Louis Jourdan, star of Gigi, dies at 95 in Beverly Hills, California

Producer David Selznick brought Louis Jordan to America where he featured in Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947).  The darkly handsome Jourdan, who had been active in the French Resistance before becoming prominent in post-War French cinema, played the valet and reluctant lover of Mrs Paradine (Alida Valli).  (Selznick was also responsible for enticing Italian star Valli to America, to play the beautiful, enigmatic Maddalena Paradine.  Valli died in 2006.)

Jourdan was born in Marseilles in 1919, one of three sons of Henri Gendre, a hotelier who organised the Cannes film festival after the Second World War.  After Jourdan completed The Paradine Case, he starred with Joan Fontaine in Max Ophuls's Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948).  Another master director with whom he (twice) worked was Vincente Minnelli: first in 1949 (Madame Bovary, opposite Jennifer Jones), then in 1958 (Gigi, opposite Leslie Caron).

Jourdan's wife died last year.  Their son, Louis Henry, died in 1981 from a drug overdose.

Tippi Hedren pays tribute to Rod Taylor, dead at 84

Australian actor Rod Taylor, who co-starred with Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), has died at his home in Los Angeles, a few days short of his 85th birthday.  Hedren said in a statement: 'Rod was a great pal to me and a real strength ... He was one of the most fun people I have ever met, thoughtful and classy.'

Sydney-born Taylor was inspired to be an actor after seeing Laurence Olivier on tour.  He joined Peter Finch's Mercury Theatre, and his first film role was in the Australian movie King of the Coral Sea (1954).  His first leading role was in The Time Machine (George Pal, 1960), adapted from the novel by H.G. Wells.  After making The Birds for Hitchcock, Taylor appeared in such films as Jack Cardiff and John Ford's Young Cassidy (1965) - he played Cassidy, i.e., the young Irish playwright Sean O'Casey - and The Train Robbers (Burt Kennedy, 1973).  His last Australian film role was in the often-hilarious outback comedy Welcome to Woop Woop (Stephan Elliott, 1998).  In 2009 Quentin Tarantino coaxed him out of retirement for a cameo as Winston Churchill in Inglourious Basterds.

Strong-jawed Taylor thought he 'wasn't really big enough to be a really tough guy' and at times felt miscast.  'I was a little bit, I don't know, sometimes insecure playing all that kind of thing.'

Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939) restored

2014 is the 75th anniversary of the original theatrical release of Jamaica Inn, which Hitchcock made for Mayflower Pictures in England before he left for Hollywood.  To mark the anniversary, the Cohen Film Collection/Rohauer Library is combining with the BFI to take a 4K-restored print on tour.  Venues in October include the New York Film Festival and the Chicago Film Festival.  A DVD and Blu-Ray release is scheduled for 12 May, 2015.  Running time is 98-99 minutes (the same as the Kino Video version at 98 minutes).

Wondering about 4K?  The high-definition digital prints of films we see in cinemas are rated at 2K, with an image made up of just over two million pixels.  However, there is a standard beyond 2K that is used for scanning older films, called 4K, which gives about eight million pixels per image.  The 4K standard allows for the manipulation of picture elements at a level far superior to even the 2K format.

Below: Leslie Banks and Charles Laughton in the restored Jamaica Inn.

Coming!  A stage version of Hitchcock's North by Northwest!

The world premiere of North by Northwest onstage is scheduled to run from 1 June to 4 July, 2015, at the Playhouse, the Arts Centre, in Melbourne, Australia.  Planes, trains, automobiles, and a mountain, are lined up, with some reliance on the wizardry of 'ingenious technical solutions', according to artistic director of the Melbourne Theatre Company, Brett Sheehy.  The production, now in development, has been licensed by Warner Brothers, and is intended by its producers to 'have a life outside Australia'.

Melbourne-based writer Carolyn Burns, working with director Simon Phillips, will employ 'a clear theatrical vocabulary separate from a cinematic one', says Sheehy.  'I think the production will join The 39 Steps and a handful of others as one of the great film-to-stage adaptations of our times.'

For more information about the MTC 2015 line-up, click here: http://dailyreview.crikey.com.au/mid-century-and-beyond-mtc-2015-season-announced/11544

Norman Lloyd was born on 8 November, 1914, in Jersey City, New Jersey.  His family was Jewish.  At age 99, he is still going strong - although he admits his tennis isn't all it used to be.  For 75 years he was married to Peggy, who died in 2011.  Best known to audiences as the villain Fry who falls off the Statue of Liberty in Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942) and as the kindly Dr Auschlander on the 1982-88 NBC medical series 'St Elsewhere', Lloyd began as a child actor in the 1920s and appeared on Broadway with a young Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre in the late 1930s.

Lloyd worked with some of the directors from the golden age of Hollywood, becoming good friends with many, including Charlie Chaplin (Limelight), Jean Renoir (The Southerner) and of course, Hitchcock.  Besides the title-role in Saboteur, Lloyd appeared as the patient Mr Garmes in Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).  In 1957, when the new series 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' needed an associate producer to assist Joan Harrison, Hitchcock was warned against Lloyd because he was friendly with several people on the Hollywood blacklist.  (Lloyd was a lifelong liberal who mixed in Hollywood's left-wing community.)  Undeterred, Hitchcock simply said, 'I want him.'

Documentary about famous Hitchcock/Truffaut interview to feature major present-day directors

A French-US documentary, focussed on the interview and resulting book 'Hitchcock/Truffaut' (originally 'Le cinema selon Hitchcock', 1966), will be shot this year and released in spring 2015.  Director is New York-based writer/filmmaker/critic Kent Jones (whose last documentary was 2010's A Letter to Elia, co-written and co-directed with Martin Scorsese), from a script Jones is writing with Serge Toubiana (Truffaut authority and director of the Cinematheque Française).

Filmmakers to be interviewed for the feature documentary include Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson, David Fincher, Brian De Palma, James Gray, Richard Linklater, the Dardenne brothers (Jean-Pierre and Luc), Olivier Assayas, and Arnaud Despleschin.

'It is going to be a film about film-making,' Jones says.  'It is about the practice of film-making as a translation of emotion into images.'  There will be 'a heavy but pointed' use of clips.  The project has the blessing of the families of both Hitchcock and François Truffaut.

Meanwhile, Jones is also planning his fiction feature debut, to be called It Never Entered My Mind, for filming next year in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.  It is described as 'a story of a couple and the brother of the husband - and a terrible act that happens between the three of them and how they don't talk about it.'

[Thanks to MA for information used here.]

Dutch director Diederik Van Rooijen has been hired by Hollywood producer Michael Bay to helm a new version of Daphne du Maurier's 1952 short story.  This version, originally announced in 2007, will probably be set in the story's Cornwall, England, location - Hitchcock's 1963 film, starring Tippi Hedren, moved the location to Bodega Bay, California.

The new version is not to be confused with a poorly-received 1994 sequel to Hitchcock's film, The Birds 2: Land's End, which director Rick Rosenthal ('Alan Smithee' in the film's credits) disowned.

Naomi Watts is 'reportedly being lined up' to play the role taken by Hedren in Hitchcock's film  ('The Independent', 13 March).  If that's true, it conflicts with other reports about how this new version will stick to the Daphne du Maurier tale (which has no major female characters).                                  .

Strangers on a Train as a stage play

However, Billington does have reservations about the production.  'The problem is that what starts as fast-moving noirish narrative shifts uneasily into Freudian casebook. ...  [Also,] although the show looks good, the acting is a more mixed bag.  Laurence Fox is rather stolidly cast as Guy, suggesting a house-prefect drawn into some dirty business by one of his raffish juniors.  Jack Huston looks more at ease as the serpentine, psychotic, white-suited Bruno and Miranda Raison is all cool, high-society poise as Guy's wife. ...  I just worry that commercial plays, like musicals, are becoming ever more parasitically dependent on the box-office pull of existing novels and films.  Or even, as here, turned into a strange hybrid [of stage- and film-effects].'

Actress Joan Fontaine, co-star of Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941), passed away at her residence, 'Villa Fontana', Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, on 15 December.  She was 96.  She and her sister, actress Olivia de Havilland (1916- ), first visited Carmel with their father in 1933.  Later, footage for Rebecca was shot there, standing in for the English coastline.  Although the two sisters famously often feuded, on learning of Joan's death de Havilland issued a statement saying that she was 'shocked and saddened'.  Both sisters won Academy Awards: Joan for Suspicion, Olivia for To Each His Own (Mitchell Leisen, 1946) and The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949).

The story of how Joan - in 1938, still a relative unknown - fell into contention for her role in Rebecca is worth recounting.  According to her biography, 'No Bed of Roses' (1978), she attended one evening a dinner given at Charlie Chaplin's house, where Paulette Godard presided, and where Joan found herself 'seated next to a heavyset, bespectacled gentleman who seemed particularly knowledgeable and pleasant.  Soon we were chattering about the current best sellers.  I mentioned that I had just read Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and thought it would make an excellent movie.  My dinner partner gazed at me through his lenses.  "I just bought the novel today.  My name is David Selznick."  Who was I and would I like to test for [the film's female lead]?  Would I!'

It may be true, as David Thomson claims (in 'The New Biographical Dictionary of Film', 2002), that most of Joan's films, after her early successes for Selznick and Hitchcock, were 'disappointing'.  (Nonetheless they included The Constant Nymph [Edmund Goulding, 1943], Jane Eyre [Robert Stevenson, 1944], Letter From An Unknown Woman [Max Ophuls, 1948], and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt [Fritz Lang, 1956].)  Joan herself owned up to lacking an 'obsessive career drive' - yet she was always fiercely independent as a woman.  It says much that during her lifetime she was a licenced pilot, champion balloonist, prize-winning tuna fisherman, and an accomplished golfer - as well as a licenced interior decorator and a Cordon Bleu cook.

New, fuller version of Hitchcock's concentration camp documentary to be released

Jewish businessman and film producer Sidney Bernstein had been a founder member of the Film Society (1924).  During World War II he served as films advisor to the Ministry of Information and SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) in Britain.  In early 1945, when the idea was mooted for 'a systematic record' of the newly-liberated concentration camps - using captured footage and film shot by the Allies themselves - Bernstein summoned to London his longtime friend, Alfred Hitchcock.  The idea was that Hitchcock would act in a supervisory capacity and contribute specific suggestions for a documentary about the horrors of the camps, whose possible audience might include the German people.  A treatment and script (which relied heavily on narration) were prepared by two writers who had witnessed the atrocities of Bergen-Belsen firsthand:  Richard Crossman (later a Labour Member of Parliament) and Colin Wills (an Australian war correspondent).  Film editors Stewart McAllister (famous for his work with Humphrey Jennings) and Peter Tanner (who would later edit such feature films as Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Cruel Sea) set to work under Hitchcock's guidance.  But the film took longer to compile than originally envisaged.  By August 1945, when the perceived need for it had already begun to wane, Hitchcock returned to the United States.  Shortly afterwards, funding was suspended with only five of six reels finished.  The cans of film remained inaccessible on shelves in the Imperial War Museum for nearly forty years.

But in 1984 the rusting cans surfaced again.  The incomplete film was taken out and actor Trevor Howard was hired to record the original narration, which was fitted to the five remaining reels.  Memory of the Camps (as it was now called) was shown on American PBS in 1985 and later elsewhere (e.g., on SBS-TV in Australia).  It can be viewed on YouTube here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdUq993AsQc 

Now the London 'Independent' newspaper reports that the film has been further restored, using digital technology, and that the missing sixth reel has been 'pieced together'.  The narration has been re-recorded with a new actor and the film given a new title (both still to be disclosed).  In addition, a separate documentary, Night Will Fall, has been made to accompany the original film.  It is directed by André Singer (executive producer of The Act of Killing) and has Stephen Frears (director of Philomena) as 'directorial advisor'.  Further information here: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/alfred-hitchcocks-unseen-holocaust-documentary-to-be-screened-9044945.html

Bruce Dern on working with Hitchcock

From a couple of sources come these insights provided by veteran actor Bruce Dern while talking to the press about his new film, Alexander Payne's Nebraska.  Asked about his films for Hitchcock, so many decades ago, Dern was unrestrained in his enthusiasm.  'I wish I could have done ten more movies with Mr Hitchcock.'  While making Family Plot (1976), in which he starred, Dern took every opportunity to sit alongside the director and question him.  They conversed frankly.  Dern: 'I asked him why he hired me for [the film] and he said, "Because Mr PAK-ee-no [Al Pacino] wanted a million dollars."'  Dern persisted with his question, and this time Hitch said: '"I hired you to be amusing.  With you and Miss Harris [Barbara Harris], I never know how you're going to say a line or react to someone else's line.  You amuse me and you will amuse the audience.  It's meant to be an amusing picture."'

Family Plot proved to be Hitchcock's final film.  To the suggestion that Hitch was in such poor health that Dern himself ended up calling most of the shots, the actor swore that this was never the case.  'Hitch was there every day at nine in the morning and he stayed until seven.'  Affectionately, Dern remembered Hitch on the first day of shooting - walking around and shaking hands and thanking every crew member by their first name.  'By their first name!  On the first day!  Now how about that?'  

[Information supplied by SR - whom we thank - and from an interview with Dern published in 'The Guardian', recommended by DF.  To read the full interview,click here: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/28/bruce-dern-alexander-payne-nebraska.]

Year-long season of Hitchcock films and events, in situ, continues in the London Borough of Waltham Forest

'Hitchcock's East End' consists of screenings and unique events designed to explore Alfred Hitchcock's connection to the area in London where he was born and grew up.  (As we know, he was born in Leytonstone above his dad's greengrocer's shop - now the site of a chicken shop and petrol station.)  Two organisations - Create London and Barbican Film - will together present the screenings and events in selected locations, all of them deliberately unorthodox but apt.  For example, the recent screening of Vertigo took place in the atmospheric surroundings provided by St Margaret's Church, Leytonstone.  (For photo, and further information, click here: http://www.createlondon.org/event/hitchcocks-east-end/.)  The screening of Rebecca on 1 December, 2013, will be held in the 'spooky' Leytonstone School, and will be introduced by film critic Catherine Bray.  After that, screenings of North by Northwest (at a location on Hackney Marshes, no doubt invocative of Prairie Stop in the film) and The Birds (linked to an ornithological walk in the Waltham Forest area) are scheduled - with more screenings and events to follow throughout 2014.  The entire project is part of a program of events leading to the opening of a new cinema, the Empire, at the end of 2014, returning a cinema to the borough after a ten year absence.  [Thanks to ST for alerting us to information in this item.]

• Related news.  ST tells us that the campaign to stop the old (c. 1930) EMD Cinema in Walthamstow from being turned into a church has been successful.  For earlier item about the campaign, scroll down to "Actors campaign to save Hitchcock-connected East London cinema".

Death of Hitchcock associate Hilton Green (1929-2013)

Hilton Green, who died on 2nd October at his home in Pasadena, California, was a respected Assistant Director, Production Manager, and Producer, and generally a much liked man.   (We can vouch for that - the Australian director of Psycho II, Richard Franklin, spoke highly to us of Hilton.)  He was Assistant Director on Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and - uncredited - on Marnie (1964).  In television, he was Assistant Director on the popular shows 'Leave it to Beaver', 'Wagon Train', 'Dragnet', and 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents'.  Eventually he became a prolific film producer, of such films as Psycho II (1983), 16 Candles (1984), Psycho III (1986), Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990), and Encino Man (1992).  [Thanks to AK for alerting us to information used here.]     

Rare script of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934; 1943) offered for sale

A bookshop in New York City is offering what it describes as 'the screenplay for the original 1934 [The Man Who Knew Too Much], issued here for an intended 1943 remake by Hitchcock and David O. Selznick which was never produced'.  Asking price: $1750.

The bookshop is: Clouds Hill Books, P.O. Box 1004, Village Station, New York, NY 10014, 212-414-4432.  Email address for more information: <cloudshill@cloudshillbooks.com>.

Composer for Hitchcock - and opening date

Keeping our readers updated on the forthcoming film Hitchcock, adapted from the book by Stephen Rebello called 'Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho', has prompted several News items appearing here over the past months (indeed years).

Now we can announce that the film's composer is the gifted Danny Elfmann, and that a recent preview of the completed film in Southern California drew an extraordinarily high 'approval' rating from the 600 audience members.  The film is set to open in U.S. cinemas on 23 November.  It stars Sir Anthony Hopkins and Dame Helen Mirren, and is directed by Sacha Gervasi.

• An advance premiere of Hitchcock was held in Hollywood on 1 November.  Some reviews have now appeared.  Here's one from London's 'The Guardian':

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/nov/02/hitchcock-first-look-review?fb=optOut

Caveat emptor.  New blu-ray Hitchcocks are reportedly disasters

Let the potential buyer beware.  First, last week, there was this about the re-done Frenzy credits, including typographical and spelling errors, first spotted by previewer Nick Wrigley at enthusiasm.org:  http://enthusiasm.org/post/31104514441

Two days later, the same site added that the film proper now contains highly distracting DVNR (Digital Video Noise Reduction) spoilage, so that, for example, the celebrated prolonged shot of the doorway of Babs's apartment has become both intolerably grainy and looks as if someone had hit the 'Pause' button on their remote: http://enthusiasm.org/post/31285985246

Meanwhile, other Hitchcock titles in the same Universal blu-ray package are reported to be 'shagged' (as one professional previewer unofficially put it about the condition of Family Plot).  Those titles include Family Plot and Marnie - and Vertigo.  Writing about the latter, previewer Jeffrey Wells at hollywood-elsewhere.com asked: 'Why is [James] Stewart's brown suit brownish violet or brownish purple? Why are Stewart and those other guys wearing suits during the inquest hearing that are madly, wildly, psychedelically blue?'  For more, go here: http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2012/09/still_screwed_u_1.php

• Some good news is that Universal have now delayed the release date of the Hitchcock package until 30 October 2012 (Region 1) to make 'corrections'.  To read more, click here: http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2012/09/hitchcock_blura.php

Hitchcock-inspired art

Apologies that we learned about this fascinating exhibit - testifying to the wide and perennial appeal of Hitchcock and his films - too late to inform our California readers before it closed on May 5th, 2012.  It ran at Gallery 1988 in Venice, California, and featured a hundred or so items.  The films depicted most often were, by our count, The Birds, Psycho - and (hooray!) The Trouble With Harry.  Illustrated below is "'You'll Never Make Sense of Arnie'" by Joe Scarano.

Alma Reville retrospective

The 2012 Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, to run from 23-30 June, will this year include a strand devoted to Alma Reville's career - both the films she worked on with her husband, Alfred Hitchcock, and several others.

As the Ritrovato newletter puts it:  'Alma had a particular talent for continuity, editing and story structure, and this is evident [both] in the films she made with her husband, like Murder! (1930), and those she made independently of [him], such as The Constant Nymph (1928), The First Born (1928), [and] After the Verdict (1929).'  The Alma Reville strand of the Ritrovato is curated by Bryony Dixon of the BFI National Archive.

For more information, click here (especially if you can read Italian): http://www.cinetecadibologna.it/     

Further news on Hitchcock: Scarlett Johansson to play Janet Leigh

Scarlett Johansson (The Avengers, Lost in Translation)  will portray actress Janet Leigh in Fox Searchlight's project, now called simply Hitchcock, a film based on Stephen Rebello's non-fiction book 'Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho' (1990).  And James D'Arcy will play Leigh's Psycho co-star, Anthony Perkins.  Darcy was last seen in W.E., directed by Madonna.

Rebello's book analyses the background and production of the classic Hitchcock shocker, Psycho (1960).  The new project is said to be a biopic that sheds light on the difficulties Hitchcock encountered during the making of his film.  (For earlier announcements about the project, whose main stars are Sir Anthony Hopkins - photo below - and Dame Helen Mirren, readers can scroll down this page.)

• Update.  Further cast members have been announced.  They include Jessica Biel (playing Vera Miles), Toni Collette (as Hitchcock's long-time assistant Peggy Robertson), and Danny Huston (as Alma Hitchcock's friend, screenwriter Whitfield Cook).  A further coup: the film will be photographed by Jeff Cronenweth (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Social Network, Fight Club - all directed by David Fincher, no less).

• More.  Shooting began on Friday April 13th, 2012 - reportedly by design, for Friday 13th was always Hitchcock's lucky day!  We are told that the first few days' footage 'looks and sounds absolutely thrilling'.  Titles-designer Saul Bass will be played by Wallace Langham.  But still no news who will play composer Bernard Herrmann - if indeed he features in the film at all!

'Rebecca the Musical' to open on Broadway in April

After 'Rebecca's 2006 premiere and subsequent 3-year run in Vienna, the show opened all across Europe and in Japan, with continued great success.

In 2009, Christopher Hampton agreed to write an English libretto in collaboration with the musical's original author, Michael Kunze.  The story of 'Rebecca' is of course based on the much-loved 1938 novel by Daphne du Maurier, filmed by Hitchcock in 1940.  Now the musical is scheduled to open on Broadway on 22 April, 2012.

For further information, please copy this URL into your browser: http://wizzley.com/rebecca-musical-on-broadway-in-2012/

The Lady Vanishes now on Blu-ray

Criterion have released Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938) on Blu-ray.  (Simultaneously they have released Ernst Lubitsch's 1935 classic Design for Living.)  The disc features a 1080p transfer, and the extras are as previously included with the Criterion DVD of the film, including an audio commentary by film historian Bruce Eder. 

Death of Israel Baker, Psycho violinist

As concertmaster of the orchestra that recorded Bernard Herrmann's all-strings score for Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), classical violinist Israel Baker helped create a seminal piece of film culture.  Sadly, he died at his home in California on Christmas Day, 2011, following a stroke.  He was 92.

In a recent tribute, classical music expert Jim Svejda called Baker 'one of the great violinists of the 20th century'.  Not only was his work heard in several dozen movie scores beside Psycho, but his brilliant playing tecnique was recognised by recording companies and audiences, particularly of chamber music.  Svejda cited the 'benchmark recording' of Igor Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat, conducted by the composer and featuring Baker. 

Approximately 300-400 production sketches for Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950) were recently sold at Bonhams, London, where they fetched £28,800.  They exist as rough pencil sketches on 130 loose sheets in a faded spring binder.  They had been stored in an attic in Dorset, England, and belonged to Jack Martin (1899-1969) who had worked on Stage Fright as first assistant director.

There isn't any question that the sketches were used during the film's production.  What is in question is who drew them?  Bonhams claim that it was Hitchcock himself, but it seems more likely that they were the work of professional artist Mentor Heubner (1917-2001) who did similar work for Hitchcock on Strangers on a Train (1951), I Confess (1953), and perhaps Rope (1948).  Notoriously, Heubner also did the faux Hitchcock storyboards for North by Northwest (1959) that Hitchcock commissioned for publicity purposes after the fact, i.e., after the film was made.

For more information and to see some of the sketches, visit the Bonhams website (though it's inactive as we post this notice): www.bonhams.com/eur/auction/18847/lot/175/     

Death of playwright/screenplay writer Arthur Laurents (1918-2011)

The man who wrote the book of the musical and film West Side Story, and who scripted Hitchcock's Rope (1948), has died in New York City where he was born.  Arthur Laurents wrote or co-wrote scripts for such films as Rope, Max Ophuls's Caught (1949), Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse (1958), and the ballet drama The Turning Point (Herbert Ross, 1977).  Laurents's play 'The Time of the Cuckoo', set in Venice, starred Shirley Booth on stage and Katherine Hepburn on film (David Lean's Summer Madness, 1955).  Laurents was gay.  At the time of Rope, he had an affair with actor Farley Granger (see below); his partner for 52 years was aspiring actor Tom Hatcher, who died in 2006.  Of Hitchcock, Laurents wrote in his memoirs 'Original Story By' (2000) that he 'was fun to work for and fun to be with.  He was a tough businessman; otherwise, he lived in the land of kink. ... Homosexuality was at the center of Rope; its three main characters were homosexuals.  Thus [Hitchcock's] seeming obsession.'

The BBC obituary is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13307873 

Death of actor Farley Granger

Farley Granger, star of the Hitchcock films Rope (1948) and Strangers on a Train (1951), has died at his Manhattan home, aged 85.  His other films included Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night (1949) and Luchino Visconti's Senso (1954).

In 2007, Granger published with his partner, Robert Calhoun, an entertaining book of memoirs, 'Include Me Out: My Life from Goldwyn to Broadway'.  Hitchcockians will learn there that Farley considered James Stewart not quite right for Rope, because he was too nice to realise the darker side of the character Rupert.  'It might have been interesting to see what an actor like James Mason ... would have brought to the part.'  Farley also agreed with Hitchcock that Ruth Roman (a Warners contract-player whom the studio insisted on) was miscast in Strangers on a Train.  'Hitch had wanted the then-little-known young actress Grace Kelly for the part.'

To read the BBC obituary for Farley Granger, click here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12894264          

Rare photos and other Hitchcock items found

The photograph below is one of 24 of Alfred Hitchcock in a set of 38 taken probably in 1966 by press photographer Renate Dabrowski of Frankfurt, Germany.  The photographs are owned by US art dealer SB and may soon go on sale.  The identity of the lady in the photograph is not known.  Can any of our readers help?  (Note.  Hitchcock visited Frankfurt several times, including in 1966 and 1972.  Of course, he had worked in Germany in the 1920s.  Frankfurt seems the likely location of the photographs, although one of them shows in the background a jet of Austrian Airlines and several others show Hitchcock standing next to stewardesses from the same airline.  So it's possible that the photographs were taken in Austria.)

The story of how SB acquired the photographs is fascinating.  As she tells it: 'Many years ago I bought a box of miscellaneous items at Abell's Auctions in Los Angeles.  The box was one of a number of boxes that were up for auction as abandoned storage, only this one had "Classical tapes" written on the side and since I love classical music I figured I had little to lose.  It was only after I opened the box and found the photos as well as the reel-to-reel tapes, including one that wasn't of music but of a more personal nature, that I realized that they had actually belonged to Hitchcock himself.  To be honest, I never played that particular tape through and I think it got tossed in my move from LA to San Francisco.  I remember that the selection of music on the tapes was in fact quite eclectic with quite a few modern composers as well [as classical ones], in particular John Cage which I found surprising at the time.'

[We thank SB for very kindly providing the above information and the photograph.]

Still coming: Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho: The Movie

Another Hitch sculpture

We have previously reported on at least a couple of sculptures of Alfred Hitchcock that have been made (scroll down to items "For sale: bronze statue of Hitchcock" and "Another bronze statue of Hitchcock", below).  The latest is a life-size caricature of him, recently unveiled by our friends at the McGuffin (sic) Film Society in Walthamstow, London, to mark the 80th anniversary of the EMD Cinema there, which Hitchcock is said to have attended.  (The building opened in 1887 as a dance hall, and we gather that it was re-built in 1930 as a cinema for the new sound films.)  An earlier item about the EMD Cinema is elsewhere on this page (scroll down to "Actors campaign to save Hitchcock-connected East London cinema").  And for the latest information, click here: http://www.guardian-series.co.uk/your_local_areas/8401574.WALTHAMSTOW__Hitchcock_sculpture_unveiled/

Claude Chabrol dead at 80

Death of cinematographer/director/producer Ronald Neame (1911-2010)

Ronald Neame, who was born in London, and began his film career working with Alfred Hitchcock as a stills photographer at British International Pictures, has died in Los Angeles, aged 99.  As a cinematographer, he photographed David Lean's In Which We Serve (1942) and Blithe Spirit (1945).  As a producer, he produced Lean's Brief Encounter (1946), Great Expectations (1946), and Oliver Twist (1948).  As a director, he made such fine, character-based entertainments as Tunes of Glory (1960), Gambit (1966), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968), and The Poseidon Adventure (1972).

Another of his films was the lyrically-told World War II thriller The Man Who Never Was (1955).  It was based on a true incident (thought up by Ian Fleming when he was working in Naval Intelligence) in which a man's dead body was floated off the European coast with fake invasion plans planted in his briefcase to deceive the Germans.  Hitchcock almost certainly saw Neame's film and was influenced by it to make North by Northwest.

To begin with, this edition of To Catch a Thief contains a remarkably good transfer.  Since Paramount does not indicate that this release of the film has been remastered in any way, I can only assume that the transfer here is identical to the one featured on the 2007 Special Collector’s Edition.  Unlike that earlier version, however, the Centennial Collection edition of the film is a two-disc release.  Disc One contains the film itself.  It also contains an entirely new commentary by Hitchcock film historian Dr. Drew Casper, replacing the one by Peter Bogdanovich and Laurent Bouzereau featured on the 2007 release.  While I have not listened to that earlier commentary, I have been told that it relies too much upon personal reminiscences and anecdotes without offering consistent insight into the film itself.  Casper’s commentary, on the other hand, offers an extremely detailed analysis of the film.

Disc Two contains several special features, three of these new.  “A Night with the Hitchcocks” is a Q&A session between Drew Casper’s film students at the University of Southern California and Hitchcock’s granddaughter Mary Stone and daughter Pat Hitchcock.  Although this piece has moments of interest, I felt that it was ultimately unrewarding.  “Unacceptable Under the Code: Film Censorship in America” is a short documentary about the history of the Motion Picture Production Code and its specific impact on To Catch a Thief.  “Behind the Gates: Cary Grant and Grace Kelly” is a short celebration of the lives and work of the two actors, featuring several production stills and excerpts from To Catch a Thief.

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Death of Eric Rohmer (Maurice Schérer), filmmaker, philosopher, author, in Paris

Frenchman Eric Rohmer has died in his ninetieth year.  This prolific director will perhaps be best remembered for the series of films he called his 'contes moraux' such as Ma Nuit Chez Maud/My Night With Maud (1970).  A former editor of 'Cahiers du Cinéma', he co-authored with Claude Chabrol the book 'Hitchcock' (1955), the first full-length study of the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

The following tribute is supplied by Inge Pruks who in the 1970s briefly studied under Rohmer while at the Sorbonne:

‘What a dignified, serene person was Eric Rohmer. He always concerned himself with the important if minimalist things in life: such as conversation (even disagreements) conducted in a civilized manner, like the small white lies we tell and hope that no one notices, like unifying the arts, like what it means to be a social being, or maybe even a human being. This often led him into an exploration of such dualities as young/old, male/female, reflective/active, honest/dishonest, contemporary/medieval, not to forget familial/professional (his own lifelong duality of Maurice Schérer/Eric Rohmer). I can still picture his tall, lean figure, his head on one side, listening with interest to students after lectures, quizzical yet authoritative. A real gentleman, a true intellectual, forever questing and never satisfied with the answer he might have discovered. His death is the passing of an age.’

Passing of Robin Wood, author of 'Hitchcock's Films' (1965)

English-born film critic and author Robin Wood has died of cancer, aged 78, in Toronto.

This is very sad news.  Wood was the author of several seminal - and influential - books of film criticism, among them 'Hitchcock's Films' (1965), 'Personal Views: Explorations in Film' (1976), and 'Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan' (1986).  Wood's essay on Hitchcock's Psycho appeared in 'Cahiers du Cinéma' soon after the film came out and led to his decision to write an entire book on Hitchcock in English.  The book was ground-breaking and passionate in answering the question, 'Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?'  His subsequent articles on film were prized by journals such as the English 'Movie' and the American 'Film Comment'.  For many years he was a contributing editor of the journal 'CineAction' published in Toronto.  His partner Richard Lippe remains on its editorial board.

For David Bordwell's fine obituary (with further links), click here: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=6483

Patrick Hamilton's 'Rope' (1929) at the Almeida in London

The play that Hitchcock filmed in 1948 works splendidly on stage in its own right.  Loosely based on a US case, but set in London, the play presents a chilling anatomy of an apparently gratuitous murder, and a brilliant snapshot of a jazz-age generation wallowing in privilege, booze, parties, a shallow obsession with fashion and films, and a desperate inner emptiness.  Not to speak of an arrogance that infected many British intellectuals after the First World War licenced, some of them boasted, by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.  (Meanwhile, in Germany ...)

The season at the Almeida Theatre in Islington, North London, runs from Thursday 10 December 2009 to Saturday 6 February 2010.  The play will be directed by well-known stage and film director Roger Michell.  Ticket prices £6 - £32.  For further information, click here: http://www.almeida.co.uk/production_details/production_details.aspx?code=82

Another bronze statue of Hitchcock

Speaking of statues of Hitchcock ... the seacoast town of Dinard, northwest France, for several years had a resin statue of Alfred Hitchcock gracing its foreshore.  On Hitch's shoulders perched a seagull and a crow.  The sculptor was Lionel Ducos.  In 2004 the original statue blew away in a gale but this year it was replaced by a sturdier one in bronze, by the same sculptor.  The photo below was supplied by Dr Alain Kerzoncuf, whom we thank.  Note: Dinard is a movie-conscious town and hosts an annual British Film Festival with invited celebrities.  Deliberately, it sometimes shows films with a Hitchcock connection.  According to the recent British documentary Alfred Hitchcock in East London, directed by Bill Hodgson, the young Hitchcock and his family 'spent several happy holidays' at Dinard.

Premiere of film Alfred Hitchcock in East London

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of Britain's first talkie, Blackmail, the above-mentioned McGuffin (sic) Film Society recently held a screening of Hitchcock's 1929 film followed by the world premiere of the 65-minute documentary Alfred Hitchcock in East London.

'Most people are ignorant of Hitchcock's associations with east London,' says the documentary's writer and director Bill Hodgson.  'My film paints a picture of Hitchcock and his roots which is radically different from previous biographies.'

In Leytonstone the film identifies the old cinema buildings where the boy Alfred was first exposed to motion pictures.  His churchgoing in nearby Stratford and his schooldays in Hackney are also explored as well as his teenage years in Limehouse during the First World War.

Alfred Hitchcock in East London is now available on DVD.  For more information, click here: http://www.mcguffin.info/

Yet another Hitchcock borrowing? The likely influence of Yellow Canary (Herbert Wilcox, 1943) on Hitchcock's Notorious (1946)

Our London correspondent, Michael Walker ('Hitchcock's Motifs'), has sent us the following.  'The NFT has just done a short season of quota quickies. The Water Gipsies (Maurice Elvey, 1932) was a revelation. Taken from a novel by A.P.Herbert, it allowed its heroine (played by Ann Todd) and her sister quite astonishing sexual freedom without being punished.  I mention it for two Hitch-related reasons. First, Alma Reville [Mrs Alfred Hitchcock] was one of the scriptwriters (along with Miles Malleson, Basil Dean and John Paddy Carstairs).  I sensed Alma's hand in the liveliness of the two sisters.  Second, Ann Todd projects a palpable sexual desire, which I don't think is a commonly recognised feature of her performances. But I do think it's also there in The Paradine Case (1947), where it contributes to a real sense of a sexual marriage - perhaps the strongest example in Hitchcock.'

Anna Massey reads from her memoirs

Actress Anna Massey (Peeping Tom, Hitchcock's Frenzy, etc.) has just finished reading extracts on BBC Radio4 from her recently-published memoirs, 'Telling Some Tales'.  In one program she talked about Frenzy.

Danny Nissim in London (whom we thank) notes that the Frenzy segment had some interesting material covering Massey's audition: Hitch sat behind a huge desk and spent the first 45 minutes talking about making batter pudding!  At one point, he asked how tall Massey was, explaining that she would have to fit into a potato sack.  But Massey disputed the myth that Hitch treated actors as cattle.  He was patient and helpful, often using a comic irony which put everyone at their ease.

Magazine-issue and book on Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry (1955) both coming

Vermont writer, artist, and film critic Stephen R. Bissette has begun a new magazine, 'Green Mountain Cinema', dedicated to New England movies and video, whose Spring 2005 issue will feature Hitchcock's VistaVision comedy The Trouble With Harry.  The first issue of the magazine has recently appeared.  For more information about it, click here: http://www.blackcoatpress.com/greenmountaincinema1.htm

Stephen is also working on an entire 'making of' type of book about Hitchcock's wonderful film.  He is visiting locations in Vermont, such as Craftsbury Common, where parts of the film were shot, and interviewing local residents.  He would be very thankful to receive any production stills or photocopies of newspaper clippings (especially those of the period).  Stephen may be contacted at <msbissette@yahoo.com>.

[Our thanks to Tony Williams and Nandor Bokor for information in this item.]

Hitchcock biography by McGilligan criticised

Reviews of Patrick McGilligan's 'Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light' (2003) have now appeared in 'Cineaste', the 'Hitchcock Annual', 'Film Quarterly' - and (at great length) on this website.  All have been luke-warm.

For example, Prof. Marshall Deutelbaum concludes his review in 'Film Quarterly' (Vol. 58, Issue 1) like this: 'By choosing to write a biography without attempting to discern any trace of his subject's life in his films, McGilligan has limited Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light to the facts of a life's work without insight into the life itself.' (p. 58).

'Miss Torso' dead at 68

Georgine Darcy was just 17 when Alfred Hitchcock chose her to play the dancer 'Miss Torso' who is seen living opposite Jeff's apartment, and entertaining a string of suitors in the evenings, in Rear Window (1954). 'I had absolutely no idea who Alfred Hitchcock was,' she said. 'I considered myself a dancer and photographer's model and not an actress. I think he was impressed with my portfolio as I paid the extra, and had photos taken of me in colour.' On meeting her, Hitchcock suggested she find an agent, but she ignored the advice - to her cost. She was paid $350.

Georgine Darcy died in Malibu, California, recently.

What is of interest to Hitchcockians is that Hitchcock kept in touch with her after Rear Window.  He told her: 'If you go to Europe and study with [actor and acting coach] Michael Chekhov, I could make a big star out of you.' But she again ignored his advice, and settled into an undistinguished career. Her most noticeable roles came as Gypsy, the secretary to Pat O'Brien on 'Harrigan and Son' on television in the early 1960s, and in such unmemorable films as Don't Knock the Twist (1962), Women and Bloody Terror (1969), and The Delta Factor (1970).

Georgine Darcy is survived by her second husband, the actor Byron Palmer, to whom she was married for 30 years. .

Another To Catch a Thief coming

There's no word yet on who will direct or star in Paramount's remake of the Hitchcock comedy-adventure To Catch a Thief (1955), now set in Miami.  'Entertainment Weekly' (25 June, 2004) quotes screenwriter Todd Komarnicki: To Catch a Thief is one of Hitchcock's fluffier offerings. 'It was a delicacy on the Hitchcock menu, not one of his full-meal movies.'  A faster pace is promised this time: 'Thievery [must now compete] with alarm systems and bodyguards and everything protected.  We're going to see some really badass thieving this time around.'

Latest DVD news: Hitchcock releases from Warners and from MGM

Warners has announced a Region 1 release date - September 7 - for nine Hitchcock titles on DVD, each with its own 'making of' documentary and other extras.  As previously announced here, the titles include: Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941), Mr and Mrs Smith (1941), Stage Fright (1950), Strangers on a Train (1951), I Confess (1953), Dial M For Murder (1954), and The Wrong Man (1957).  In the case of Strangers on a Train, it will be released on two discs comprising a new Special Edition.  The ninth title will be the previously released North by Northwest (1959): Special Edition.  The discs will sell as a set for $99.92 (SRP).  The Strangers on a Train: Special Edition two-disc set will be available separately for $26.99.  The other discs will each be available separately for $19.97.

We can reveal that among the people participating in the 'making of' documentaries are members of the Hitchcock family, filmmakers Peter Bogdanovich and Richard Franklin, critic Bill Krohn, and various others.

We also hear of titles coming in November as part of MGM's Alfred Hitchcock promotion. These will include: The 39 Steps (1935), Sabotage (1936), Young and Innocent (1937), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Rebecca (1940), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), and The Paradine Case (1947). They'll be available in a box set and separately.

[Thanks to Kristopher Valentine and Richard Carnahan for forwarding information contained in this item, and to the Digital Bits website.].

More on Rodenbach's novella "Bruges-la-Morte" (1892) and the line to Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)

We'll put a special page concerning the above topic on this website soon, but meanwhile readers are reminded to visit our 'Selections' page to read the article called "The original of Vertigo".  The editor of 'The MacGuffin', Ken Mogg, says: 'It's clear to me that two Belgian (or Belgian/French) literary works, Georges Rodenbach's novella "Bruges-la-Morte" (1892) and Georges Simenon's novel "Lettre à mon juge" (1947) were both influences, probably directly, on the novel by French writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, "D'Entre les morts" (1954), that became Alfred Hitchcock's film masterpiece Vertigo (1958).  However, Boileau and Narcejac's novel was also almost certainly influenced by two French films.  Henri Verneuill's Le Fruit Défendu/ Forbidden Fruit (1952) was an adaptation of "Lettre à mon juge", and it starred Fernandel as the married doctor who takes a mistress Martine (Françoise Arnouil) who from the moment he sees her exerts a strange fascination over him, and whom he eventually strangles.  Also, Robert Siodmak's Le Grand Jeu/ Card of Fate/ Flesh and the Woman (1953) is a classic Foreign Legion story (originally filmed in 1934 by Jacques Feyder) starring Gina Lollobrigida as both a Parisian redhead and her brunette "double" who turns up in Algiers and haunts the hero.  I think it was Peter Cowie who first pointed to this latter film as a possible predecessor of Vertigo.

'Then there are all the literary and cinematic (and even operatic) descendants of Rodenbach's original novella that may have exerted a degree of influence on Vertigo.  Here I'm thinking of the silent films The Unfinished Portrait (1910), attributed to Léonce Perret, and Daydreams (1915), directed by Yevgeni Bauer (both of these works were direct adaptations of "Bruges-la-Mortes"); the novellas "Gradiva" (1903), by Wilhelm Jensen, and "Der Tod in Venedig"/ "Death in Venice" (1913), by Thomas Mann; and the opera "Die tote Stadt"/ "The Dead City" (1920), by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (again this was taken directly from "Bruges-la-Morte" or perhaps from its stage version, "Le Mirage", first performed in 1901).

'Finally, I wouldn't be surprised if Rodenbach influenced Belgian artists, most notably, perhaps, the Surrealist Paul Delvaux (1897-1994), who produced a series of paintings depicting nude and semi-nude women in dreamlike settings, often cityscapes at night.  (Other influences on Delvaux were his fellow Belgian Magritte and the Italian Chirico.)  I'm sure that Hitchcock knew his work.  For example, I detect his influence on the death scene of the Karen Dor character in Topaz (1969).'

From Rodenbach's novella "Bruges-la-Morte" (1892) to Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) - firming the line

Dominique Païni's essay "Léonce Perret, le dernier symboliste", included in the anthology 'Léonce Perret' (2003), which was published in conjunction with the 2002 Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy, refers to the short film Het Onvoltooide Portret/The Unfinished Portrait (1910), apparently directed by the Frenchman Léonce Perret (1880-1935).  In a French setting, the film reworks the story originally told by the Belgian Symbolist author Georges Rodenbach (1855-98) about a man whose first wife dies but who 're-appears' in the form of a double, and whom the man then obsessively woos, leading (in the novella) to a bizarre murder.  Rodenbach's story is set in the Belgian city of Bruges, 'a city of silence, ennui and ... desolation', and the story's original publication was accompanied by 35 half-tone reproductions of photographs of the city.  A stage version of the story, 'Le Mirage', was first produced in 1901.

In 'The MacGuffin' #29 (January 2004), Michael Walker described The Unfinished Portrait at some length, and its obvious influence, direct or indirect, on the novel 'D'Entre les Morts' (1954), by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, that eventually became Hitchcock's masterpiece, Vertigo.  Walker noted, though, that neither Rodenbach's novella nor Boileau and Narcejac's novel alludes to a portrait of the dead woman.

Now, after reading Walker's account, Prof. Tony Williams (whom we thank) has emailed us as follows:

'I recently viewed a film which is another "unlikely candidate" in anticipating Vertigo. This is Daydreams (1915), directed by the Russian filmmaker Yevgeni Bauer (1865-1917), and also based on "Bruges-la-Morte".  However, unlike The Unfinished Portrait, Daydreams is complete.  Bauer is one of those recently rediscovered pre-Revolutionary directors put into the shade post-1917. His work belongs to those excavated silent films often shown at the Podernone Festival and others. I'll give a brief synopsis.

'It opens with the main character distraught over the body of his recently deceased wife (significantly covered with flowers). As a last memory, he cuts off a plaid of her hair (fetish associations!) and continues to mourn his dearly departed to the concern of his maid (cf. Midge in Vertigo). One day, he passes a look-alike in the street and follows her to a theatre where he discovers her playing a revived corpse in a performance of Meyerbeer's "Robert le Diable". Already psychologically disturbed, he reacts like a male hysteric.  Parallels with Hitchcock's Scottie are not hard to see, as well as with Bernard Herrmann's operatic score.

'He brings her back home and asks an artist friend to paint her portrait with her wearing the clothes of the dead wife. Since "Tina" is a vulgar Judy-type, the artist warns his friend against this "magnificent obsession", but to no avail. I believe the dead woman's jewelry also figures in the narrative. Tina attempts to seduce his friend. The maid gives her notice since she cannot put up with her master's obsession any longer.

Ronald Neame talks about Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929)

At the Hollywood Heritage Museum in Los Angeles recently, a screening of the sound version of Blackmail was attended by both Patricia Hitchcock and the British director Ronald Neame.  Neame, who is now in his 90s (biography), worked as an assistant camera operator on Hitchcock's film.  The following report is from Mark Norberg (whom we thank).

Neame said he was amazed at the memories of the shoot that came to him while watching the picture. He remembered standing behind a curtain (where Anny Ondra kills the artist) with a couple of other stage hands and hitting the curtain to represent the struggling pair. Something else he mentioned was the fact that Hitch assigned him to shoot 16mm footage of the filming.  [Editor's note.  About a minute of such footage was included on the Criterion laser disc of Blackmail, released in 1992. The footage is silent and has the title "The kiss".  Shot on the set of the artist's studio, it shows Hitch having fun demonstrating to Cyril Ritchard how he wants him to kiss Ms Ondra!  The latter is co-operative but laughing!]

He also was able to recall the occasion when the then Duke and Duchess of York (later the King and Queen Mother) visited the set of the 'first British sound picture'. He recounted how the Duchess stepped into the sound booth with Hitch where she took off her hat so that she could put on a headset and listen to the sound being recorded. Neame recalled immense problems with the recording of the dialogue, the cameras having to be contained in large soundproof booths - and these having to be moved in their entirety for a tracking shot or a pan of more than a few degrees.

He stated that he hadn't seen the sound version of Blackmail for some time but that he had seen the original silent version about four years ago and that he felt the silent version was much superior. And he noted that although Blackmail was [officially] the first British talkie, since most British theaters were not equipped for sound most people saw only the silent version anyway when it was first released.

When asked about working on the set with Hitch, Neame mentioned the usual things you hear: 'he was always calm and in control', 'always wore a jacket and tie', etc. Then Neame turned to Pat Hitchcock and said with a devilish grin, 'but most I remember Hitch's sense of humour which tended to be rather sadistic'. In the tobacco shop scene there is a gas flame on the counter from which the villain lights his cigar. One day Neame came on the set to see Hitchcock heating a half crown over the open flame with a pair of pliers. He couldn't imagine what Hitch was doing. After the coin was quite hot Hitch threw it to the ground and called over the prop man who seems to have been his favorite victim.  Hitch pointed across the floor to the coin and said something like 'Hey there! What's that half crown doing just lying on the floor?' Of course, when the man went to pick it up, he discovered exactly what it was doing there!  Later, Hitchcock induced the same man to put on a pair of handcuffs, which were in abundance during the shoot.  Hitch then told the man that if he would keep them on until the next day, while locked in the studio, Hitch would reward his efforts with a gift. The prop man readily accepted the bet, not knowing that the director had put a generous amount of laxative in the poor fellow's tea! Neame was later told by the man that, with the industrious help of his wife, he had made it through the night and onto the set the next day with the handcuffs intact. (Neame was unable to recall exactly what Hitchcock gave the man for his troubles but said Hitch did pay off his bet.)

Report on recent Kim Novak forum

Author Stephen Rebello, who on January 17 chaired the above sell-out event in Los Angeles for the American Cinematheque, tells us: 'For the moderator, these things are tricky.  The conversation needed to be about a six-film retrospective and [Ms Novak's] overall career.  For Hitchcockians, of course, that means not enough telling detail about Vertigo, for "fans," not enough gossip about Harry Cohn, Rita Hayworth, feuds with leading men, etc. I think we struck a balance, though.'

The following report is by Bill Krohn ('Hitchcock at Work'), who adds some material and asks a question:

'After a screening of Vertigo, and with Stephen Rebello handling the mike, [Kim] recounted that Harry Cohn, her boss, told her it was a lousy script, but to do it because it was Hitchcock. She read it and thought it was a wonderful script. She said that she knew instinctively how to play the role because she had been in the hands of men telling her what to do, how to dress, how to walk, ever since she got to Hollywood - notably Harry Cohn. She said she hated Madeleine's grey dress and the black shoes that went with it. All she had to do was put them on to feel imprisoned - which again worked for the performance.

'The rest of the evening was about the rest of Kim's career. Nothing but nice things to say about Hitchcock. Stephen asked her afterward for me if she looped the Nun's line "I heard voices" [at the end of Vertigo], and she said she didn't, but it would have been a wonderful way to convey Madeleine's feelings of guilt. She did actually - it was almost 50 years ago, so she's forgotten. And her reading of that "Hitchcock touch" is exactly right. "I heard voices" is looped over Madeleine and Scottie embracing - a disembodied voice that could very well be Madeleine's conscience (the maternal superego, Slavoj Zizek would say), which then rises up in the darkness of the next shot. Go, Hitch!

'Noted in passing while watching the film for the umpteenth time: Midge's last name is Wood (= Midge would, if Scottie could), and for some reason she is polishing a spectator pump (medium-heeled woman's shoe) when Scottie comes to her apartment to ask for an expert on San Francisco history.  (Explanations, MacGuffinists?)  Another small detail: I'm pretty sure the Madeleine stand-in wearing the grey suit walks through the first dolly-in on Madeleine in the black dress at Ernie's. She would have been on the set anyway, ready to shoot her walk-on as Madeleine later in the film, and Hitchcock probably just sent her through the first shot for the hell of it.

'Finally, a question: If Scottie's real friends - like Midge - call him Johnny, why does Madeleine, in both incarnations, call him Scottie?'

[Our thanks to both Stephen Rebello and Bill Krohn for the above.  Stephen further tells us: 'Also in attendance at the showing of the 70 mm restored print of Vertigo were Tippi Hedren and Diane Baker, sitting together. Patricia Hitchcock and two of her daughters also attended the benefit party which followed the screening, as did Hedren and Baker.  The mayor of Hollywood officially declared it Kim Novak Day.' ] 

We've announced a few coming remakes of Hitchcock films here, only to end up with egg on our face.  It seems that the strike-average for such remakes actually getting made is about one project in two.  But this one sounds promising ...

How many actors appeared in both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much?

The answer to that question, according to Charles Barr's 'English Hitchcock' (1999), p. 234, is 'one'.  Frank Atkinson played the policeman shot dead on the mattress during the gun battle with Peter Lorre's anarchists in the 1934 version and was one of the employees in Ambrose Chappell's London taxidermist's visited by James Stewart in the 1956 version.

But a recent newspaper obituary for Betty Baskcomb (d. 15 April 2003) claimed that she, too, appeared in both versions of TMWKTM.  Our man in London, Michael Walker, decided to check.  He soon found that in the 1956 film Baskcomb plays Edna, the bespectacled woman at London Airport who telephones the villains.  But where is she in the 1934 version?  Our man had a flash of inspiration: 'I thought the most sensible character to check out would be the young woman who is displaced from her bed during the gun battle. We only see her face briefly as she turns, but I think it's enough. She does the same strange mouth movement as Edna in TMWKTM (2); she has the same long nose. To check further, I tracked Baskcomb down in Robert Hamer's It Always Rains on Sunday (1947): she's the incumbent barmaid (Edie, I think), in effect Googie Withers's successor. She has a little scene with a reporter around 71 minutes in; and there we can see what she looked like. Allowing for the age differences, I'm now pretty confident that I've found her in the 1934 movie.'  (Good work, Michael!).

DVD news:  German 6-disc release reportedly superb

We hear that 7 Hitchcock features have been released as a set entitled 'Hitchcock: The Early Years'.  The 6 discs comprise The Lodger (1926), Downhill (1927), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Sabotage (1936), Secret Agent (1936), Young And Innocent (1937), and The Lady Vanishes (1938).

A Yahoo 'MacGuffin' Group correspondent, JG, writes: 'DVD aficionados [report that] this set is far better than all else out there ... including the Criterion.  The soundtracks are in English.  I have the set and it is superb and all the fanfare is accurate.  I have the Laserlight sets of the early Hitchcocks ... and these transfers are far, far better. Enormously so.'

Here's a link to the German Amazon site: Amazon.de: Verwandte Artikel entdecken

• And for soundtrack enthusiasts, the City of Prague Philharmonic, conductor Paul Bateman, have recorded        'The Essential Alfred Hitchcock': new digital recordings including The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca, Spellbound, Lifeboat, Under Capricorn, Stage Fright, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, Marnie, Topaz, and Frenzy.

Hitchcock didn't care for Christie's novels as film fare, finding them too dry and cerebral, but of course they do have suspense after their own fashion.  And TV adapatations, in particular, of the Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot stories have shown just how engagingly filmic those stories can be.  Our favourite series remains the Miss Marple series with Joan Hickson.  But both Peter Ustinov and David Suchet have been fine Poirots.  So we print here an item from the latest 'Scarlet Street' (#49) headed "Boob Tube Tidings".  Some brief comment then follows.

'Fans of David Suchet's letter-perfect performances as Agatha Christie's Poirot will be delighted to hear that he'll return as the natty Belgian sleuth in four new productions to be telecast on the Arts & Entertainment Channel starting this fall.  Shooting has completed on Five Little Pigs- based on Christie's 1942 novel [known as 'Murder in Retrospect' in the US] - and three other adaptations will roll between now and early 2004: Death on the Nile, The Hollow, and Sad Cypress.  Four additional Poirot productions are tentatively set for filming next year.  It seems Mr Suchet is as anxious as any fan for the entire canon to be filmed, and is confident that he'll appear in them all.'

Comment.  All four titles mentioned above are outstanding Christies.  And Sad Cypress may have an additional interest for Hitchcock fans because, to quote Robert Barnard's 'A Talent to Deceive' (1980), the novel represents 'the only time Christie uses the lovely-woman-in-the-dock-accused-of-murder ploy' - à la Robert Hichens's 'The Paradine Case' (1933) and Hitchcock's 1947 film adaptation, starring Alida Valli as Mrs Paradine.

Bad news about Criterion Hitchcocks ...

The quality Criterion DVDs of Rebecca, Spellbound, and Notorious are to be allowed to go out of print - at least for the time being - from the end of 2003 (Region 1).  All three of these DVDs carry valuable extras, including commentary.  Marian Keane (Harvard University) gives the commentary on Spellbound and Notorious, film historians Leonard Leff and Rudy Behlmer the commentaries for Rebecca.  A case of shop early this year for Christmas?

Onstage, a gay take on Hitchcock ...

Performance-artist John Epperson has just finished a two-month engagement in New York in the show 'As I Lay Lip-Synching'.  The character he plays, 'Lypsinka', dressed to the nines and wearing a flamboyant orange wig and heavy make-up, presents what is essentially a nightclub act with songs and patter derived from live and studio recordings of mainly obscure female singers of the fifties and sixties. But these musical sections of the act are repeatedly interrupted with extensive audio excerpts from films.  At one point, the character begins to undergo some kind of crisis within a dream state.  Here, extensive dialogue excerpts from Hitchcock's Marnie are used, including the scene in the kitchen between Marnie and her mother, the 'You Freud/Me Jane?' scene between Marnie and Mark Rutland, and the scene in which Mark drives Marnie back to 'Whykwyn'.  However, all of the dialogue of Mrs Edgar and of Mark has been edited out so that it becomes a form of monologue. In addition, the Marnie dialogue is interspersed with dialogue from other films - including Elizabeth Taylor carrying on about lobotomies in Suddenly, Last Summer and Sandra Dee screaming 'I'm a good girl!' in A Summer Place! -  all of this forming a brilliant audio and performance montage.

According to our informant, Assistant Professor Joe McElhaney (whose forthcoming book on Hitchcock contains a chapter on Marnie), previous stage acts of Epperson's also drew on Hitchcock's film, using such memorable lines of Mrs Edgar (Louise Latham) as 'We don't talk smart about the Bible in this house, missy' and 'We don't need no filthy man comin' 'round here no more, do you understand?'  In that same act, Epperson repeatedly used Bernard Herrmann's 'neurosis' theme from the film to signify the moments when Lypsinka was lapsing into insanity.  The latest act uses the Psycho shrieking violins as transitions.

Staying on the line: Larry Cohen's latest again inspired by Hitchcock

Phone Booth, the project that writer-director Larry Cohen (It's Alive, Q: The Winged Serpent, The Stuff) had hoped to sell to Hitchcock, and which Fox 2000 eventually bought for Joel Schumacher, was clearly considered enough of a hit earlier this year to warrant a new Cohen project.  David R. Ellis (Final Destination 2) will direct Cellular from a Cohen script, and it, too, has a 'minimalist', telephone theme.  Starring Kim Basinger, it follows the fortunes of a woman kidnapped and thrown into a car trunk with only her cell phone as a lifeline to the outside world. She makes desperate calls, trying to find a rescuer and to prevent her husband and child from being kidnapped too - before her cell phone battery goes dead.  According to Cohen, one film in particular inspired both Phone Booth and Cellular: Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954).  'It's one of my favourite thrillers', Cohen has said.  

The author of the 'Poldark' novels, set in 18th-century Cornwall, has died in a nursing home in Sussex, England.  The novels formed the basis of a popular BBC-TV miniseries in the 1970s.  The best, and best-known, film adaptation, though, of a Winston Graham novel was undoubtedly Alfred Hitchcock's psychological suspense drama Marnie (1964), starring Tippi Hedren and scripted by Jay Presson Allen.  But Graham himself wrote several screenplays, of varying quality.  His adaptation of his mystery novel set in post-Occupation France, 'Night Without Stars', as filmed by Anthony Pellisier in 1951, was frankly insipid, though David Farrar and Nadia Gray gave adequate performances.  On the other hand, when Ronald Neame made Take My Life in 1947, from an original screen treatment co-written by Graham, the result was splendid, an interesting companion-piece to Hitchcock's more ambitious and complex The Paradine Case filmed the same year in similar settings (the Old Bailey, etc.).  Neame's cinematic (read: visually energetic) rendering showed the influence of his Cineguild partner, David Lean.  Presumably it was the Cineguild input that made the screenplay work so well.  However, it should not be forgotten that Graham's 'Marnie' received this enthusiastic accolade from one New York critic: 'the best book about a woman written by a man' (quoted in Tony Lee Moral, 'Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie' [2002], p. 6).
 

Another Hitchcock-related stage play

In recent years, London has seen stage versions of Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, and Marnie (though the latter production returned to Winston Graham's novel for additional characters and dialogue).  And in California, as reported in 'The MacGuffin' #28, they have had a stage version of 'Rope' (as distinct from Patrick Hamilton's original play).

Now London has 'Hitchcock Blonde' by Terry Johnson.  It has just transferred from the Royal Court to the Lyric in the West End (and may open in New York in 2004).  Here's a description: 'A media lecturer and his female protégé find some deteriorated Hitchcock footage.  Have they discovered some early rushes?  What film were they for, and who is the mysterious blonde?  "Hitchcock Blonde" is not a play about Alfred Hitchcock.  He may, however, make a cameo appearance.'  (Impressive!)

• More Hitchcock DVD news.  From late April, R2 DVD owners have another chance to buy the Universal Hitchcocks - but, according to our sources, with the addition of Foreign Correspondent, Mr and Mrs Smith, and Suspicion to the collection.  N.B.: Suspicion is packaged with its 'colourised' version as an 'extra'.  (See also separate item on Topaz, etc., lower down this page.)  Next, according to 'Scarlet Street' forums, Image Entertainment has announced the release of Under Capricorn on DVD (we hear it is very good - there are no 'extras', however). And the <alt.movies.silent> newsgroup reports that Kinowelt in Europe is working on a DVD of Murder!/Mary similar to their double feature of the silent/sound Blackmail.  Lastly, we hear that Warners will be bringing out Dial M for Murder, Stage Fright, The Wrong Man, and (presumably) I Confess in 2004.  (Thanks to Scott Parker for this, who heard it announced on 'Home Theater Forum'.)

• For Hitchcock DVD collectors.  Paramount have released the Region 1 DVD of To Catch a Thief.  Presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen and mono,  the disc includes several featurettes - such as "The Writing and Casting of To Catch A Thief" and "The Making of To Catch A Thief" - plus a stills gallery and trailers. Retail is $US 24.95.  (The quality of this DVD is outstanding - KM.)

• German DVD release of silent & sound versions of Blackmail.  The following report by silent-film historian David Shepard comes from <alt.movies.silent>.  'A DVD containing both the talking and silent versions of Hitchcock's Blackmail has been released by Kinowelt Home Entertainment on their "Art Haus" label.  It's Region 2 PAL, so of course one would need multi-standard equipment to view it in North America.  I think it could easily be ordered through amazon.com (Germany).  The German title is Erpressung.  The silent version is IMHO one of the truly great "high silent" films. Hitch (who of course spoke German and had worked at UFA) really knew his Lang and Murnau and, if possible, went them one better.  The image quality of both versions is breathtaking.  It makes the Criterion laserdisc (for which I was once most grateful) look like garbage. The sound on the talking version is absolutely free of optical hiss, thumps etc.  The silent version has a (digital) piano score which is obviously inspired by the music used on the silent sequences of the talkie, but is musically much better. [...] The viewer can call up the material in original English or add optional subtitles in German, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese.'

• Deja vu. Those who remember the ill-fated 'Multimedia Hitchcock' project on the Web - itself designed as a pilot for a still vaster project of making available online scholarly resources and essays in film study - will watch with interest the progress, or otherwise, of a recently-announced program, a collaboration between the American Film Institute and the Georgia Institute of Technology.  These two illustrious bodies will create a scholarly website for the movie Casablanca (1942).   Still in its early stages of development, the site is intended as a prototype for a virtual cineplex containing interactive academic studies of classic movies.  Accessible through the AFI's website, the analysis of each film would then be digitally linked to pertinent scenes on a DVD in an online student's computer.  It's hoped that this approach will solve copyright problems caused by film companies' reluctance to see their 'product' published directly on the Web.  (As we recall, such reluctance proved a stumbling block in the case of the 'Multimedia Hitchcock' project.  The latter was given a booth presentation in 1999 at the Hitchcock Centennial Celebration in New York, but has not been heard of publicly since then.)  Meanwhile, legislation is helping to smoothe the way for this latest multimedia project.  A subscriber to an academic film list recently posted the following: 'While overall the media corporations are winning increasing power in copyright, the 2002 copyright legislation now in effect in the US allows university educators to put entire commercial films on edu websites, provided they are only accessible for students and for instructional purposes.'

• A couple of articles on the Web may interest our readers.  The first, occasioned by the new Robert Altman film, Gosford Park, sending up the so-called Golden Age of British murder-mystery stories, profiles matinee idol, song-writer, and actor, Ivor Novello (1893-1951), who is portrayed in Altman's film.  The article includes information on why Novello saw fit in 1932 to reprise his starring role in The Lodger, originally filmed by Alfred Hitchcock just six years earlier.  (The article says that the remake, directed by Maurice Elvey, was a flop, though not everyone seems to agree. Leslie Halliwell, for instance, while conceding it was a minor British film of the time, thought it 'not bad'.)  To read the article, from the 'Los Angeles Times', click here: Resurrected by a Song.  And we have only just learnt - more than two years late! - that director Andrew L. Stone (1902-99) has died.  When Stone wasn't making more-than-competent musical films, such as Stormy Weather (1942) and Song of Norway (1970, a fantasia on the life of Grieg), he was turning his hand to made-on-location thrillers of high calibre, such as The Steel Trap (1952), Julie (1956), and Cry Terror (1958), usually with excellent casts.  The Steel Trap actually starred Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright, and had a score by Dmitri Tiomkin (that combination sound familiar?), while Julie put Doris Day in a big dramatic role the same year that she starred in Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much: this time, instead of having to try and save a statesman's life at the Royal Albert Hall, she must single-handedly steer a runaway airliner to safety - naturally, our Doris proves up to it!  To read Kevin Brownlow's "A Tribute to the Last Silent Film Director: Andrew L. Stone", go to: Andrew L. Stone.

• [This item may be transferred to 'Odd Spot' in due course, perhaps under the title "The film that wasn't there".]  Reportedly, the new Coen brothers film, The Man Who Wasn't There, is part-set in Santa Rosa, California, where Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt was filmed in 1943.  According to the film's cinematographer, Roger Deakins, the setting constitutes a Hitchcock homage, and on radio recently he spoke of shooting portions of the film in that very town.  However, an October 12 article in the Santa Rosa 'Press Democrat', and published on the Web, seems to indicate that the Santa Rosa portions of the film were in fact shot some distance away, in the town of Orange.  Read the 'Press Democrat' article: Santa Rosa will be played by Orange

• Universal seem to be unfairly milking Hitchcock buffs of every last cent.  The DVD of Topaz reportedly contains another few minutes of footage over and above the 17 minutes of extra footage that were in the VHS restored version.  And, curiously, still no explanation is provided about where the footage has come from (is coming from?) or who has pieced (is piecing?) it together.

• The above item refers to the DVD of Topaz released in the US (Region 1).   Sad to report, a note in 'Sight and Sound', December 2001, says that the DVD of Topaz released in the UK (Region 2), though it contains the film's two alternative endings (see "More about ... a longer version of Topaz", below), prints at least one of them in the wrong aspect ratio: the duel-in-the-stadium 'reveals cropping of the image on this particular DVD, since neither duellist appears in the wide shot that's meant to encompass them (the aspect ratio is marked on the disc as 1.33:1 when the original film is 1.85:1)'.  Indeed, when you examine the information printed on the same page (p. 64) of 'Sight and Sound', at least four of the R2 Universal Hitchcocks (The Birds, Marnie, Torn Curtain, and Topaz itself) have been released with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, instead of the 1.85:1 aspect ratio in which they were shot and originally released.(Update.  With the re-release of the R2 Universal Hitchcock DVDs in April, 2003, you might have expected the above-named 'gaffes' to be righted.  But it hasn't happened.  [We thank reader Alistair Kerr for confirming this.]  Nor is there joy for our Australian/R4 readers.  The same 'gaffes' occur here.)

British playwright Frederick Knott (1916-2002) will long be remembered as the author of the ingenious play on which Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder (1954) was based.  (Knott also worked on the film's screenplay - though, as the following obituary notes, he received only his 'expenses' in payment.)  The play's cunning, would-be wife-murderer, Tony Wendice (played by Ray Milland in the film), owes something as a character to his counterpart in the stage play and 1947 film called 'Dear Murderer' by St John Legh Clowes; and his nemesis, Chief Inspector Hubbard (played superbly on stage and in the film by John Williams) seems part-based on the crafty Scotland Yard detective played by Naunton Wayne in the 1949 film Obsession adapted from the stage play by Alec Coppel.  However, 'Dial M For Murder' is essentially the work of Knott, and is both gripping and elegant.  The following obituary, by Douglas Martin, comes from the 'New York Times', 20 December, 2002:

               Frederick Knott, a notoriously unprolific playwright who
                 scored big when he did write - with his 1952 Broadway hit
                 'Dial M for Murder' and later with the 1966 thriller 'Wait
                 Until Dark' - died on Tuesday in his Manhattan apartment.
                 He was 86.

                 'He hated writing,' his wife, Ann Hillary Knott, said.

                That is perhaps understandable. The clever, complicated
                 'Dial M for Murder' was turned down by seven London
                 producers before being accepted as a television drama by
                 the British Broadcasting Corporation. Mrs. Knott said that
                 he became so discouraged that he almost tore up the script.

                 Making matters worse, he signed away the movie rights for a
                 paltry £1,000 after the television production. Though he
                 wrote the screen version for Alfred Hitchcock in 1954, he
                 thus made far less money than he might have. When the
                 picture was remade in 1998 as A Perfect Murder, he
                received credit for writing the play, but no payment, Mrs.
                 Knott said.

                 But he made enough with just three plays to live
                 comfortably and that was his sole objective. 'He wrote only
                 for money,' his wife said.

                 'Dial M for Murder' was translated into two dozen languages
                 and is still performed by professional and amateurs around
                 the world. 'Wait Until Dark' was a Broadway hit and then a
                 successful movie with Audrey Hepburn in 1967. He also wrote
                 'Write Me a Murder' in 1961.

                 Major Frederick Paull Knott was born in in Hankow, China,
                 on Aug. 28, 1916. His parents were Quaker missionaries who
                 sent him back to England for his education. He graduated
                 from Cambridge University in 1938 and served in the Royal
                 Artillery from 1939 to 1946.

                 He then retreated to a cottage next to his parents' home in
                 Sussex to struggle with a play he had already imagined. His
                 inspiration was the bang of a gun going off, he said in an
                 interview with 'The New York Times' in 1961. He imagined the
                 bang in an old, very oak-paneled English house that had
                 seen better days.

                 He worked for 18 months straight; he stayed in his bathrobe
                 and his mother left meals by the door. He emerged with
                 'Dial M for Murder.'

                 Then the struggle really began. A succession of producers
                 rejected the play, with one calling it trivial. His wife
                 read aloud a letter from the producer August MacLeod, who
                 complimented the 'ingenious little plot,' but said that
                'the play as a whole would cause little interest.'

                 But then the BBC offered to use it as a 90-minute
                 television play early in 1952. It got rave reviews. He sold
                 the film rights to a London movie company headed by Sir
                 Alexander Korda.

                 Then James Sherwood, a stage producer with a lease on a
                 London theater, had to cancel the production of a play and
                 asked to produce 'Dial M for Murder.' After less than three
                 weeks' rehearsal, it opened to critical acclaim.

                 The excitement in the plot does not arise from trying to
                 solve a murder. The theatergoer knows who committed it and
                 how it was executed. Rather, the tension grows from the
                 attempts of Scotland Yard to break down the culprit's
                 seemingly perfect alibi so that an innocent party can be
                 saved from execution.

                 Maurice Evans, the actor, saw the London production and
                 offered to star in the show on Broadway. That plan was
                 almost scuttled by the film deal, according to 'The
                 Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection.' Sir Alexander had a
                 clause barring any future live productions until after the
                 movie came out. That snag was worked out, and 'Dial M'
                 began its run of 552 performances in October 1952 at the
                 Plymouth Theater.

                 In the next five years, the play was produced in 30
                 countries. It is still a standard of summer stock and
                 school productions.

                 Mr. Knott then worked closely with Hitchcock on writing the
                 screenplay, though Mrs. Knott said that he was paid just
                 his expenses. Sir Alexander had received $175,000 from
                 [Warners] for the rights to the 1954 movie..

'Got him at last'?

That line (minus the question-mark) from Hitchcock's Murder! (1930) comes to mind now that crime author Patricia Cornwell claims to have identified Jack the Ripper as the painter Walter Sickert (1860-1942) whose art was admired by Hitchcock to the extent that he owned two Sickert works.  Indeed, one of the latter, "The Camden Town Murder" (though Hitchcock owned only an early sketch version of it), features in the 'evidence' that Cornwell adduces against the painter.  But her most conclusive piece of evidence might seem to be this: one letter allegedly sent by the Ripper is written on paper with the same distinctive watermark and edgings as writing paper used by Sickert, provided to him by his stationer father.

A pity, perhaps, that Hitchcock isn't around to direct a follow-up version of The Lodger (1926), which he adapted from the novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, an earlier woman crime writer, and loosely based on the Ripper case.

For more, click here: Guardian Unlimited Books | News | Does this painting by Walter Sickert reveal the identity of Jack the Ripper? And now here's a 'New York Times' review of Cornwell's book on the Ripper case, that suggests she has got it all wrong:  'Portrait of a Killer': Investigating a Historical Whodunnit.

Alfred Hitchcock - Mr Nice-guy

One of our favourite passages in Stephen Rebello's 'Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho' (pb, 1991) is this reminiscence by Rita Riggs, the film's costume designer: '[Hitchcock] had a sense of fun about him that I don't think some people picked up on.  For instance, one night, I came home to find a carton of wild, French strawberries on my doorstep because we had been talking about them recently.  Is that perversity or is that doing something out of sheer enjoyment?'  (p. 99)  Now the 'Los Angeles Times' has revealed that the actor Bob Crane (1928-78) - the subject of a new film directed by Paul Schrader - once received a dozen red roses every day for a week from an anonymous admirer of his work on 'Hogan's Heroes'. The donor?  None other than Mr Aitch!  [Thanks to Bill Krohn in Hollywood for this item.].

Where is Hitchcock's 'lost' short called An Elastic Affair?

In 1929 Alfred Hitchcock directed An Elastic Affair, running ten minutes.  He made it at the Elstree studios of British International Pictures to showcase the talents of two young actors named Aileen Despard and Cyril Butcher who had just won scholarships awarded by 'Film Weekly'.  The scholarships - and the completed film - were announced in the Saturday January 18th, 1930, issue of 'Film Weekly', and the film was shown silent (though it was apparently shot with sound) on the following day, Sunday January 19th, 1930, at the London Palladium, where its 'stars' appeared in person to receive their contracts from John Maxwell, Chairman of British International Pictures, Ltd.  Under those contracts, both actors would be trained in film acting at the Elstree Studios for six months.

Hitchcock researcher (and contributor to this website), Dr Alain Kerzoncuf, is trying to locate a copy of An Elastic Affair.  He hopes that someone reading this News item may have information about the film's whereabouts or know something about its two young actors and the contents of the film in which they appeared together.  (It is known that Aileen Despard - whose full name was Aileen Despard Kilpatrick - made about three other films after An Elastic Affair.  Cyril Butcher took up a stage career, and may have appeared in some films; he also wrote or co-wrote plays, a musical comedy, film scripts, and at least one book related to acting.)  Dr Kerzoncuf may be contacted by email at this address: <alain.ker@wanadoo.fr>..

The late Ms Kael: how to be very, very subjective

Findings by Bill Krohn, Dan Auiler, and Ken Mogg, notwithstanding, showing that Hitchcock was a regular viewer of Hollywood, English, and other movies, the late Pauline Kael claimed the contrary in one of her last interviews now published on the Web.  (Yes, we're talking about the author of the book 'Raising Kane' which, after its original publication in 'The New Yorker', proved to be full of egregious errors - pointed up later by Peter Bogdanovich in 'Esquire' - many of which were based on Kael's near-total ignorance of how movies are made.)  Here's the most relevant passage:

                           Did you ever meet Alfred Hitchcock?

                           Yes, and I didn't have a very good time, because he
                           wanted to talk about movies but hadn't really gone
                           to see anything. His wife had, and she was very
                           knowledgeable and very pleasant. I liked her a lot,
                           but he kept breaking off to talk about his wine cellar
                           and his champagne collection. I got very distressed
                           when we talked about actors, because he had often
                           cast people not after seeing them in pictures but
                           from seeing them on a reel of film that their agents
                           brought him, so that he saw only little highlights
                           from some of their roles. He didn't know the
                           possibilities of some of the actors, and this was
                           reinforced by his feeling that he shouldn't
                           improvise. Directors should not be allowed to
                           improvise, he said, even though he had done a lot of
                           improvisation earlier in his career, and it was some
                          of his best work. I think part of the rigidity of his
                           later pictures was from his feeling that everything
                           should be worked out in advance, which didn't
                           allow for any creative participation by the actors.
                           You feel the absence of that participation in movies
                           like Topaz and Marnie and, I would say, all of
                           his later movies. He was quite rigid, almost like a
                           religious fanatic - no one should improvise, the
                           director should have everything planned out in
                           advance.

Before the above was published, Bill Krohn was approached by a 'fact-checker' from 'The New Yorker' and asked if he supported what Ms Kael claimed about Hitchcock.  No, he said, and debunked both the idea that Hitchcock never improvised and the 'truly ludicrous claim' (Krohn's phrase in an email to 'The MacGuffin') about test-reels that were used to hire actors, as opposed to seeing them in films.  Krohn cited the case of Doris Day, to whom Hitchcock remarked at a party that her performance in Stuart Heisler's Storm Warning (1951) was excellent - and who, several years later, was hired by him to star in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) because he remembered her supporting role for Heisler.  Long-standing readers of this page will recall something else that Krohn once told us: how Hitchcock and wife Alma were regular attenders at the repertory cinema in Los Angeles run by cinematographer Gary Graver.  (Patricia Hitchcock and Graver were recently interviewed for the French-release DVD of Suspicion, and Pat recalled those occasions well.)  To read the full interview with Pauline Kael (the above excerpt is only a fragment), click here: The New Yorker: On-line Only

Rare lobby card from Hitchcock's 'lost' The Mountain Eagle (1926) turns up in Massachusetts

The above lobby card was recently discovered at a flea market in Rowley, Massachusetts.  Of heavy cardboard, it was found behind a second picture of a dog, apparently as backing.  (Both pictures were in a cardboad box containing broken picture frames and glass.)  It is probably the only extant lobby card for The Mountain Eagle, Hitchcock's film that had limited distribution (in Germany and the USA) and all prints of which have disappeared.

The Mountain Eagle was set in the backwoods of Kentucky but filmed on location in the Austrian Tyrol and in a Munich studio.  The dog seen here may have belonged to the film's hero, a hermit known as Fearogod (Malcolm Keen), who at one point must trek through snow carrying a sick child.

Although no prints exist of Hitchcock's second film as a director, the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California, contains some 30 stills and production photographs.  Several of the production photographs show what appears to be the dog seen here - perhaps it was the unit's mascot.  The photographs are reproduced in Dan Auiler's book, 'Hitchcock's Notebooks' (1999).

Film historian J. Lary Kuhns points out that the American distributor of The Mountain Eagle, Artlee Pictures (named after its President, Arthur A. Lee), also distributed Hitchcock's first film, The Pleasure Garden (1925), which was shot almost entirely in the Emelka Studios, Munich.  Kuhns believes that the lobby card for The Mountain Eagle 'is pretty much final confirmation of my claim that [contrary to some reports] the film did not have the US title Fear o' God'.  The film starred Nita Naldi, Bernard Goetzke, and Malcolm Keen.

[Special thanks to Sandra McLachlin, Gloucester, Massachusetts, who found the lobby card and who told us about it.].

Scriptwriter Arthur Laurents comments frankly on the homosexuality in (and out of) Rope

Playwright and screenwriter Arthur Laurents has written 'Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood', which was reviwed by David Ehrenstein in the 'Los Angeles Times' on 9 April, 2000.  Here's an excerpt from the review:

'[As the 1940s] ended, Laurents met Farley Granger at an otherwise dull Hollywood party.  "We touched once by accident and reacted as though it was foreplay."  The next day Laurents gave Granger a phone call and found "[i]t was though he had been waiting for the signal, all he needed to jump into his car and come barreling across the canyon.  I barely had enough time to shower and shave before there he was, running through the door, and then, there we were rolling on the floor.  On the shag rug in the living room of a sublet on the wrong side of Doheny Drive in midafternoon, me and my movie star.  Oh frabjous day!"

'But while Granger was gung-ho, Laurents was alarmed: "I was afraid that Farley moving in would be announcing I was gay.  Whatever people might think, they didn't know.  Now they would."  For right on top of this, Laurents had been hired by Alfred Hitchcock to write the screenplay of Rope [1948], an Americanized version of Patrick Hamilton's London-set play about a pair of gay Leopold and Loeb-style thrill killers - one of whom was to be played by Granger.

Death of Albert J. Whitlock, visual effects artist, at 84

We are saddened to note the passing of Albert Whitlock, the widely-respected visual-effects artist best known for his work with Hitchcock on a  succession of films made at Universal from The Birds (1963) to Family Plot (1976).  Whitlock died in Santa Barbara, California, on October 26, 1999.  The two-times Academy Award winner was born in London in 1915, and his first work in a film studio was as a 'general factotum' (as he once told KM).  He painted some of the signs used in The 39 Steps (1935).  In America, he worked for a time with the Disney organisation before Hitchcock, recalling him from their British days, employed him to paint the matte backgrounds for The Birds, e.g., several vistas of Bodega Bay. Whitlock was a quietly spoken, gracious man.  He appears briefly in Mel Brooks's Hitchcock spoof, High Anxiety (1977), as the man in the tower at the end.