Since 1962, “Citizen Kane” had topped the Sight & Sound Greatest Films poll, but that run came to an end this year when “Vertigo” finally ousted Kane from the top spot, rising up from the #2 spot in the previous poll. The full Top 250 is now available, with 5 Hitchcock films making the list: #1 Vertigo (1958) #34 Psycho (1960) =#53 North by Northwest (1959) =#53 Rear Window (1954) =#171 Notorious (1946)
As mentioned previously, Bernard Herrmann‘s original score for “Psycho” was recently put up for auction at Bonhams. Unfortunately, it failed to reach the minimum price of £30,000… Psycho music score fails to sell The score to Alfred Hitchcock’s horror movie Psycho, failed to be sold recently, Bonhams auction house said. The 20-page work has been withdrawn from a sale after it failed to make its minimum price of £30,000. The music for the 1960 thriller,… (read more)
If you have £30,000 going spare, you might want to consider putting in a bid for Bernard Herrmann‘s original score for “Psycho“… …further details are available on the Bonhams web site.
Here’s 36,000 frames from all of the black & white Hitchcock films… The position of each frame on the circle is determined by two variables: 1) position in the film — frames from the start and end are near the top (12 o’clock) and the frames from halfway through are at the bottom (6 o’clock), etc. 2) the position on the axis — calculated from the average brightness of each frame, with darker frames near… (read more)
Aficionados of film posters will enjoy Film the Blanks :) An ongoing experiment in deconstructing and abstracting film posters. Some famous and some not so famous. Look at the blank, read the clue and take a guess using the comments section. There’s definitely at least 2 Hitchcock film posters on the site… I’m sure you can guess which films they are!
There’s something wonderfully surreal and slightly unsettling about many of the Czech and Polish Hitchcock film posters. (The Birds) (Psycho) (Rear Window) (The Birds & Psycho) (Frenzy) (The Birds) (Rebecca) (Vertigo) (Family Plot) (Hitchcock film festival) To my mind, they seem to generate the same uneasy feeling that Tom Adams’ artwork for his series of Agatha Christie book covers do. As a child, these book covers used to give me the heebie-jeebies!
For anyone who’s interested, I’ve just set up an “On This Day in Hitchcoch History” RSS feed: //the.hitchcock.zone/rss/onthisday.xml The feed should give you a list of individual events for the current day. If you’re not seeing the correct day, then you can include an UTC offset to the end of the URL. Just add a comma followed by the number of hours offset you want to add/remove from UTC/GMT – e.g.: //the.hitchcock.zone/rss/onthisday.xml,-9 //the.hitchcock.zone/rss/onthisday.xml,+12
Reading the advert, I’m not 100% sure if the seller is claiming this is the actual car used in the film or not, but the Marreyt Classics web site has a LHD Aston Martin DB 2/4 Convertible up for sale… Whether or not it was used in the film, it would be the ideal car for a quick weekend jaunt up to Bodega Bay… The fully retractable hood would come in handy should the local… (read more)
Tony Macklin, former editor of the “Film Heritage” magazine, has just posted a 1976 audio recording of an interview he had with Hitchcock… The Hitch interview was one of two in which I was a bit intimidated. (The other, of course, was Sam Peckinpah.) A critic friend of mine had interviewed Hitch and said the master had led him to a freezer, and he had thought for an instant that Hitch was going to lock… (read more)
Just when I thought I’d seen every Hitchcock publicity photo ever, I stumbled across this one. Taken to promote “The Birds“, it shows Hitchcock and Suzanne Pleshette… The rear caption reads: “School days are re-enacted by director Alfred Hitchcock with Suzanne Pleshette playing her screen role of a pretty school-teacher.”
