Dave Pattern

All posts by Dave Pattern

In remembrance…

It’s that time of the year when we look back at the Hitchcock collaborators who passed away. In 2007, the following people died… Roscoe Lee Browne (Topaz) Lonny Chapman (The Birds) Laraine Day (Foreign Correspondent) Ray Evans (The Man Who Knew Too Much) Hansjörg Felmy (Torn Curtain) George Grizzard (Alfred Hitchcock Presents) Peter Handford (Under Capricorn & Frenzy) Teddy Infuhr (Spellbound) George Tabori (I Confess) William Tuttle (North by Northwest) Peter Viertel (Saboteur) Jane Wyman… (read more)

The Lady Vanishes (Criterion, 2007)

I’ve added full details and images to the site for the new Criterion DVD of The Lady Vanishes. It’s pretty much a given that any Criterion Hitchcock DVD is well worth buying (especially as the out-of-print titles become very collectable). As with the last wave of Criterion Hitchcock DVDs (Spellbound, Notorious, and Rebecca), Criterion have come up trumps with both the transfer and the extras. The transfer is an improvement on the original DVD release… (read more)

Move over Bernard Herrmann!

One of the sections in Brendan Dawes’ book is about generating images from music. Whilst messing about with the “North by Northwest” images (see previous blog post), I began to wonder if you could create music from images? Anyway, here’s the first 90 seconds of my replacement soundtrack for “North by Northwest” :-) It was created by grabbing a frame from the movie every half a second and working out the average colour of the… (read more)

10 DVD UK set from Network next year

Some great news for Hitchcock fans in the UK — Network are planning to release a 10 DVD set of early Hitchcock films (all licensed from Granada International) in early 2008 (probably in February). Full details haven’t been confirmed yet, but the set should contain: The Pleasure Garden (1925) The Lodger (1927) Downhill (1927) The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) The 39 Steps (1935) Secret Agent (1936) Sabotage (1936) Young and Innocent (1937) The… (read more)

“North by Northwest” squished

After reading Brendan Dawes’ “Analog In, Digital Out“, I’ve revisited the colours of “North by Northwest” (see earlier blog post). Rather than squish every frame to a single horizontal line, this time each frame is squished vertically — see if you can spot the “crop duster” sequence: ( full sized version on Flickr )

Hitchcock retrospective in Austria

Hitchcock fans in Austria will want to check out the Hitchcock retrospective at the Österreichisches Filmmuseum, running from 01/Dec/2007 to 04/Feb/2008. The press releases are available here and here, and there’s also a copy archived on the wiki. The web site also has a collection of hi-res Hitchcock images!

“ABC News Classics” on DVD

When the “ABC News Classics: Grace Kelly” DVD first appeared on Amazon.com, I assumed it would be a compilation of TV news articles about the life of Grace Kelly. Oh boy, did I assume wrong! Unfortunately when I placed my pre-order, the product details on Amazon were sketchy and no running time was given. A quick Google search didn’t throw up any further details, so I thought “what the heck”. When the DVD arrived yesterday,… (read more)

Favourite Hitchcock Baddie – round 1

Okay — so I forgot to include a few memorable baddies (like Bruno in “Strangers on a Train“), but here’s the results from last month’s poll: Interesting to see that neither Vandamm or Elster (who was surely the most cold-hearted of all Hitchcock baddies) picked up any votes. So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the winner of this round — Joseph Cotten as evil Uncle Charlie! You think you know something, don’t you? You… (read more)