Features
Demetrios Matheou
Like his great contemporary Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant not only gave some of his best performances for Hitchcock, he also grabbed the opportunity to darken his screen persona. It was never the case, with either of them, of simply playing “baddies”. Far more significantly, they revealed the dark psyches of average, even good men, in performances that leave the audience with the bitter aftertaste of familiarity.In Grant’s case, there is no better example of this than in Notorious. Released a year after World War II, on the surface the film is a spy yarn about Nazis conspiring against the US, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
There’s an affecting moment in the café scene in Torn Curtain (1966) when the physicist Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) and his fiancée-assistant Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews), desperate to flee East Berlin, are awed into compassion for the jittery Polish Countess Kuchinska, who offers to help them if they will sponsor her bid to emigrate to the U.S. It looks a little as if Newman and Andrews themselves were awed by Lila Kedrova’s fabulously flowing performance.Hitchcock must have calculated that Kedrova's exotic bird of prey would radiate some flamboyant humanity in a grey Cold War suspenser Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The relationship between Hitchcock and Hedren was already subject to scrutiny, and is symbolic of his fascination with blondes. Soon, with Sienna Miller playing the leading lady of 1963’s terrifying The Birds and Toby Jones as the director, it’s going to be revisited with the TV film The Girl (2010’s Hitchcock’s Women had trodden this path). Hedren has advised Miller, and also told press that Hitchcock “was an extremely sad character…deviant almost to the point of dangerous”. (See the clip below for more of her views on Hitchcock.)After seeing Hedren in a drinks’ ad on TV, Hitchcock put her Read more ...
carole.woddis
“Our Country’s Good, a play that proclaimed the power and enduring worth of theatre and that celebrated its centrality to our lives, was of importance in the third term of a government which deemed 'subsidy' a dirty word.” So wrote Max Stafford-Clark of the play he directed at the Royal Court in 1988. A titan of the British Theatre for over four decades and artistic director of the Royal Court for 14 of them (1979-93), ask Stafford-Clark if he feels the words are as relevant now as then and his answer is unequivocal. “Absolutely, yes. I think Cameron and Osborne collectively are more of Read more ...
fisun.guner
Some actors build their characters from the feet up. In fact, it’s a theatrical commonplace to think that shoes can hold the key to a character's psychology. Hitchcock takes the idea and applies it to the opening sequence of Strangers on a Train, his 1951 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1950 debut novel. In a brilliant opening sequence two pairs of shoes hurry through a station concourse, onto a platform, and finally converge when one accidently knocks the other as their owners sit opposite each other: the stylish but conventional black shoe greeting the camp black and white brogue in an Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Anthony David “Tony” Scott was "the other Scott brother" whose filmmaking was cinematic, determined and all-encompassing. After directing thousands of television commercials, Scott’s breakthrough film, The Hunger, starring Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon and David Bowie, became a classic, setting the stage for beautiful, elegiac and shocking tales of vampirism, love, and the implications of immortality. A trained fine artist, Scott's eye always found the perfect shot.Many memorable movies were to follow: Top Gun with Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer was a film that marked a generation, and a Read more ...
ronald.bergan
In Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho, Norman Bates was plump, balding, bespectacled and 40 years old, the physical antithesis of the lean, lanky and boyishly good-looking 28-year-old Anthony Perkins. The casting satisfied Hitchcock’s desire to create as much sympathy for Norman Bates as possible. There is nothing about Perkins to suggest a homicidal psychopath. He is a clean-cut young man, who soon reveals himself to be charming, confident, and witty. Only gradually does Perkins give us subtle clues as to the character’s inhibitions, such as when he gulps with embarrassment when indicating the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
MoMa and the Met, the Whitney and the Guggenheim – all very fine, but if you crave something different when in NYC, it’s worth braving Penn Station’s circles of hell to get a train to Philadelphia (takes just over an hour) to visit the mind-boggling Barnes Foundation. This private art collection, worth around $30 billion, is in a league of its own. Dr Albert Barnes owned the largest number of Renoirs in the world - 181, acquired between 1912 and 1942; 69 Cézannes - more than the Louvre - 59 Matisses, 46 Picassos, many works by Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, Rousseau, Modigliani, Seurat, Pissarro, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, Ingrid Bergman, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, Janet Leigh – these are only the best-known of that special breed, the Hitchcock blonde. For some reason, whether he wanted a femme fatale or a romantic accomplice or a tragic victim, Hitch liked them blonde, and preferably glacial.Like so many of the great director's traits and predilections, one can trace the template for his heroine right back to his silent movies. In 1929 Hitch made two versions of Blackmail – it is at once his first talkie and his greatest silent, and in the Czech actress Anny Ondra it features his Read more ...
graham.rickson
Vertigo’s recent elevation to the top of Sight and Sound’s contentious Top 10 makes its minor shortcomings all the more glaring. But dodgy back projections, a plot full of holes and a truly terrible painted portrait ultimately don’t dim its brilliance. Barbara Bel Geddes, later to attain global fame in the late 1970s as Larry Hagman’s mother in Dallas, plays the supporting role of Midge, the former fiancée of James Stewart’s Scottie. In a film notable for glacial pacing and stilted, spare dialogue, Midge’s warmth shines out. It’s as if she’s strayed in from a different film. She’s Vertigo’s Read more ...
Tom Priestley
I am keenly looking forward to seeing the new production of JB Priestley’s play Cornelius at the Finborough Theatre. This will be the first time I have seen the work performed, though I have of course read it. But my father always said his plays were made for the stage rather than the page. They need the skill of a cast and director to bring the characters alive and the active engagement of the audience to enhance the experience. Cornelius is subtitled “A Business Affair in Three Acts” and takes place entirely in a London office; there are echoes of my father’s novel Angel Pavement Read more ...
james.woodall
The most radical Locarno ever: it's in the upper 20s Celsius in the southern Alps. The sky is cloudless blue. Moreover, not for one, or two, or three, or four nights in a row, but for FIVE has it not rained in this small resort. Next year no doubt it will again be the normal business of deluges in the Piazza Grande, and an air of anti-climactic, soul-freezing damp will prevail.Good weather helps the mood but does not, of course, affect the quality of films. Of the ones I’ve seen in the Piazza (not in competition) only Pablo Larraín’s No, about a 1988 referendum in Chile to extend or bring an Read more ...