BFI
The Hitchcock Players: Tippi Hedren, The Birds, MarnieThursday, 23 August 2012
The relationship between Hitchcock and Hedren was already subject to scrutiny, and is symbolic of his fascination with blondes. Soon, with Sienna Miller playing the leading lady of 1963’s terrifying The Birds and Toby Jones as the director, it’s... Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: James Stewart, Rear WindowWednesday, 22 August 2012
Hitchcock was fond of the locked-box mystery, but never in the obvious form: whether it’s the leads in Rope, stuck in their apartment with a body shut up in a trunk, or the survivors from a ship murderously bobbing along together in Lifeboat, the... Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Farley Granger and Robert Walker, Strangers on a TrainTuesday, 21 August 2012
Some actors build their characters from the feet up. In fact, it’s a theatrical commonplace to think that shoes can hold the key to a character's psychology. Hitchcock takes the idea and applies it to the opening sequence of Strangers on a Train,... Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Anthony Perkins, PsychoMonday, 20 August 2012
In Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho, Norman Bates was plump, balding, bespectacled and 40 years old, the physical antithesis of the lean, lanky and boyishly good-looking 28-year-old Anthony Perkins. The casting satisfied Hitchcock’s desire to create... Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Anny Ondra, BlackmailSaturday, 18 August 2012
Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, Ingrid Bergman, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, Janet Leigh – these are only the best-known of that special breed, the Hitchcock blonde. For some reason, whether he wanted a femme fatale or a romantic accomplice or a tragic... Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Alfred Hitchcock's cameosWednesday, 08 August 2012
Alfred Hitchcock isn't the only director who appeared in his own movies - François Truffaut, Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese and M Night Shyamalan are among many others who have done the same - but he is by far the one who has done it most frequently... Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Herbert Marshall, Murder!Sunday, 05 August 2012
The epithet "mellifluous" might have been invented to describe Herbert Marshall’s voice. It was lucky that sound came along at the time Marshall, after a prestigious stage career, entered films when he was almost 40. We don’t hear those beautiful... Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Kim Novak, VertigoSaturday, 04 August 2012
In Vertigo Kim Novak plays two women who are really just one. First Madeleine, a supernatural siren, a woman apparently possessed by her tragedienne great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes. However, it’s a performance within a performance and she’s merely... Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Barry Foster, FrenzyThursday, 02 August 2012
Hitchcock’s penultimate film was the grubby, squirm-inducing Frenzy, and Barry Foster's depiction of the grim killer Robert Rusk is central to the disquieting aura it casts. The film’s production was problematic enough, having been cut by the BBFC... Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Robert Donat, The 39 StepsWednesday, 01 August 2012
It’s always a thrill watching The 39 Steps’ Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) doing daredevil feats on the Flying Scotsman as it speeds across the Forth Bridge, kissing a Scottish crofter’s jealously guarded wife, and bringing down the house with an... Read more... |
DVD: Wonderful LondonTuesday, 24 July 2012
Long before the invention of digital technology and the birth of Keira Knightley, cinema shows in Britain contained not one feature, or two features, but also what the advertisements called a "full supporting programme". That meant newsreels, maybe... Read more... |
BlackmailSaturday, 07 July 2012
The premiere of the newly restored version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 silent classic Blackmail, outdoors at the British Museum, will go down as one of the defining moments of the London 2012 cultural extravaganza. This was a thrilling,... Read more... |
