Alfred Hitchcock: Classic or Dud?

A group of exceptional film-makers died at about the same moment: Howard Hawks, Chaplin, Nicholas Ray, George Cukor, William Wyler, Vincente Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, King Vidor. With regret, I have to concede that those careers are now known in the halls of cinephilia but hardly anywhere else.

including chaplin -- one of the most famous ppl of the 20th century -- with these guys is kinda crazy imo.

Yet if you say “Hitch” out loud on any bus, people start looking for a bomb, or a fat man with a poker face who is studiously ignoring the search.

i wonder if anyone has ever tried this experiment?

When Mackendrick was six, his father died of influenza as a result of an pandemic that swept the world just after World War I. His mother, in desperate need of work, decided to be a dress designer. In order to pursue that decision, it was necessary for Martha MacKendrick to hand her only son over to his grandfather, who took young MacKendrick back to Scotland when he was seven years old. Mackendrick never saw or heard from his mother again.

psycho's 'real' america was produced on US television means - so i wldn't be surprised if you found similar location-work and imagery in some of the Hitchcock-directed tv shows that preceded psycho

Thanks for the Mackendrick information--longer in the States than I would have guessed.

I tried the Hitch experiment this morning. No bomb-searching, but I did end up arguing about the existence of god with the person beside me.

xp

i wondered about the TV shows but didn't know how hands-on Hitch was with them tbh

Nick Pinkerton gives Frenzy a close, admiring look, and gives a short comparison to Shadow of a Doubt (I'd forgotten that one shares a writer with Meet Me in St Louis):

http://blog.sundancenow.com/weekly-columns/bombast-109-2

Newly translated -- Rivette on Under Capricorn:

Not the least of the script’s merits is its resolving of this complex network of emotions and plans into a story with a clear, linear continuity. Hitchcock’s direction—which is also very discreet—intentionally remains on the side of its subject, refusing to underline the important points and, instead, simply presenting them to us. The camera surrenders to the characters as they move around but usually refuses to penetrate and intervene in their interior lives. If the surface details of the story—including the macabre evidence—are underlined in one heavy, abrupt stroke, it is because Hitchcock does indeed love disposing of the whole spectacular side of a plot through excess and, by taking on the outrageousness of such details himself, frees the spectator from being preoccupied with them.

http://kinoslang.blogspot.com/2013/08/hitchcocks-under-capricorn-by-jacques.html

HItchcock's Holocaust documentary restored:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/alfred-hitchcocks-unseen-holocaust-documentary-to-be-screened-9044945.html

I Confess anyone? Screened last night, surprisingly low-key and offbeat. Hitchcock really wanted to reuse Monty Clift after this one*, but alas it was not to be.

*Both Clift and Anne Baxter were sorta imposed on him by the studio; Hitch wanted Grant, Stewart or Olivier for the male lead, and got as far as flying Anita Bjork over to the states to for the female lead before the studio discovered she'd had a child out of wedlock.

Eyes of HItchcock

http://vimeo.com/107270525

btw Norman Lloyd (aka the Guy Who Fell Off the Statue of Liberty) just turned 100!

http://variety.com/2014/film/features/norman-lloyd-at-100-hollywoods-living-memory-1201345747/

last days (I've not read the book this was expanded into)

Hitchcock has a pacemaker. Once a month he attaches a device to his chest, clamps metal bracelets on his wrists, and hooks the whole thing up to a telephone. An electrocardiogram is taken over the phone and then sent to his physician for examination. “Come on, Da-vid, let's play with my pacemaker.” He takes great pleasure in demonstrating the monitoring procedure. After everything is in order and the call has been placed, Hitch picks up the receiver and says “How do you do?” in his slow and deliberate voice. The technician on the other end is probably in a laboratory a thousand miles away. “Today,” he intones, “I have attached our little device to the electric typewriter. How is its heart?” He also says he intends to attach it to the dog. The little disks on his wrists resemble handcuffs. He seems quite taken with the idea of being taken.

He is fascinated by the Patty Hearst affair. He followed the trial compulsively. Hearst is to be released from prison and is planning to marry. “First she says she fell in love with her captors. Imagine! Now she wants to marry her bodyguard. Is it the gun, do you suppose, or the set of keys?” Hitch cannot get enough of it. Patty Hearst's parents are separated, and he broods about which parent the girl will go to before her marriage. He keeps mulling the question, over and over.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/13/alfred-hitchcock-s-fade-to-black-the-great-director-s-final-days.html

Rod Taylor RIP

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B64tG8jCQAAFLju.jpg

some links

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-rod-taylor-1930-2015

Anyone have recommenadations besides the 3-4 well-known films? I think he has a couple nice dialogue moments w/ Hedren in Birds, esp in that divisive hilltop conversation.

Darker Than Amber (1970) is very strong... not sure why its imdb rating is so average. Oddly, it's the only cinematic representation of John B. MacDonald's "Travis McGee" private eye character to date. William Smith is an incredible villain in it and their fight scene on a houseboat is semi-famous.

Taylor is also very good in Young Cassidy (1965), playing essentially the Irish playwright Sean O'Casey (renamed John Cassidy) in his early years.

yeah, didnt know that John Ford began that film and dropped out.

alas i just missed a 35mm rep screening of Amber here last month

the fight scene in the unexpurgated version of "darker than amber" is fucking insane

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0igiQA5jvI

it's not on a houseboat but a cruise ship... and outside the cruise ship.

some outstandingly ugly 1970s zooms in there, too.

rod taylor was kind of an axiom of hyperviolent 1970s cinema

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUBqmmGGudY

and don't forget zabriskie point

he also dated yvette mimieux, which couldn't have been too bad

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqvvby30CO1qf826yo1_1280.jpg

re his face, Robin Williams met him and said "Dad!!!"

kind of an axiom of hyperviolent 1970s cinema

I guess that's why the video clerk cast him as Churchill

i should say, an axiom of hyperviolent late-1960s cinema

TCM is showing a Rod Taylor block of five features and a short this Thursday night at 8

new bio

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-peter-ackroyds-alfred-hitchcock

Died 35 years ago today.

If you need another ranking...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/9443826/From-Topaz-to-Psycho-top-52-Hitchcock-films.html

Understandably overvalues his British work.

Good to see Downhill in the top twenty

Aw, Number Seventeen's not that bad.

Def the worst one I've seen, but there's a lot of British silents I haven't sat thru yet.

Good to see Sabotage so high.

Good to see Brits still like kids dying. (For real, tho, my fave Brit Hitch outside of Lady Vanishes.)

David Bordwell on Hitchcock/Truffaut: the book, the Kent Jones documentary, and the two filmmakers.

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2015/06/12/truffauthitchcock-hitchcocktruffaut-and-the-big-reveal/

Wow!

https://vimeo.com/gumpstudio/thereddrumgetaway

The Red Drum Getaway
A Hitchcock mashup where Kubrick is the villain.
"Jimmy was having a rather beautiful day until he bumped into Jack and things got weird."

https://38.media.tumblr.com/bddf1c5f4fb51ebe3e170a7ee12b9517/tumblr_mi5ojcWQwH1ritscno1_500.gif

Jamaica Inn is a kind of a weird Hitch in that it seems to be more Laughton's show than the director's. I can't think of another film of his where the star, no matter how iconic or prominent, overshadow's the filmmaker's presence. Which is to say that, while Laughton is a hoot in the film, the overall effect of it is kind of entertaining in the moment and then immediately forgettable.

Haven't seen it. That was the one that made the first worst-movies-ever Medved book.

Jamaica Inn has the liveliness common to all Hitchcock's British talkies, and I prefer it to Under Capricorn if we're talking period costume romps.

Jamaica Inn is pretty good. I love the shipwreck scene. Good gothic suspense.

No idea what a Hitchcock acolyte would think of Hitchcock/Truffaut (e.g., it basically omits The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps, which, from what I recall, is in keeping with the perspective of the Truffaut book). I'm not; I love many sequences and images (I consider the still of Janet Leigh's eye one of the greatest images ever, and really liked hearing Scorsese talk about that shot the way I see it, as an entry point into the '60s) and maybe a half-dozen films, but I usually come up short on what happens between those sequences and images. Hitchcock/Truffaut, as you would expect, sticks with the highlights (makes me want to see Saboteur and The Wrong Man again, for starters). The interview subjects are well chosen (could do without Bogdanovich, who seems to be there so he can knowingly name-drop "Hitch" at one point), and I liked that Kent Jones stuck with seven or eight instead of an endless procession; thought Fincher was very good. (Hope this isn't meaningful: Scorsese is identified as the director of Taxi Driver and The Wolf of Wall Street.) I guess it would have been too weird to include De Palma--I wonder if he was approached. Not a complaint, just an observation: they basically put the Truffaut book aside for lengthy sections on Vertigo and Psycho. (Film/book I'd like to see: the story of how this film that no one could even see in the '70s became the consensus choice as the greatest film ever made.) The deaths of Hitchcock and Truffaut in relatively close proximity makes for a melancholy ending.

Nine millionth person to say this: I meant Sabotage.

It disappointed me, much like the Buckley-Vidal. The makers didn't dramatize the material. Everything that could be said about the book was done in five minutes; then I wanted to reread it.

i like sabotage, it's zippy and wartime-bleak. never watched the wrong man cuz the title's too on the nose, like if lynch made a movie called the possessed or welles made one called abracadabra

(xpost) They've got the voices on tape, and they've got still photographs. I'm not sure how you'd dramatize it...Seems to me they explained the context in which the interviews took place well enough (Truffaut the auteurist trying to elevate Hitchcock above the "entertainer/master of suspense" tag). I've never owned the book, but I read a lot or maybe even all of it from either a high school or university library. A local book store had a remaindered pile of the reissue they mention at the end a few years ago--kicking myself for not buying one.

Hitch should've called Vertigo The Wrong Woman.

this week from Hull Independent Cinema: 5 movies, 5 nights; Rear Window, Vertigo, NxNW, Psycho and Hitchcock/Truffaut. hope my poor aging apnoeic brain can handle the late nights.