King Alfred The Great!

"It's only a movie, and, after all, we're all grossly overpaid!"

"I don't understand why we have to experiment with film. I think everything should be done on paper. A musician has to do it, a composer. He puts a lot of dots down and beautiful music comes out. And I think that students should be taught to visualize. That's the one thing missing in all this. The one thing that the student has got to do is to learn that there is a rectangle up there - a white rectangle in a theatre - and it has to be filled.



"Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints".

Ooer, I'm going to have to watch out then! I am back again, mes braves, to bring you our second instalment in the life of the great director, Alfred (The Great) Hitchcock!

I am publishing this automatically, so if it doesn't work, please feel free to throttle me, a la Hitchcock, on my return from the hair salon, where I am going to be civilized!

At last, at last, I hear you cry, for I was beginning to look like one of Hitchcock's victims - and not in a good way... Don't think darling Grace Kelly, I was starting to look like Mrs Bates!

So, to continue - Glance down to the bottom if you're not too interested in what La Wiki has to say about Mr Hitchcock, for there is a little amuse bouche down there that might tickle your fancy! Salut, mes cineastes!

"Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was a British filmmaker and producer who pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in his native United Kingdom in both silent films and talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood. In 1956 he became an American citizen while retaining his British citizenship".

Hitchcock directed more than fifty feature films in a career spanning six decades. He remains one of the best-known and most popular filmmakers of all time.



Who do you think we might say that about today? Quentin Tarantino? I would guess more likely someone such as Stephen Spielberg. What do you think? Who will stand the test of time in Hollywood's less blingtastic times?!

Back to La Wiki, for the last time I avoided her, she chucked a temple-jar at me head!

- "Hitchcock was born on 13 August 1899, in Leytonstone, London, the second son and youngest of three children of a greengrocer and poulterer. His family was mostly Roman Catholic. And, being of Irish extraction, Hitchcock was sent to the Jesuit Classic school St. Ignatius College near Stamford Hill, London.

He often described his childhood as being very lonely and sheltered, a situation compounded by his obesity. He was once sent by his father to the local police station with a note asking the officer to lock him away for ten minutes as punishment for behaving badly".

"I am scared easily, here is a list of my adrenaline-production:

1: Small children (Didn't he also say you should never work with children or animals?!)
2: Policemen
3: High places
4: That my next movie will not be as good as the last one".

The idea of being harshly treated or wrongfully accused is frequently reflected in Hitchcock's films.

Apparently, "Hitchcock's mother would often make him address her while standing at the foot of her bed, especially if he behaved badly, forcing him to stand there for hours. These experiences would later be used for the portrayal of the character of Norman Bates in his movie Psycho.

Hitchcock became intrigued by photography and started working in film production in London. He began his directing career in 1922, working on silent films, and his last collaboration with a British director, Graham Cutts, led him to Germany in 1924.

The film Die Prinzessin und der Geiger (The Blackguard, 1925), directed by Cutts and co-written by Hitchcock, was produced in Berlin. Hitchcock also worked as an art-director on the set of F. W. Murnau's film Der letzte Mann (The Last Man 1924).

He was very impressed with Murnau's work and later used many techniques for set design in his own productions. In his interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut (Simon and Schuster, 1967), Hitchcock also said he was influenced by Fritz Lang's film Destiny (1921)".

Talkies

In 1926, Hitchcock made his debut in the thriller genre with the film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, a major commercial and critical success.

This film was heavily influenced by Expressionist techniques he had witnessed first-hand in Germany. Some regard this as the first truly "Hitchcockian" film, incorporating such themes as the "wrong man".

On 2 December 1926, Hitchcock married Alma. Their only child, daughter Patricia, was born on 7 July 1928. Alma was to become Hitchcock's closest collaborator, writing some of his screenplays and working with him on every one of his films.

"Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table". Later, he would say, "Television has brought back murder into the home - where it belongs".

In 1929, Hitchcock began work on his tenth film, Blackmail. While the film was still in production, the studio, British International Pictures, decided to make it one of the UK's first sound pictures. With the climax of the film taking place on the dome of the British Museum, Blackmail began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences"

Hitchcock's fondness for his homeland resulted in numerous American films set in, or filmed in, the United Kingdom, including his penultimate film, Frenzy.

"Someone once told me that every minute a murder occurs, so I don't want to waste your time, I know you want to go back to work".



His first film for Gaumont, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), was a success and his second, The 39 Steps (1935), is considered one of the best films from his early period. This film was also one of the first to introduce the concept of the "Macguffin", a plot device around which a whole story seems to revolve, but ultimately has nothing to do with the true meaning or ending of the story. In The 39 Steps, the Macguffin is a stolen set of design plans. (Hitchcock told Truffaut: "There are two men sitting in a train going to Scotland and one man says to the other:

'Excuse me, sir, but what is that strange parcel you have on the luggage rack above you?'

'Oh,' says the other, 'that's a Macguffin.'

'Well,' says the first man, 'what's a Macguffin?'

The other answers, 'It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.'

'But,' says the first man, 'there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.'

'Well,' says the other, 'then that's no Macguffin.'")

Hitchcock's next major success was in 1938 with his film, The Lady Vanishes, a clever and fast-paced film about the search for a kindly old Englishwoman, who disappears while on board a train in the fictional country of Vandrika (a thinly-veiled version of Nazi Germany)."

(Did you know, that in 1945, Hitchcock served as "treatment advisor" (or a film editor) for a Holocaust documentary produced by the British Army? The film, recording the liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps, remained unreleased until 1985, when it was completed by PBS Frontline and distributed under the title Memory of the Camps".)

Around this time, Hitchcock had become known for his famous observation, "Actors are cattle."

"I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle..."

"When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, 'It's in the script.' If he says, 'But what's my motivation?, ' I say, 'Your salary.'"

He once said that he first made this remark as early as the late 1920s, in connection to stage actors who were snobbish about motion pictures". Hitch hated
the palaver that can go with film and particularly method acting,



"Cary Grant is the only actor I ever loved in my whole life".

Apparently, on the set of The 39 Steps, he locked his two stars, Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll, together with a set of handcuffs, and pretended he had lost the key. He did this so they would exactly understand what it felt like to be shackled to one another throughout a number of scenes...


Hitch preferred to storyboard his films extensively, mapping it all out on paper, scene by scene, doing very little looking through the actual camera viewfinder, except apparently for photo opportunities, like this one!



"I'm full of fears and I do my best to avoid difficulties and any kind of complications.
I like everything around me to be clear as crystal and completely calm".

"However, Michael Redgrave said that Hitchcock had made the statement during the filming of The Lady Vanishes. The phrase would haunt Hitchcock for years to come and would result in an incident during the filming of his 1941's Mr. & Mrs. Smith where Carole Lombard brought some heifers onto the set - with name tags of Lombard, Robert Montgomery, and Gene Raymond, the stars of the film - to surprise the director. Hitchcock said he was misquoted: "I said, 'Actors should be treated like cattle'."

With the prestigious David O. Selznick picture, Rebecca in 1940, Hitchcock made his first American movie, set in England and based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier. The film starred Sir Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, exploring the fears of a naive young bride who enters a great English country home and grapples with the problems of a distant husband, a predatory housekeeper, and the legacy of her husband's late wife, the beautiful, mysterious Rebecca".



"If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on".

The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1940. The statuette was given to Selznick, as the film's producer. The film did not win the Best Director award for Hitchcock".

I love the romance of Rebecca, it's one of my favourite films. ...The house on the cliffs, the Gothic, opulent and magnificent room settings, dark Mrs Danvers, the salt of the sea, and the elusive magnetism of fated Rebecca. In fact, it's probably the only film I can stomach the vastly overrated (in my opinion, and we agree that it amounts to nowt, right?!), actor, Laurence Olivier; Ah, dear Larry!

Hitchcock worked for Selznick again on Spellbound, with Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, exploring the then-fashionable subject of psychoanalysis, and featuring a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí.

"Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it".




The dream sequence as it actually appears in the film is considerably shorter than originally envisioned, (at several minutes long), as it proved to be too disturbing for the audience.

Some of the original musical score by Miklós Rózsa (which makes use of the theremin) was later adapted by the composer into a concert piano concerto". Did you know that? There's a little snippet to slot into conversation at some point today!

Lord, I've come all this far, and I haven't even got to The Birds yet, possibly his most terrifying movie, although my personal favourite is Rebecca, and coming a very close second, Psycho.



Had you heard of the theremin before? I want to leave you with this snippet (courtesy of the little maidens of Youtube of one of my favourite comedians (a bit of a surrealist and a very talented musician) Bill Bailey, with an introduction to the theremin, via a run through the CNN and BBC news themes! The theramin is the aerial type of contraption he plays with his hands to his right on the keyboard. It's only just over a minute long - Enjoy!



If you are really, really interested in the theramin, here Bill uses it more to demonstrate an althernative to the British National Anthem, drawing on the band Portishead's style - It's not dead funny, but there is a lot of the theramin!

Getting Hitched?

Do you know who said this?

"A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it". And,

"For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake... Revenge is sweet and not fattening!"

Here is a clue:



Have you got it yet?

"Always make the audience suffer as much as possible".

Incidentally, in passing, I have seen a couple of foreign language films recently, which have very much given me pause for thought...

I saw this one last night: The Yacoubian Building (2007), based on a novel by Alaa Al Aswany, it offers a panoramic view of contemporary Egypt, glimpsed through the stories of a number of fairly challenging folk living in (and in the case of the poorest, living on the rooftop of), the Yacoubian Building in Cairo. There's Zaki, a faded aristocrat or Pasha, Bothayna, the beautiful, poor girl he falls for, a young student seduced into religious extremism, and Haj Azzam, a rich businessman, wishing to take a second, but secret wife, among other characters.

I've never seen an Egyptian film before, and found it thought-provoking. My almost 3 year old niece is mixed heritage - Her dad is in fact from Cairo, and this made me think strongly about the country of her father's birth, which I have yet to visit.

The second film I slouched before was from Belgium - Have you seen many Belgian films yourself, I wonder? I'll bet you've sampled Belgian Chocolate or the country's amazingly rich and diverse beer? I know I have!

Anyhoo, this was the Flemish film: Rosie: The Devil In My Head (1998), which offered an insight into the troubled upbringing, in a deeply industrial Antwerp, of the teenaged Rosie, of the film's title.

I won't spoil the film for you by giving much away, but I found it charming and intriguing by turns, curious and ultimately a bit sad. The film attracted many awards for its cast and director, but of the talented young actress, Aranka Coppen, playing Rosie, I can find no further (Internet) trace... If anyone knows what she went on to do next, I'd love to hear it?

I adore film, especially in foreign languages but when, last week doing my usual half-listening to the TV, while tippy-tappying away here with my toes in Blogland, GJ was watching a very interesting programme with British presenter, Jonathan Ross, 'interviewing' Alfred Hitchcock...

This got me thinking on Hitchcock's oeuvre and his considerable influence on the movie industry.

When you look at this director's work overall, it is more than impressive, and I hope to use some of the words attributed to 'Hitch' over many years, to illustrate some aspects of his life and work over the next couple of days, if that's all right with you, mes cinephiles?!

"A lot of movies are about life, mine are like a slice of cake".

"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out".

Hitch is said to have offered us these reflections, "Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film".

And isn't that what we think most of Hitch, that he was the consummate master of suspense, keeping us, as stiff as a board, on the edge of our seat, observing, (far from calmly), the fate of the heroes and heroines, victims and villains, up on the wide silver screen?

"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder".

"Give them pleasure - the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare".



When, later in life, Hitch was accepting the American Film Institute Life Achievement award, he opined importantly: "I beg permission to mention by name only four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation, and encouragement, and constant collaboration.

The first of the four is a film editor, the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter Pat [Patricia Hitchcock], and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen. And their names are Alma Reville."

Here, Hitch was paying homage to his wife, Alma Reville, to whom he would be married for 54 years. (That's some record these days, n'est-ce pas?) Alma worked alongside her husband for practically her entire career, often unnamed, refining Hitch's scripts and film direction.



La Goddess Wiki, a keen movie buff herself, had this to say about Alma: "... best known as the wife of Alfred Hitchcock, whom she met while they were working together at Paramount's Famous Players-Lasky studio in London, during the early 1920s.

They married on 2 December 1926 at Brompton Oratory in London. Alma became his collaborator and sounding board, with a keen ear for dialogue and an editor's sharp eye for scrutinizing a film's final version for continuity flaws so minor they escaped Hitchcock's own notice, and that of his top-notch crew.

Cinema was the couple’s passion. A talented editor, Alma worked on British films with directors like Berthold Viertel and Maurice Elvey, though her main focus was her husband’s work. She was particularly good at revising dialogue and spotting inconsistencies in his plots".



Did you know that? I've heard it's often the case that, behind many successful men, stands an intelligent woman?!



"To make a great film you need three things - the script, the script and the script".

"Fear isn't so difficult to understand. After all, weren't we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf.

What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It's just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual.

The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them..."

Wiki, again - Sometimes, you just cannot shut the Goddess up! : "Hitchcock became famous for his expert and largely unrivalled control of pace and suspense, and his films draw heavily on both fear and fantasy. The films are known for their droll humour and witticisms, and these cinematic works often portray innocent people caught up in circumstances beyond their control or understanding".



We all know about that, don't we? Don't we all struggle with circumstances and sometimes a hand dealt by fate, which we cannot control or barely even understand?



Go on, admit it, now I've whet your appetite, you want to know more about the life and work of the man who said this:

"These are bagpipes. I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equalled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig".

And of Tallulah Bankhead's lack of undergarments. Hitch said : "I didn't know whether to send her to make up or the hairdresser".



A demain, mes chums! Toodles!