Hitchcock
graham.rickson
John Farrow’s inexplicably neglected 1948 thriller The Big Clock is a difficult work to pigeonhole, combining traces of noir, screwball comedy and suspense. Farrow’s source material was a novel by poet and pulp fiction writer Kenneth Fearing, here adapted by crime author and screenwriter Jonathan Latimer. Visually it’s spectacular, the first establishing shot moving from a dark New York skyline to the interior of the art deco Janoth Building in (almost) one single take, showing us Ray Milland’s George Stroud taking refuge inside the titular timepiece. It’s a flashback, and there’s a first- Read more ...
David Nice
"Weary Death" – "Destiny", the English-language title, is weak by comparison – settles in a small German town, an impressive simulation constructed on a back lot of the Babelsberg Studio outside Berlin. He buys a plot in the churchyard, builds himself a dwelling with an impenetrable wall around it and casts his blight over a young betrothed couple, hoping that the young woman can conquer him and bring him respite from his wretched duty.This is the gist of Fritz Lang's early (1921) "German folksong in six verses", but its format allows for three stories-within-a-story casting far and wide in Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is an impeccably restored presentation of the 1945 feature-length documentary that was intended to be shown in German cinemas in order to counter any remaining support for Nazism. Backed by the British Ministry of Information, it was overseen by Sidney Bernstein and involved commissioning or gathering footage from army cameraman (American, British and Soviet) present at the liberation of the concentration camps, as well as from newsreel cameramen.The assembled film, shot in over 14 locations including Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, did not spare viewers’ sensitivities. Forty-three cameramen Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Patrick Barlow’s last play was parked in the West End for nine years. The 39 Steps finally closed this autumn, but not before travelling all over the world, most prestigiously to Broadway but also, among other destinations, to Russia, Japan, Australia, Korea, Hong Kong and France. There have been no fewer than eight different productions in Germany, including one with an all-female cast. So the question naturally pinging around Barlow’s cranium was: how exactly do you follow that?In 2012 he came up with the answer in the form of a redux version of Ben Hur. It was produced at the Watermill Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Although the shadows of the Holocaust and German guilt hang over Christian Petzold’s sixth outing with his formidable muse Nina Hoss, Phoenix is more concerned with the essence of female identity. It contextualises in dreadful circumstances and iterates, as no other film has done in recent years, the politically incorrect but no less obvious and appalling notion that a woman’s face is her most valuable real estate, the thin, fragile wall that separates her from emotional destitution.A woman effaced, this fable-like drama insists, is a woman invalidated – a theme previously explored, in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Whether you’re partial to Highsmith or Hitchcock, or both, there’s something deliciously exciting about the prospect of Strangers on a Train. Much of that anticipation lies in the intriguing question of which side of the material this adaptation will fall – with book or film, two very different animals – and curiosity as to the staging. "Hitch" has rather spoiled us for visuals. Or has he?The opening premise of Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel, in 1950, is a cracker. Two strangers meet on a train and fall into conversation. One of them, alcoholic playboy Charles Bruno, talks of the perfect Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Who is Terry Johnson? For a period of two decades between, say, 1982 and 2003, he was predominantly a playwright. He was sufficiently successful at it that for a period in 1995, three of his plays were on in the West End at once. But the plays have slowly dried up – the last was in 2006 – and nowadays he is very largely a director. His latest gig as a director is a 20th-anniversary revival of his play Hysteria!If the plays have stopped coming it’s because Johnson's enthusiasm for writing about deceased cultural icons has run out of steam. Much of his best work exhumes dead geniuses and/or Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Newly restored versions of old films in cinemas are commonplace. This revival of Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder is set apart due to it being in 3D, as it was originally intended to be seen. But unless you were able to catch it in the few American cinemas where it screened after its May 1954 New York premiere, the original has proved elusive, although 3D versions have surfaced intermittently.It was seen by audiences in red-and-green specs in 1980, in a form which did the rounds for a couple of years afterwards. There was another attempt to bring it back to life in 2004. Then, last summer Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This story is mostly familiar from Alfred Hitchchock's 1938 movie, starring Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood. Among the things it's best remembered for are the comic double act of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, playing the cricket-obsessed Charters and Caldicott trying to get home to England from somewhere in pre-war Europe to watch a Test match, and Dame May Whitty as the titular missing person, Miss Froy.This new BBC version, dramatised by Fiona Seres, lacked fanatical cricket supporters, though it was more faithful to Ethel Lina White's original novel, The Wheel Spins, which didn't Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bernard Herrmann: Vertigo and Music From the Films of Alfred HitchcockGreat film soundtrack music can have a tough time being accepted as thus. There’s the test of time: does the music continue resonating? Is the music a sympathetic foil for the visuals? Can it live away from the screen and still create its atmosphere? The questions are endless, but the music of Bernard Herrmann will always pass any test. With Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo declared the greatest film ever in last year’s Sight and Sound poll, Herrmann’s music for it was, by association, also cast as an all-time great. Previously, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A pedestrian talent hitches a ride on genius in Hitchcock, director Sacha Gervasi's often cringemakingly banal look at the filmmaker in the run-up to the mother of all horror movies, Psycho. One can only imagine what the Great Man himself would think of a film that applies rudimentary psychology to a celluloid classic that gets under the skin to an extent Gervasi can only dream of. Thank heavens, at least, for the committed performances of a cast headed by Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren as Mr and Mrs H, two classy talents in a film that otherwise feels as if it was made for some Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The BBC makes a habit of dramatising the difficult lives of those who have entertained us – tortured comedians, anguished singers, even troubled cooks. Whatever you make of their merits, the message accumulating across all these biodramas is that the audience’s pleasure comes at the cost of the artist’s pain. Or as Alfred Hitchcock put it in The Girl, “Who pays our wages? The audience.”And so to the master. In The Girl Hitchcock became the story rather than the storyteller, not for the first time or the last (the film starring Anthony Hopkins as Hitch is coming soon). Based on the testimony Read more ...