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Chinatown - NYC
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Since yesterday I own ALL movies of Jeremy Renner and all series available!!!!! Paper Dragons was the last to arrive …. I am happy now!
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looking at a basketball game
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Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum will finally reopen on 13 April after a 10-year renovation held up by everything from asbestos problems to cycling...
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJZ8F69IH2o
This restoration of Hitchcock’s 1926 silent melodrama offers a gripping prehistory not just of his own work, but the Hollywood thriller itself. Ivor Novello plays the lodger, living in a boarding house in pre-first world war London where people are terrified of a serial killer called the Avenger who murders young blondes. The lodger is a strange, tortured figure whose neurotic sensitivity and vulnerability begins to entrance the landlady’s pretty daughter Daisy (June Tripp), who is being courted by Joe (Malcolm Keen), a police detective on the killer’s trail. But might not this lodger, with his mysterious nighttime excursions, be the killer himself? Novello’s haunted appearance is a ghostly premonition of Robert Donat in The 39 Steps and Anthony Perkins in Psycho. The initial sequence, showing how news of the murders is disseminated in the press, is brilliant, and there is a flash of pure Hitchcock genius in the lodger’s ambiguous disgust and excitement at seeing Joe playfully put Daisy in handcuffs. The ending is arguably a little anti-climactic, but with its sheer brio and control, this is a vital rerelease.
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“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again …”
Everyone who loves film knows the opening words of Rebecca, that astonishing mixture of emotional hothouse and freezer that was Hitchcock’s first American film, made for David O Selznick and released in 1940. But for all the portent of that opening voiceover, or the symbolic drama of the great Cornish mansion burning down as the film ends, it’s not about a place. It’s not really a thriller, either, in any meaningful sense – despite the suspense of the closing reel.
Rebecca is a film about abusive relationships, and the way power might shift within them – and, most unusually, even for its time – its hero is the worst of the abusers. The romantic might view Laurence Olivier’s Max de Winter as someone haunted by his past; the realist would see him as someone haunted only by his inability to control his past, specifically his titular deceased wife, and so he alights upon Joan Fontaine’s gauche, clumsy (and nameless) gentlewoman’s companion as a wife who will give him no trouble.
Briefly, Fontaine has accompanied the ghastly Mrs Van Hopper (Florence Bates) to Monte Carlo as her paid companion. There she meets de Winter, a dark and brooding widower, prone to staring moodily over cliff edges and contemplating death.
After a whirlwind romance – much of which consists of him admonishing her in tones that would see any modern man dumped on the spot (his proposal: “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool”) – they marry and return to his ancestral home, where Rebecca’s old personal maid, Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson, portraying a Miss Gulch of the servant class), makes the second Mrs de Winter’s life a misery.
Everywhere she turns, Mrs Danvers summons the ghost of Rebecca, constant reminders of her own unsuitability for the role of châtelain of Manderley. Only when Manderley is destroyed and the mystery of Rebecca’s death – accident, or suicide, or murder – is solved, can Mr and Mrs de Winter, and Mrs Danvers, be freed. And like her mistress, the latter must die to be free.
Rebecca was one of three films Hitchcock adapted from stories by Daphne du Maurier, and much the most successful. Du Maurier had been distressed by the liberties he took with Jamaica Inn; The Birds suffered in being transformed from a perfect, ever-tightening noose of a short story set in Cornwall into an expansive movie set on the California coast. Rebecca’s near fidelity is owed to Selznick, who was “shocked and disappointed beyond words” at Hitchcock’s first treatment of the story and told the director: “We bought Rebecca and we intend to make Rebecca.”
The only significant departure from the novel was unavoidable. Du Maurier made Max de Winter a murderer: he killed Rebecca in rage at her affairs (feminist readings of the story posit her as its heroine; any modern reader will view her sympathetically the more they see of her husband). The Hollywood Production Code, however, could not allow a murderer to escape unpunished and so an accidental death had to be engineered. Clumsy it might have been, but because that plotline is tacked on at the end, it doesn’t interfere with the mighty central pillar of the film: the desperate, suffocating, co-dependent relationships of Mr and Mrs de Winter, Mrs Danvers and Rebecca.
Reliant though the film is on dialogue, Hitchcock throws in those inimitable visual touches, too: Max staring over the cliffs to the Mediterranean, the sea swirling sickeningly beneath him, showing us his death wish; his sister explaining to the second Mrs de Winter how much Mrs Danvers loved Rebecca, and the screen fading to black behind Fontaine’s face, a startling representation of the fall in your stomach when you hear something you have dreaded. And, of course, that critical, crippling moment when Fontaine descends the grand staircase to the Manderley masquerade ball, having been tricked by Mrs Danvers into wearing a replica of one of Rebecca’s old gowns.
It’s Fontaine’s film, really, rather than Olivier’s. He supplies the danger (though in the novel, the fact that Mrs de Winter conspires to conceal Rebecca’s murder shows how she has been corrupted by her awful marriage), and she is our representative: the one who shows how we might fare transplanted into minor aristocracy. She’s obviously too beautiful to be the mousy, dowdy wallflower the character demands, but by hunching her shoulders and darting her eyes, by playing up the clumsiness and never acknowledging her own beauty, she convinces. She has to: for without her, this would be only a film about vile snobs.
The reason Rebecca still grips lies in the fact that we can all see ourselves in Fontaine’s role: everyone plunged into a new and unfamiliar milieu has felt her uncertainty and fear that they are the wrong person, in the wrong place. We have all had relationships in which we cannot be sure where the ground lies, in which the dynamics of power leave us isolated and clinging desperately to whatever fixed points we can find.
“Our marriage is a success, isn’t it? A great success? We’re happy, aren’t we? Terribly happy?” Fontaine asks Olivier halfway through the film. He turns and strolls away from her. She continues, the note of desperate hope gone from her voice. “If you don’t think we are happy, it would be much better if you didn’t pretend.” By now she’s almost whispering. “I’ll go away. Why won’t you answer me?” And there, in those few seconds of speech, is the most human, heartbreakingly vulnerable person ever to appear in a Hitchcock film.
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In the early 1950s, the British Film Institute was transformed by Denis Forman and Gavin Lambert. Forman was appointed director of the BFI in 1948, and one year later, he invited Lambert to edit what Lambert recalled as “the institute’s terminally boring magazine Sight & Sound and bring it back to life”. Both left the institute in 1955, Forman to help create Granada TV, Lambert to become a Hollywood screenwriter and novelist, and by then the National Film Theatre had been established on the South Bank, and Sight & Sound had become one of the world’s pre-eminent film journals.
Among Lambert’s innovations was a worldwide poll of critics to vote each decade on the top 10 films of all time, an immense undertaking that utilises the resources of the BFI and depends on the authority of Sight & Sound. The results of the seventh and largest poll were announced on Wednesday to a gathering waiting with bated breath at the now rather grand BFI Southbank complex (formerly the National Film Theatre), and they’re published in the redesigned September edition of Sight & Sound (in 1952 a quarterly costing 3/6 – 17½p; since 1990 a monthly now priced at ).
In 1962, when there were few books on the cinema, no film schools, and virtually the only way to see a movie was in a picture house or at a film club; all 10 films were in black and white. Six were silent (two of them by Chaplin), Robert Flaherty’s tedious Louisiana Story was the single docudrama, and there were just two postwar movies, Lean’s Brief Encounter and De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, a key movie in the influential neo-realist style.
Fifty years later, with film schools everywhere and 115 years of movies easily available to scholars and fans alike, the only surviving film from the first list is Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, one of three silent pictures. The most surprising inclusion is the documentary Man with a Movie Camera by the Soviet theorist who styled himself Dziga Vertov (Russian for spinning top). Vertov’s film is as dazzling, obscure and avant-garde as on the day it was made, and somewhat less accessible than such masterly movies as On the Waterfront and 12 Angry Men, photographed in America by his brother, Boris Kaufman. The 1962 list represented the orthodox canon of that day. The 10 top films chosen in 2012 by 846 critics (of whom I was one) are the tip of an iceberg formed by the 1,045 nominated movies, and they reflect a new orthodoxy of sorts. Over six decades a new cinematic canon has been developing and changing, and it is less fluctuating and more conservative than one might have predicted.
Neo-realism has come and gone, as has the new Italian cinema that followed in the form of Antonioni’s L’avventura, which in 1962 got on the list in second place a little less than two years after being greeted with uncomprehending derision at Cannes. Ingmar Bergman, too, has also been and gone, possibly because votes were divided between a string of his masterpieces. The same is true of the French new wave, with neither Truffaut nor Godard reaching the top 10. Japanese cinema was unknown until Rashomon took a major prize at Venice in 1951 and helped heal the wounds created by the second world war. Since 1962 every poll has featured Kurosawa, Mizoguchi or Ozu, with the last named now in third place with Tokyo Story, one of the most affecting movies of family life and ageing ever made.
In 1962, Citizen Kane suddenly took over the first position, with Renoir’s La Règle du jeu close behind. Then, in 1982, Hitchcock’s Vertigo joined the list after spending years out of distribution and available only in bootleg prints. This year, not entirely surprisingly, it became substantially pre-eminent. All three movies were box-office failures in their day, and it needed the polemical magazine Movie in the early 1960s to establish the reputation of Hitchcock as a personal director of great depth rather than just the “master of suspense”, which he called himself, or merely a gifted entertainer, which was Sight & Sound’s view of his achievement. The first book on Hitchcock in English was by a key Movie contributor, Robin Wood, published in 1965 and initially reviewed by a single national paper, the Observer.
The 30 pages the September Sight & Sound devotes to the poll make for a fascinating read. So many of the great masters – Wilder, Lang, Eisenstein, Peckinpah, Almodóvar, for instance – fail to make the cut, though in some cases only just. There’s not a single 21st-century picture in the new list. The nearest any gets is Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love at 24, and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive at 28. Since 1992, the critics’ poll has been accompanied by a parallel top 10 chosen by directors, which also contains nothing from this century. Interestingly, Michael Mann picked two pictures from the 21st century, but they didn’t get on to the winning list. One was James Cameron’s Avatar, which (in an accompanying note) he calls “a brilliant synthesis of mythic tropes”.
I first voted in 1972 when I was in my late 30s. My 10 films included Citizen Kane, La Règle du jeu and Battleship Potemkin, which all made the top 10 list that year, unlike my other choices, which were Buster Keaton’s The General, Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano, Kurosawa’s Ikiru, Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, Ford’s Stagecoach, Kelly and Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain and Bergman’s Winter Light. This year (which even an apprentice actuary would tell you is likely to be my last) I decided to make a defiantly different choice of current favourites. They are (in alphabetical order) Au Revoir les enfants, La Grande illusion, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Leopard, Meet Me in St Louis, Pather Panchali, Seven Samurai, Stagecoach, Vertigo, Wild Strawberries. Only Stagecoach was on my 1972 list, and only Vertigo also appears in the latest top 10. On reflection, I find it much easier to list my 100 favourite westerns or 10 best films featuring dogs than to pick the 10 all-time best pictures.
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httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g458w2X9uHc
Life, most of the time, is matter of routine. We get up, go to work, pass the day as we have hundreds like it before. But this predictability is an illusion, because at any moment, the whole reassuring framework could collapse. An accident, an incredible stroke of luck, a crime: and suddenly everything has changed.
Roger Thornhill’s life turns on a dime in the bar of the Plaza Hotel on 59th street, at the moment he calls over the bellboy. He’s an advertising executive – one of the original Mad Men – whose anxieties centre around keeping his women sweet (with gifts dispatched by an obliging secretary), his mother happy and the Skin Glow account ticking over. But that bellboy was looking for a certain George Caplan, and he’s not the only one: a couple of shady characters waiting around the corner see Thornhill and think they’ve found their man. When he steps into the lobby for a moment, one of them presses a gun to his heart.
He’s whisked out of his natural habitat – no more martinis for Roger, at least not quite yet – and into a world which no longer seems to be following the rules. Who are these men who keep insisting he’s Caplan? Who threaten to kill him if he tries to escape? And why, having arrived at a well-appointed country house, is he asked how much he knows and how he knows it?
At this point, we’re as baffled as Thornhill. Despite having been with him for only a couple of scenes, we feel all the disorientation – and the rising panic – of his having been taken for someone else. Hitchcock, as ever, taps a reservoir of primitive fear. How would it feel if no one believed you were you? And the harder you tried to convince them, the less they took you seriously?
Luckily Thornhill isn’t the kind to go down without a fight. Fifteen minutes after the opening credits and we are in a car chase with a quirk – our hero is almost blind drunk behind the wheel, having been force-fed Bourbon. He escapes, not for the last time, into the hands of the police, a safe haven compared to the gang who have it in for George Caplan.
The pace doesn’t slacken. Thornhill finds himself at the UN, then suddenly accused of murder and on the run, dodging the cops on a sleeper train to Chicago. That’s where he meets the devastatingly cool Eve Kendall, a Hitchcock blonde who’s clearly nobody’s fool. True, the shine she takes to a strange man she knows may be guilty of murder stretches credulity, but only until we receive the first hint she may already be in on the game.
If you haven’t already seen North by Northwest, I’m jealous. You’re in for an amazing ride. I haven’t even mentioned the famous crop-duster scene – which again plays on a very deep-seated fear of having nowhere to hide – or the climax on Mount Rushmore, a sequence that elevates nailbiting to an Olympic-level sport. This is Hitchcock at his slickest, his most crowd-pleasing, his least encumbered by cod-psychological plotlines involving trances or kleptomania. It is a rollicking, old-fashioned adventure, laced with excitement. Cary Grant is a leading man so assured he makes James Bond look insecure, and Eva Marie Saint a love interest with more charisma than Tippi Hedren and Kim Novak combined. Then there’s Bernard Hermann’s punchy and frenetic score, and Saul Bass’s revolutionary titles, the very essence of 50s metro chic.
Which is why it baffles me that North by Northwest is regularly eclipsed in assessments of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, not least by the all-conquering Vertigo, which has been fetishised by critics since the 1960s. It received another boost earlier this week in Sight and Sound’s once-a-decade poll, while North by Northwest was nowhere to be found.
Perhaps the lack of Freudian handwaving leads people to rate it poorly in comparison. But despite the preposterous (though seamlessly woven) plot, it’s a rather good psychological fable, and a lot less pretentious into the bargain. Thornhill is a man who can’t – or hasn’t had to – grow up. Eve saves him, but not before she breaks the bonds that have kept her in a terrifyingly subservient relationship. Hitchcock’s ability to conjure up that sense of a perfectly pleasant life going haywire is especially powerful.
Our thrill is to see it all unfold, safe in the knowledge that at the end we’ll be able to return to the old routine. And even if things don’t always go as planned, perhaps we’ll be able to tackle them with a little of the old Thornhill panache.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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“It tells a most unlikely tale about a wife-murder, and tells it for more than two hours in a style that is slow, wordy and, apparently, casual,” sniffed the Manchester Guardian’s film critic 54 years ago. To clarify, what he may have meant to say is that Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is nothing less than the greatest film of all time.
The reappraisal was due on Wednesday after the 1958 film topped the British Film Institute’s much-respected Greatest Films poll, which it has been conducting once every decade since 1952.
Vertigo managed to end the reign of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, which has topped the list since 1962.
“I was a little surprised,” said Nick James, the editor of Sight & Sound magazine, which carries out the poll. “I remember hoping last time that Citizen Kane would get knocked off and it never happened, so yes, I was surprised. And delighted.”
Vertigo’s achievement is all the more impressive because the poll, which is considered one of the most authoritative, was bigger and more international this year than ever before, with 846 critics and writers having their say.
James said Vertigo’s victory reflected changes in the culture of film criticism. “Cinephilia has changed in that there’s less of a massive respect for the all-singing, all-dancing, every technological achievement in one film kind of film, like Citizen Kane.
“People are moving towards more personal films, ones that they can react to personally in their own lives, and Vertigo is that kind of film, especially if you watch it more than once. It is a film that grows and grows on you.”
“It feels like a much more contemporary film than Citizen Kane, which is a lot of bombast and is very theatrical and slightly hammy by modern acting standards. Vertigo is about our inner life.”
Third in the critics’ list is Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, the 1953 Japanese drama. “I watched this film just three days ago and I couldn’t stop crying,” said James. “It tells you more about family life than any recent Hollywood film, I would suggest, even how we live today. It is very poignant and sad and heartbreaking and fabulous – it is a masterpiece.”
Ozu’s film came top in a parallel poll among directors – 358 of them participated including the likes of Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen and Mike Leigh. In the directors’ poll, Tokyo Story won over Citizen Kane and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in joint second. They were followed by 81/2; Taxi Driver; Apocalypse Now; The Godfather and Vertigo in joint seventh place; then Tarkovsky’s Mirror and, in 10th, place Bicycle Thieves, which topped the first critics’ poll in 1952.
The success of Vertigo reflects the remarkable change in fortune Hitchcock has had with critics, some of whom once looked down on him as little more than a Hollywood thriller director.
To be fair to the 1958 Guardian critic, he found a lot to like in Vertigo and praised the director’s mastery of suspense. But he added: “This does not, indeed, mean that Vertigo is really a worthwhile film. Even Hitchcock’s mastery cannot obliterate its essential dottiness or banish impatience during its second unnecessary hour.”
These days the BFI, which is currently showing a retrospective of the director’s films, believes Hitchcock should be studied in schools alongside Shakespeare and Dickens.
Although a British director tops the poll, there are precious few British films in the top 100. Some might argue that 2001: A Space Odyssey is a British film – ranked 6th – but the first unarguably British film is Carol Reed’s The Third Man at 73rd.
The contemporary love affair with silent films, after the success of The Artist, continues with two new entries in the top 10: Dziga Vertov’s avant garde documentary Man With a Movie Camera at number 8, and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc in 9th place. There is a paucity of offerings from the last 20 years, with the only ones making an impact being Wong Kar-Wei’s 2000 film In The Mood For Love – at 24 – and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, from 2001, at 28.
Full results of the poll will be published in the next issue of Sight & Sound, out on Saturday, as it celebrates its 80th birthday with a revamped look and a new digital edition archive.
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httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sG_tQ_t5dw
On October 12 1954, Alfred Hitchcock was shooting on location in Morrisville, Vermont, when the overhead bracket supporting a VistaVision camera snapped. Weighing 850lb – the same as a car – the camera unit dropped through the air, swiped the director’s shoulder and rolled over, pinning a crew member briefly to the ground. It was the nearest the master himself came to violent death: just a few inches to the side and it would have smashed that unmistakable domed head like a peach and provided cinema theorists with any number of irresistible, macabre metaphors. Hitchcock calmly ordered filming to continue with a replacement camera. Later he packed up, however, declaring himself unsatisfied with the weather in Vermont, and moved the shoot back into the studio in Los Angeles.
The film was The Trouble With Harry. Perhaps the near-miss was a bad omen, because Hitchcock’s most experimental, subversive and uncompromisingly strange black comedy – about people in a small town who can’t decide what to do with a dead body – was a catastrophic commercial failure. It lost half a million dollars at the box office and was unavailable for decades after release. The colossal Hitchcock retrospective just getting under way at London’s BFI Southbank has already elicited many elegant articles, endlessly rehearsing the accepted canon: Psycho, Vertigo, North By Northwest, The Lady Vanishes, The Birds … and so on – but The Trouble With Harry doesn’t make the cut.
This exclusion feels more pronounced in the context of discussion of Hitchcock as a surrealist. Surrealist moments or elements such as the Dalí-designed dream-sequence in Spellbound get a lot of attention, understandably; but The Trouble With Harry gets passed over. Hitchcock’s most completely surreal achievement happened behind his cheerleaders’ backs: a film whose eerie dream procedure is pursued from the opening titles to the final credits. Hitchcock wryly called his box-office flop an “expensive self-indulgence”; to Truffaut, he said that “the humour is quite rich”. Audiences came along to it the way Broadway theatregoers might sit down to something by Agatha Christie or Ira Levin. Instead, Hitchcock gave them his Waiting for Godot. Now the moment has come to reclaim The Trouble With Harry as radical absurdist cinema.
It was adapted from a novella by British author Jack Trevor Story, by one of Hitchcock’s favoured screenwriters, John Michael Hayes (Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much). The action was transplanted from its original English countryside setting to a folksy, gently autumnal Vermont. It begins with a scene of intense, captivating strangeness. A little boy runs through woodland with a toy gun and, in a world of his own, pretends to fire it. He then freezes rigid, terrified, on hearing real gunfire. It is the only time in the movie that anyone looks scared. Are real grownups firing back at him? Has he somehow magicked them into being? All the while Bernard Herrmann’s unsettling score offers premonitions of his Psycho theme. The boy hears shouts in the undergrowth, and then finds a man’s dead body with blood trickling from what looks like a bullet hole in the head.
But wait. The body isn’t sprawled on the ground, arms and legs flung wide, the way it surely would be in an undisturbed crime scene. It is stretched out, neat and proper, as though laid in an invisible coffin, with polished shoes and a slightly dandyish suit and tie. Twice, Hitchcock gives us the foreshortened camera angle with the kid looking down the length of the corpse, and it looks as if the great big feet are protruding from his little frame.
Subsequent events show that a number of people have a reason to feel uneasy (the word “guilty” isn’t quite right) about the deceased, whose name turns out to be Harry Worp. There is Jennifer, played by Shirley Maclaine in her first movie role, a pretty young widow, mother of the little boy. There is the roguish retired sea captain, Wiles (Edmund Gwenn); Mildred Natwick, a John Ford regular, plays the simpering spinster Miss Gravely with whom Captain Wiles is enamoured. John Forsythe (who as a silver-haired older man would later find fame as Blake Carrington in the 80s TV soap Dynasty) gives a laconic, Bogartian performance as a handsome artist called Sam Marlow who falls in love with Jennifer.
Each of them prods the corpse, or frowns at it, or sighs over it, or worries that it will cause trouble – or, in Jennifer’s case, laughs with unfeigned relief and delight at the sight of it. (That nice Shirley Maclaine!) But nobody goes into shock and astonishment and immediately calls the cops, the way they would in real life, or in a conventional movie. A conventional movie would introduce a police inspector, who would interrogate all these people, and their connections with the deceased would be made apparent to the audience that way.
Not here. Eerily, weirdly, each character is basically unconcerned about that most horrible of things, a dead body. They discuss having tea over the body. They discuss their love lives over the body. (Very recent attempts at assault and rape are remembered with a detached smile.) Jennifer giggles heartlessly; Sam draws the cadaver. Are they all monsters, or suffering from mass psychosis? No. Hitchcock’s genius is to keep strictly to the bad-dream logic. These are all nice people in a silly spot of bother, behaving as if they are in Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St Louis. They walk and talk and move around the screen like lucid somnambulists.
What Hitchcock did in The Trouble With Harry was to remove the suspense: an extraordinary act of formal daring. (His Rope, made in 1948, centred around a dead body, too, but here there was a far greater sense of suspense: the two students are desperate that the body concealed in their flat remains a secret.) In Harry, even the arrival of the deputy sheriff and the doctor in the final scene is not suspenseful or climactic: more a woozy, bizarre comedy starring people who look like human beings but aren’t. They should be astonished at the body in the bath; they are perplexed but calm.
The nearest comparison is probably with Eugene Ionesco’s play Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It (written in 1954, the same year) about a playwright and switchboard operator who have to deal with a dead body in their apartment that is continually growing. In the cinema, the nearest in spirit could be Luis Buñuel’s 1972 film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie – but even there, the strangeness is partly explained by dreams. In Harry, everyone is wide awake.
Hitchcock doesn’t personally appear in the film. Or does he? Is he, in fact, tipping us a sly wink with Sam, the misunderstood artist whose modern experimental canvases are sold by the local postmistress? She hangs one the wrong way up. With an indulgent chuckle, Sam turns it the right way round – but isn’t the least bit cross. At the time, no one knew which way up to hang The Trouble With Harry. It’s time to take another look.
• The Genius of Hitchcock is at the BFI Southbank, London SE1 until 30 November. The Trouble With Harry will screen on 20, 25 and 28 September. Details:
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[caption id=”flickrImage_2” align=”alignleft” width=”356” caption=”Alfred Hitchcock Presents © by twm1340”]
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Play on
Why are the pop-based Ivor Novello awards nominating far more interesting film scores than any other awards body? Their three contenders for best original film score, announced last week, were: The First Grader, by Alex Heffes; We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood; and Life in a Day, by Harry Gregson-Williams and the great Matthew Herbert. These are inventive, creative and powerful modern film scores – far more vital, exciting and reflective of what’s going on in film score composition in the UK at the moment than the usual boring nods for, say, Howard Shore and Alexandre Desplat.
Silent Hitch
Trash got a real treat last week, attending the launch of BFI Southbank’s forthcoming Hitchcock season. The blockbuster event, designed to coincide with the Olympics and the cultural Olympiad, will show all of Hitchcock’s films, but the jewels in the BFI’s crown are surely the nine restored silent films, polished to a new shine and now with several of them given modern music scores. The composers of the new scores were in attendance last week, including Nitin Sawhney (who’s done The Lodger), Soweto Kinch (who gave a live accompaniment on solo sax to a clip of The Ring) and Daniel Patrick Cohen, a precocious young Royal Academy graduate who, at 24, has written a new score for Hitchcock’s first feature film, The Pleasure Garden, made in 1925, when Hitch was also in his mid-20s. It’s a mouthwatering musical prospect — even just seeing brief clips of these restored films, given the new frame of a contemporary music setting, was like discovering that there’s a cool, young, British indie film-maker in town and his name is Alfred Hitchcock.
Chauvinist? Moi?
Surely there must be a film made by a woman somewhere in the world that the Cannes selectors deem good enough to make the official selection? Last year, it seemed progress in this regard had been made when four films by women, including Lynne Ramsay, were picked. Despite another tantalising selection for 2012, Thierry Frémaux has made a backwards step in not finding a single female-directed movie to include, and one can’t help feeling that an important way of looking at the world has been denied exposure on the greatest of film stages. That said, I’m still hopping with excitement at seeing such a promising bunch of films. I’m most looking forward to Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone and Gomorrah-director Matteo Garrone’s Reality, closely followed by Michael Haneke’s Amour and Lee Daniels’s The Paperboy, mainly because John Cusack is in it and he told me last month he thought it was going to be “very dark and quite excellent”.
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Nicole Kidman is set to play Grace Kelly, the Oscar-winning Hollywood actor who gave it all up for a life as princess of Monaco, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Grace of Monaco, by screenwriter Arash Amel, was on the 2011 Black List of the best unproduced scripts in Hollywood. It follows the format of recent films such as My Week with Marilyn and The King’s Speech, both of which examined a famous 20th-century figure by focusing on a particular moment in their lives. The story on this occasion centres on a six-month period in 1962 when French leader Charles de Gaulle and Monaco’s Prince Rainier III were at odds over the opulent principality’s standing as a tax haven. Kelly, then 33 and in the first flush of her royal career, was said to have been instrumental behind the scenes in solving the political impasse.
The film has the air of classic Oscar-bait and is being directed by Olivier Dahan, whose Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose saw Marion Cotillard take home the Academy Award for best actress in 2008. Kidman won the same Oscar in 2003 for her role as Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours, and was nominated separately for the best actress and best supporting actress prizes in 2002 and 2011.
Dahan’s film is likely to follow Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, which centres on Kelly’s famed collaborator and production of his iconic 1960 horror, into cinemas. Anthony Hopkins is to play the British director in the latter film, with Scarlet Johansson as Janet Leigh. Kelly starred in three films for Hitchcock, Dial M For Murder, Rear Window and To Catch a Thief, before quitting Hollywood to marry Rainier in 1955. She died in an a car accident in 1982 and her funeral was watched on television by 30 million people.
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A new film version of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel, Rebecca, is in the works, according to Variety. The classic mystery, which was made famous on the big screen by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940, will be penned by Eastern Promises writer Steven Knight for Dreamworks and Working Title.
Rebecca sees a young woman attempt to fill the shoes of the titular deceased wife of rich aristocrat, Maxim de Winter, to the chagrin of his sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers. Hitchcock’s version, which opened the first Berlin film festival in 1951, starred Sir Laurence Olivier as de Winter and Judith Anderson as Mrs Danvers. Joan Fontaine was Hitchcock’s choice for the innocent, vulnerable victim.
Du Maurier’s tale has had many stage and TV adaptations and has inspired two Bollywood movies – 1964’s Kohraa and Anamika, directed by Anant Mahadevan and released in 2008.
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