Hitchcock
Gary Naylor
Older readers may recall the cobbled together, ramshackle play, a staple of the Golden Age of Light Entertainment that would close out The Morecambe and Wise Show and The Generation Game. Mercifully, we don’t have grandmothers from Slough squinting as they read lines off the back of a teapot in this show, but there are still too many callbacks to those long-forgotten set pieces of Saturday night telly.There’s a lot of effort put into creating a 1950s Cold War vibe in Emma Rice’s adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, but that jokey 1970s tone overpowers set design, costuming, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
There's a tension in Alfred Hitchcock’s early films between misogyny and condemnation of the patriarchal suppression of women. The suppression was inherent in the original sources from which The Pleasure Garden (1926), Easy Virtue (1927), Champagne (1928), The Manxman (1929), Blackmail (1929), Juno and the Paycock (1930), and The Skin Game (1931) were adapted. Unconscious or not, the gynophobia that also flickers in these films is shared by The Lodger (1926), Downhill (1927), and Rich and Strange (1931). That it's intensified in Hitchcock's mature work, culminating in Psycho (1960) Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Before the Plays That Went Wrong and the multi-role six-hander Operation Mincemeat, there was Patrick Barlow’s adaptation of The 39 Steps: four actors on a collision course with feasibility.Barlow is a comedy hero for creating the National Theatre of Brent in 1980, where as preening thesp Desmond Olivier Dingle he performed two-handers with a rotating door of partners that included Jim Broadbent. They considered no topic too epic, from the Zulu Wars to the Greatest Story Ever Told. Barlow’s 2005 version of John Buchan’s 1915 spy thriller, filtered via Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s awards season in the film world, which means that we’re currently swamped by hyperbolic shows of love and respect – actors and their directors gushing about how each could simply never have reached their creative heights without the other. Of course, it’s not always like that; there is plenty of hell unleased on a movie set. John Logan’s new play investigates the messier, uglier side of the director-actor dynamic, by considering two real-life, notorious, if very different confrontations. One is between Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren, during the shooting of Marnie, in 1964 in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell are, almost certainly, Britain’s greatest directors. Hitchcock was slightly older, and entered the film business earlier; in fact, Powell worked as a stills photographer on Hitchcock’s Champagne and Blackmail, in the late Twenties, shortly before making his own films.And by the time Powell had entered his partnership with Emeric Pressburger, with The Spy in Black, in 1939, "Hitch" was on his way to Hollywood; while his career became international, Powell’s would, with the more English than the English émigré Pressburger by his side, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Since her death in 1995, Patricia Highsmith has prompted three biographies, screeds of often conflicting psychological analysis and now this documentary from the Swiss-born Eva Vitija. We hear the director say at the outset that by reading her then-unpublished diaries she learned to love, not just the writing, but the writer, which not all commentators have managed to do.It’s tempting to say, "Join the queue, lady.” Highsmith was the most prolific of seducers, haunting gay bars around the world and specialising in pursuing married women. None of the relationships lasted, except for a couple Read more ...
Saskia Baron
A lot has changed in the 40 years since Blow Out was first released. In 1981, American critics from Pauline Kael to Roger Ebert praised to the heavens Brian De Palma’s homage to assorted Hitchcock thrillers and his script’s mash-up of 1970s conspiracies. Certainly this handsomely restored print does justice to Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography. Not since Vertigo has a hotel bedroom been so artfully saturated in sickly red neon and ghastly green.But in 2021, what’s also striking is De Palma’s inability to film an actress without wanting to strip her or stick her with a knife. It’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Darkest Hour may have been director Joe Wright’s finest hour, but we can say for certain that, despite its impressive cast, The Woman in the Window isn’t. Concocted from A J Finn’s titular novel with a screenplay by Tracy Letts, it’s a perplexingly derivative thriller which gives leading lady Amy Adams precious little on which to unleash her considerable talents. Predicting the outcome is merely a matter of totting up which scenario scores highest on the PlayItAgainSam-ometer.Adams plays child psychologist Dr Anna Fox, who’s separated from her husband and child and lives in a cavernous Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in Paris in the summer: Charade was the last word in old Hollywood’s glamorous cool. It was almost the last word for Grant, feeling if not looking his age. Its tricksy, trapdoor plot, with a baffled Hepburn hunted for a MacGuffin of $250,000 in wartime bullion she doesn’t know she owns, was also a 1963 encore for Grant’s Fifties Hitchcock thrillers (sans Hitchcock), combining To Catch a Thief’s breezy French locations with North by Northwest’s innocent on the run. Released just after JFK’s assassination (requiring the word’s overdubbing with “elimination”, since Read more ...
Graham Fuller
When it was announced that Ben Wheatley would be directing a new version of Rebecca, his fans must have wondered what kind of exciting damage he would do to the neo-Gothic template of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel – and how he might spin the material in a different way than did Alfred Hitchcock in his unimpeachable 1940 classic starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson.Perhaps Wheatley would inject some social commentary or working-class bloody-mindedness into du Maurier’s haute bourgeois world, or dirty up Maxim de Winter’s pristine Cornwall pile Manderley with cobwebs, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A camel is a horse designed by committee, they say; perhaps that explains why The Host, with several writing credits – adapted by Zachary Weckstein from a story by Laurence Lamers, screenplay by Finola Geraghty, Brendan Bishop and Lamers – doesn't really know what it is. Part suspense thriller, part crime caper, but mostly a Hitchcock rip-off (although I'm sure the creators would call it “homage”).It starts so promisingly, with Saul Bass-esque opening titles, but then we get into tale that becomes bogged down with trivial details. After being dumped by the married colleague with whom he has Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Debates about whether 1964’s Marnie presaged Alfred Hitchcock’s downslide as a force will run and run. It is however certain that it was the director’s last film scored by Bernard Herrmann, who had worked on 1963’s The Birds, 1960’s Psycho, 1959’s North by Northwest and, before that, a run of Hitchcock’s films back to 1955. After Marnie, the affiliation continued – for a while. Herrmann’s music was heard in the TV show the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and he provided a score for Torn Curtain which the director neither liked or used. The professional relationship was over.Although the music for Read more ...