Features
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 ...
Thembi Mutch
The new Wits Museum in Johannesburg is located in an old Shell petrol station and stands on the corner behind a vast glass frontage. The winner of the 2012 VISI architecture award, it is big, akin to the Guggenheim in its sense of architectural swagger, and aglow with beckoning wonders. And, at noon on a Saturday, it is empty.Inside this building, attached to the Witwatersrand University, is one of the most eclectic, intellectually brave, diverse, challenging and political displays of art, photography, sculpture, religious icons, masks, baskets and weaving that Africa can muster. It rivals Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Alfred Hitchcock’s atmospheric boxing silent The Ring pivots on the allure of WAG-dom, 1927-style, for Lillian Hall Davis’s Mabel. At the start, she is the ticket-seller for the fairgound booth in which her pugilist boyfriend, “One Round” Jack Sander (Carl Brisson), takes on all-comers. And one can tell by the way she chews gum that she’s bored.When a fight manager pits the unrecognised Australian heavyweight champion Bob Corby (Ian Hunter) against Jack, to see if he’d be worth signing, Mabel is smitten by the smooth-talking hunk. Hall Davis’s amorous glances never suggest vulgarity, though Read more ...
ronald.bergan
Whenever the name of Ivor Novello is mentioned, which is not often these days, the term “matinee idol” is inevitably appended. Novello, now best known as a songwriter, had already starred in nine silent films before Hitchcock chose him to play the title role in 1927’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. In a way, Novello, whose well-carved profile, smouldering dark eyes and bow lips gained him the reputation of Britain’s answer to Rudolf Valentino, was cast against type as a possible serial killer. (Not so the creepy Laird Cregar in the 1944 remake.)
The influence of German Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Before the blonde, there was Bergman. In the second half of the 1940s, Hitchcock cast Ingrid Bergman three times, and on each occasion asked her to incarnate a different kind of leading lady. In the film noir Spellbound (1945) she was a psychoanalyst defrosted by Gregory Peck, and she played the loyal sister of a convict in 19th-century Australia in Hitchcock's first colour film, the costumed period piece Under Capricorn (1949). In Notorious (1946), she takes the role of Alicia Huberman, a good-time girl whom we find drowning her sorrows after her father is convicted as a Nazi spook.She is Read more ...
fisun.guner
Giving his press conference speech at the opening of Kiev’s first international art biennale, David Elliott, the seasoned British curator charged with its organisation, looked exhausted, though far from triumphant and more than a little irate. “It’s not the way I usually handle things,” he said. He had opened his speech with an apology – some of the exhibits were still not ready. Meanwhile, the attendant press, who had come from as far as Tokyo, New York and London, were perhaps also a little disgruntled. The official opening had been scheduled for 11am that morning but it was now pushing 5pm Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s 50 years since Marilyn Monroe died alone on the night of August 4, 1962, from swallowing too many sleeping pills. The sad story soon became the stuff of legend. When they found her, she was still slumped over the telephone receiver; she had been ringing around, desperately trying to get help. Rumours soon spread about her relationship with Senator Robert Kennedy and possible access to state secrets, which gave rise to far-fetched conspiracy theories implicating the CIA in her death.The intrigue may have helped keep her memory alive, but it goes nowhere near to explaining why, half a Read more ...
ronald.bergan
The epithet "mellifluous" might have been invented to describe Herbert Marshall’s voice. It was lucky that sound came along at the time Marshall, after a prestigious stage career, entered films when he was almost 40. We don’t hear those beautiful tones until some time into Murder!Marshall, as the theatrical knight, Sir John Menier, is first seen as a member of a jury at a murder trial of a young actress. While 11 of the jury members discuss the case, Menier is neither seen nor heard. After they have agreed on a guilty verdict, Menier then makes his "not guilty" view known. Gradually, with the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Vertigo Kim Novak plays two women who are really just one. First Madeleine, a supernatural siren, a woman apparently possessed by her tragedienne great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes. However, it’s a performance within a performance and she’s merely a facsimile, a devastating creation played by an agent in a murderous plot. The imposter manipulates Scottie (James Stewart) into loving her only so that he may witness her apparent death. Then there’s Judy, the real woman behind the performance who is persuaded back into the part when Scottie can’t let go of Madeleine’s ghost.The dual role Read more ...