvious influence, direct or indirect, on the novel 'D'Entre les Morts' (1954), by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, that eventually became Hitchcock's masterpiece, Vertigo.  Walker noted, though, that neither Rodenbach's novella nor Boileau and Narcejac's novel alludes to a portrait of the dead woman.

Now, after reading Walker's account, Prof. Tony Williams (whom we thank) has emailed us as follows:

'I recently viewed a film which is another "unlikely candidate" in anticipating Vertigo. This is Daydreams (1915), directed by the Russian filmmaker Yevgeni Bauer (1865-1917), and also based on "Bruges-la-Morte".  However, unlike The Unfinished Portrait, Daydreams is complete.  Bauer is one of those recently rediscovered pre-Revolutionary directors put into the shade post-1917. His work belongs to those excavated silent films often shown at the Podernone Festival and others. I'll give a brief synopsis.

'It opens with the main character distraught over the body of his recently deceased wife (significantly covered with flowers). As a last memory, he cuts off a plaid of her hair (fetish associations!) and continues to mourn his dearly departed to the concern of his maid (cf. Midge in Vertigo). One day, he passes a look-alike in the street and follows her to a theatre where he discovers her playing a revived corpse in a performance of Meyerbeer's "Robert le Diable". Already psychologically disturbed, he reacts like a male hysteric.  Parallels with Hitchcock's Scottie are not hard to see, as well as with Bernard Herrmann's operatic score.