Here’s one for all you Hitchcock completests!
Currently available on the Amazon France site for €23.20 on a combined DVD and Blu-ray release is a 70 minute film of Alain Riou and Stéphane Boulan’s stage play “Hitch”. According to my PC, both discs are region free but the transfers are 25 frame/sec PAL, so you’ll need to check that your TV and player can handle that if you live in a country that uses the NTSC standard (e.g. America).
The quality of the transfer is good, especially on the Blu-ray, and appears to have been filmed live in front of a theatre audience. Dialogue is predominantly in French, with occasional parts in English, and there are optional English subtitles.
I’ve struggled to find any reviews that aren’t in French, so I suspect the play has never been staged outside of France. However, here are some reviews and their English Google Translations:
- theatrotheque.com (Google Translation)
- webthea.com (Google Translation)
- lestroiscoups.com (Google Translation)
- spectaclesfrancais.ch (Google Translation)
- canalblog.com (Google Translation)
I won’t spoil the plot, except to say the play begins with Hitchcock dead — shot in the head with the gun in his hand and Truffaut seemingly responsible for his death — and ends with a recreation of the famous photograph by Philippe Halsman:
The play is entirely fictional, but borrows heavily from the background to Truffaut’s interviews with Hitchcock, which took place in August 1962. Apart from Joe Sheridan as Hitchcock, Mathieu Bisson as Truffaut, the excellent cast is completed with Patty Hannock as Alma Reville.
If you’re a big Hitchcock fan, I thoroughly recommend getting hold of a copy!
In an interview on the Dick Cavett Show Hitchcock mentioned how much he regretted killing off the boy (Desmond Tester) in Sabotage. Cavett, wisely, felt the need to tell his viewers that AH was referring to a fictional character. Likewise as we’ve seen in recent film bios it seems as if folks cannot help confusing AH the man with his product, so I suppose it was only a question of time before we would have Truffaut shooting Hitchcock!
PermalinkWhilst this undoubtedly sells tickets (& books as we’ve seen with Ackroyd and others) it dilutes the real story which is so much more interesting, but I can hear AH telling me “it’s only play”.