Alfred Hitchcock: Classic or Dud?

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.

i visited the Frenzy door in Covent Garden tonight.

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

Did I tell you when I was London last summer I walked by the Carol Reed blue ceramic circle in Chelsea many times? Don't think I passed any Hitchcock locales, although maybe I did pass by the Michael Balcon ceramic circle as well.

so this http://openplaques.org/plaques/1367

Yes. Apparently called Blue Plaques. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/travel/london-blue-plaques-ceramic-homages.html
There seems to be an app as well.

i had dinner w/in a few blocks on Kings Road last night.

There's one on Joe Orton's house/death site too.

i wondered for a minute what the ceramic circle was.

yeah we have a lot of these across the UK

i wondered for a minute what the ceramic circle was.

yeah we have a lot of these across the UK

Our (America's) would be so LOL

Perish the thought

in what universe is Shadow of a Doubt = dud????

my top 5

The 39 Steps
Shadow of a Doubt
The Lady Vanishes
Rope
Vertigo

https://media.giphy.com/media/bM7h7JvPDonS0/giphy.gif

Strangers on a Train is my #6

Our (America's) would be so LOL

― Iago Galdston, Sunday, November 27, 2016 6:58 PM (ten months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://pics.me.me/Imgur-de19b1.png

My contrarian idiosyncratic bloody-minded top 5:

1) Blackmail
2) Rich and Strange
3) Downhill
4) The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
5) NxNW

Difficulty: I don't watch movies made after 1934, unless I really want to, okay?

via Criterion Daily

In the latest entry in Reverse Shot’s symposium on time, Julien Allen proposes that “perhaps the most compelling display of Hitchcock’s bravura in Psycho [1960] occurs during one of its least discussed sequences, in which Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) cleans up the crime scene, immediately after he discovers Marion’s body. Its duration alone—nearly ten percent of the film—is prima facie remarkable, and it contains, in its nine and a half minutes, an encyclopedic collection of escalating and conflicting sympathies and emotions, as well as directorial deceptions which are all the more exceptional for the director’s justified confidence that they would be almost invisible on first viewing.”

http://reverseshot.org/archive/entry/2382/psycho

My favourite sequence in the film, and maybe the greatest instance of Hitchcock beautifully fucking with his audience that I can think of offhand.

Marnie is now an opera.

http://www.metopera.org/Season/2018-19-season/marnie-muhly-tickets/

oh ffs

timely

this and the opera of Exterminating Angel feel like fully good ideas imo

78/52 on BBC2 last night, really fun.

oh! thanks for the heads up, looking forward to it. hopefully it's on the iPlayer..

(it is)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09w3w9v

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DdtzBWoV0AEGcy_.jpg

I just thought the thread could do with a classic Hitch @ the '63 Cannes Festival pic where he looks like he is about to lay a choddie on the beach.

excellent pic

Why did Hitchcock keep Rear Window, Rope, The Trouble with Harry, Vertigo, and The Man Who Knew Too Much out of circulation???

scarcity drives demand, demand raises price

yes, he wanted his heirs to get a little coin

they were rolled out again 4 years after his death

Why did Hitchcock keep Rear Window, Rope, The Trouble with Harry, Vertigo, and The Man Who Knew Too Much out of circulation???

Was it just these? Why these? Did he have more of a stake to the rights to these than to some of the other heavy hitters? I wonder if this was more of a thing back when revival houses and second runs were a thing. Disney, for example, used to (still does?) take things out of circulation all the time, at least up through the end of the videotape era. Don't know if they still did it with DVD.

https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/The_Times_(15/Nov/1983)_-_Return_of_the_missing_Hitchcocks

Interesting. I actually remember when those movies got reintroduced. My dad took me to see them! Or at least Rear Window.

Unless Vertigo and Rear Window turn out on reexamination not to be the masterpieces that most knowle-geable critics hold them to be,

http://toronto.citynews.ca/video/2018/05/29/angry-birds-prompt-warning-signs-from-city/

'Vertigo' after Weinstein

not sure i've read that Novak quote before; illuminating

LOL, I'd typed "Jeanne Dielman in 2022" even before reading the article and realizing it's actually framed around Vertigo defeating Kane in S&S 2012.

idgi, i don't think we're supposed to cheer for Scottie

yeah makes me want to re-watch. As for Hitch mapped onto Weinstein it actually felt a bit tacked on.

it's very WOKE

lol and Thomson is not a millenial what gives

arrogant prick