Blackmail free tomorrow in Trafalgar Square, London
Just stumbled across this on the BFI website… …so, if you’re in London tomorrow evening, it might be worth catching this free screening of Hitchcock’s early masterpiece “Blackmail“!
Posts filed under Blackmail (1929)
31 Days of Hitchcock
I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a couple of weeks now… Joe Valdez has set himself the task of watching and reviewing a different Hitchcock film every day in October. You can catch up with his reviews at thisdistractedglobe.com. Joe’s not used a category for his Hitchcock-a-blog-o-thon, but you find all of the posts by doing a search for “Hitchcock” on his blog.
Hitchcock Update (w/c 15/Oct/2007)
Over at MacGuffin, Ken Mogg’s latest entry in “The Editor’s Week” (13/Oct/2007) continues his in-depth discussion about “Frenzy“. “Frenzy” is one of my guilty pleasures — whenever I watch it I always enjoy it more than I feel I should. But then again, most of the characters in the film seem to be indulging in guilty pleasures, greed and excess. The food motif has been well discussed, but I’d not picked up on the Rusk/breadstick… (read more)
Gas
In 1919, whilst he was working at W.T. Henley’s Telegraph Works, Hitchcock edited and wrote articles for the in-house newsletter “Henley Telegraph“. Nearly 90 years later, director Sylvie Bolioli and Polaris Productions Ltd took one of the Hitchcock short stories that appeared in the Henley Telegraph — Gas — and turned it into a short film (see Internet Movie Database) starring Tony Hadley, Johanna Mohs, and Valerie Leon. The US premiere for “Gas” takes place… (read more)
Vertigo celebrations at San Juan Bautista
Just a quick reminder that the Vertigo weekend at the San Juan Bautista (San Francisco) is only a week away now: www.oldmissionsjb.org/vertigo.html Highlights of the event include: viewing and discussion of the film mass in memory of Mr. Hitchcock and his wife Alma auction and gala fundraiser at Casa Maria Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia will also be attending some of the events.
Hitchcock, Titanic, and the Key
As Hitchcock prepared to make the move to Hollywood, David O Selznick was mooting the idea of making a film of the ill-fated Titanic. Selznick even planned to purchase the SS Leviathan, and Hitchcock proposed an opening credit sequence which would begin with a close-up of a rivet, then a gradual pull back of the camera to reveal the entire ship. Hitchcock also joked about filming the sinking sequence, only to discover that there was… (read more)
Frequent collaborators
I’ve been adding the odd name to the Frequent collaborators section on the Alfred Hitchcock article on Wikipedia for a while now, so I decided recently to do the job properly and analyze the “Complete Cast and Crew” pages on IMDB for the 53 major Hitchcock films. The final data showing everyone who appears 3 or more times can be seen in this Excel spreadsheet. Quite often, Leo G Carroll is named as being the… (read more)
The Tingler
Ladies and gentlemen, please do not panic!But SCREAM!Scream for your lives! I just happened to catch the beginning of “The Tingler” (1959), directed by William Castle this morning and couldn’t help spotting all of the links with Hitchcock! According to his IMDB profile, Castle emulated Hitchcock (by appearing in trailers and by creating a trademark silhouette), but it was the highly succesful low budget “House on Haunted Hill” that, apparently, inspired Hitchcock to make his… (read more)
New Hitchcock DVD from Criterion
Well, perhaps not quite “new”, but Criterion have announced that they will be re-releasing their “The Lady Vanishes” DVD in November. Hopefully, more details will appear on their blog in due course. The previous 1998 DVD release from Criterion was missing around 6 seconds of footage, but this has apparently been restored to the film for the new release. As well as a new cover and transfer, the release also contains a second disc with… (read more)
52,000 frames of Hitchcock
Back in January, I set myself the task of reducing every one of the available major Hitchcock films down to 1000 frames of film. Today, nearly 7 months later, I’ve finally finished :-) 1000 Frames of Hitchcock I’m guessing this is probably the largest online collection of images from Hitchcock’s films, with a total of 52,000 images covering a creative period of over 50 years, and taking up 3.76GB of disk space. However, there’s still… (read more)