Dave Pattern

All posts by Dave Pattern

To Catch a Thief: Soundtrack CD

In case you’ve not already spotted it, Lyn Murrary‘s original score to To Catch a Thief (1955) is now available on CD, courtesy of the Intrada label. The CD also contains Murrary’s score to The Bridges at Toko-ri (1954), which also starred Grace Kelly. The full track listing for To Catch a Thief is: Paramount Seal / You’ll Love France / Le Chat (2:28) Red Convertible / To Catch a Thief – Part 1 /… (read more)

Hitch: When Truffaut Confronted Hitchcock

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… (read more)

The first Hitchcock toilet?

Everyone knows that Psycho (1960) was one of the first — if not the first — Hollywood feature film to show a flushing toilet, but was it the first Hitchcock film to show a toilet? The Lodger (1927) has a scene set in a bathroom, but no toilet is shown. Perhaps the Buntings only have an outside toilet? Nor do we get to see Sir John Menier’s toilet in Murder! (1930) whilst he shaves in… (read more)

“The room, I might add, gets very wet.”

In the 1997 documentary “The Making of Psycho“, actress Janet Leigh spoke about her reaction to seeing the shower scene in the completed film: When I saw it and I saw it cut together and I saw the boom, boom, and the music and everything, I absolutely went… I just was crazy. I really screamed. I never take a shower. I cannot take a shower. ‘Cause it never dawned on me until that moment how… (read more)

Dental Anachronism

As Patrick McGilligan notes in his biography of Hitchcock, the director detested “the plausibles” — those who analysed his films too deeply and who delighted in finding plot holes. “I’m not concerned with plausibility,” Hitchcock liked to boast. “That’s the easiest part, so why bother?” Or, as he put it on another occasion, “Must a picture be logical, when life is not?” I was reminded of this when I stumbled across this little article published… (read more)

Nova Pilbeam as Mary Rose

I’ve been planning to write something about J.M. Barrie’s Mary Rose for a while now, but I thought I’d share this little bit of trivia that I don’t think any of the Hitchcock scholars have stumbled across before… On Sunday 11th September, 1938, BBC Radio broadcast an adaptation of Mary Rose starring Nova Pilbeam, Griffith Jones and Irene Rooke. Pilbeam had previously appeared in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and Young and Innocent… (read more)

The Birds is Coming (again?)

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the cinema, a number of websites are reporting that Michael Bay is still trying to get a remake of The Birds (1963) off the ground. If you’ve got a long memory, you’ll know that Bay has been pushing this project since 2005. Universal’s ‘The Birds’ Redo Nabs Dutch Director Diederik Van Rooijen ‘The Birds’ Remake Gets Its Director Back in 2005, Tippi Hedren was… (read more)

The Incredible Shrinking Hitchcock

Think of Hitchcock and invariably you think of his weight. Although biographer John Russell Taylor notes that the director was “painfully self-conscious about his appearance”, Hitchcock knew that his weight was a strong publicity hook — it was something that made him memorable to the public. Whilst Hitchcock’s weight became a serious problem later in life, particularly when he began to suffer from painful arthritic knees in the 1970s, many of his early collaborators were… (read more)

“Short Girls Are Best”

Another little gem from the National Library of Australia’s Trove site, this time from the the Adelaide Mail (23/May/1931): HEROINES IN FILMS Short Girls are Best It is not much use trying to be a screen heroine if you are tall. Mr. Alfred Hitchcock, the brilliant British director, says a screen actress should not be above medium height; indeed, smallness is a definite asset. “A little actress not only photographs better, particularly in close-up scenes,… (read more)