Alfred hitchcock movies
Her upbringing was 'English' and strict. Two years of boarding school from the age of eight was followed by relocation to the U. Selznick to direct Rebecca Keen to join the acting fraternity, Pat appeared on stage by the early 40s. In , she played the titular role in the short-lived Broadway play Violet at the Belasco Theater. Though she would have liked to go on to a college education, her father instead packed her off to London when she was 18 to study at RADA among her classmates were Lionel Jeffries and Dorothy Tutin.
She made several appearances on the London stage, followed by an inauspicious screen debut in In , she had a small role in her father's thriller Stage Fright as 'Chubby Bannister' which set the tone for her future roles, usually as the dowdy friend or sister of the heroine Strangers on a Train , Psycho She was also featured in ten episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents , whenever in her own words "they needed a maid with an English accent".
Towards the end of the Second World War , he returned to England, where he produced two films in French for the Free French forces. In he also served as film editor for a documentary about the concentration camps that were liberated by British troops Bergen-Belsen. However, the images were so shocking; it was later shelved until being published in Memory of the Camps ; the film was also re-released in After the war, Hitchcock returned to America, where he resumed his long and successful American film career.
In particular, he enjoyed developing his talents in creating psychologically intriguing films. 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. This fright complex is rooted in every individual. It broke box office records as viewers flocked to view this pioneering new horror genre film.
Hitchcock, like Walt Disney was also early to embrace the new medium of TV. He hosted a TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents from to ; his prominent role in hosting the show helped him become one of the most recognisable film directors and media celebrities of the day. During the next two decades, his output was less prolific as old age and failing health limited his work rate, but he continued to produce feature films up until his death.
Stewart's character is a photographer named Jeff based on Robert Capa who must temporarily use a wheelchair. Out of boredom, he begins observing his neighbours across the courtyard, then becomes convinced that one of them Raymond Burr has murdered his wife. Jeff eventually manages to convince his policeman buddy Wendell Corey and his girlfriend Kelly.
As with Lifeboat and Rope , the principal characters are depicted in confined or cramped quarters, in this case Stewart's studio apartment. Hitchcock uses close-ups of Stewart's face to show his character's reactions, "from the comic voyeurism directed at his neighbours to his helpless terror watching Kelly and Burr in the villain's apartment".
From to , Hitchcock was the host of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The title-sequence of the show pictured a minimalist caricature of his profile he drew it himself; it is composed of only nine strokes , which his real silhouette then filled. His introductions always included some sort of wry humour, such as the description of a recent multi-person execution hampered by having only one electric chair , while two are shown with a sign "Two chairs—no waiting!
In the s, a new version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents was produced for television, making use of Hitchcock's original introductions in a colourised form. In , Hitchcock became a United States citizen. Grant plays retired thief John Robie, who becomes the prime suspect for a spate of robberies in the Riviera. A thrill-seeking American heiress played by Kelly surmises his true identity and tries to seduce him.
They play a couple whose son is kidnapped to prevent them from interfering with an assassination. As in the film, the climax takes place at the Royal Albert Hall. This was the only film of Hitchcock to star Henry Fonda , playing a Stork Club musician mistaken for a liquor store thief, who is arrested and tried for robbery while his wife Vera Miles emotionally collapses under the strain.
Hitchcock told Truffaut that his lifelong fear of the police attracted him to the subject and was embedded in many scenes.
Alfred hitchcock biographies
While directing episodes for Alfred Hitchcock Presents during the summer of , Hitchcock was admitted to hospital for hernia and gallstones , and had to have his gallbladder removed. Following a successful surgery, he immediately returned to work to prepare for his next project. He had wanted Vera Miles to play the lead, but she was pregnant.
He told Oriana Fallaci : "I was offering her a big part, the chance to become a beautiful sophisticated blonde, a real actress.
We'd have spent a heap of dollars on it, and she has the bad taste to get pregnant. I hate pregnant women, because then they have children. In Vertigo , Stewart plays Scottie, a former police investigator suffering from acrophobia , who becomes obsessed with a woman he has been hired to shadow Novak. Scottie's obsession leads to tragedy, and this time Hitchcock did not opt for a happy ending.
Some critics, including Donald Spoto and Roger Ebert , agree that Vertigo is the director's most personal and revealing film, dealing with the Pygmalion -like obsessions of a man who moulds a woman into the person he desires. Vertigo explores more frankly and at greater length his interest in the relation between sex and death, than any other work in his filmography.
Vertigo contains a camera technique developed by Irmin Roberts, commonly referred to as a dolly zoom , which has been copied by many filmmakers. After Vertigo , the rest of was a difficult year for Hitchcock.
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During pre-production of North by Northwest , which was a "slow" and "agonising" process, his wife Alma was diagnosed with cancer. Alma underwent surgery and made a full recovery, but it caused Hitchcock to imagine, for the first time, life without her. Hitchcock followed up with three more successful films, which are also recognised as among his best: North by Northwest , Psycho and The Birds At first, Thornhill believes Kendall is helping him, but then realises that she is an enemy agent; he later learns that she is working undercover for the CIA.
Psycho is arguably Hitchcock's best-known film. He subsequently swapped his rights to Psycho and his TV anthology for , shares of MCA , making him the third largest shareholder and his own boss at Universal, in theory at least, although that did not stop studio interference. It took four years to transcribe the tapes and organise the images; it was published as a book in , which Truffaut nicknamed the "Hitchbook".
The audio tapes were used as the basis of a documentary in It was obvious from his films, Truffaut wrote, that Hitchcock had "given more thought to the potential of his art than any of his colleagues". He compared the interview to "Oedipus' consultation of the oracle".
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The film scholar Peter William Evans wrote that The Birds and Marnie are regarded as "undisputed masterpieces". He hired Tippi Hedren to play the lead role. Movies don't have them any more. Grace Kelly was the last. Hedren visits him in Bodega Bay where The Birds was filmed [ ] carrying a pair of lovebirds as a gift. Suddenly waves of birds start gathering, watching, and attacking.
The question: "What do the birds want? He said it was his most technically challenging film, using a combination of trained and mechanical birds against a backdrop of wild ones. Every shot was sketched in advance. He reportedly isolated her from the rest of the crew, had her followed, whispered obscenities to her, had her handwriting analysed and had a ramp built from his private office directly into her trailer.
Toward the end of the week, to stop the birds' flying away from her too soon, one leg of each bird was attached by nylon thread to elastic bands sewn inside her clothes. She broke down after a bird cut her lower eyelid, and filming was halted on doctor's orders. In June , Grace Kelly announced that she had decided against appearing in Marnie In , describing Hedren's performance as "one of the greatest in the history of cinema", Richard Brody called the film a "story of sexual violence" inflicted on the character played by Hedren: "The film is, to put it simply, sick, and it's so because Hitchcock was sick.
He suffered all his life from furious sexual desire, suffered from the lack of its gratification, suffered from the inability to transform fantasy into reality, and then went ahead and did so virtually, by way of his art. She applies for a job at Mark Rutland's Connery company in Philadelphia and steals from there too. Earlier, she is shown having a panic attack during a thunderstorm and fearing the colour red.
Mark tracks her down and blackmails her into marrying him. She explains that she does not want to be touched, but during the "honeymoon", Mark rapes her. Marnie and Mark discover that Marnie's mother had been a prostitute when Marnie was a child, and that, while the mother was fighting with a client during a thunderstorm — the mother believed the client had tried to molest Marnie — Marnie had killed the client to save her mother.
Cured of her fears when she remembers what happened, she decides to stay with Mark. Hitchcock told cinematographer Robert Burks that the camera had to be placed as close as possible to Hedren when he filmed her face. Hitchcock reportedly replied: "Evan, when he sticks it in her, I want that camera right on her face!
Failing health reduced Hitchcock's output during the last two decades of his life. Biographer Stephen Rebello claimed Universal imposed two films on him, Torn Curtain and Topaz , the latter of which is based on a Leon Uris novel, partly set in Cuba. Torn Curtain , with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews , precipitated the bitter end of the twelve-year collaboration between Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann.
Hitchcock returned to Britain to make his penultimate film, Frenzy , based on the novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square After two espionage films, the plot marked a return to the murder-thriller genre. Richard Blaney Jon Finch , a volatile barman with a history of explosive anger, becomes the prime suspect in the investigation into the "Necktie Murders", which are actually committed by his friend Bob Rusk Barry Foster.
This time, Hitchcock makes the victim and villain kindreds, rather than opposites, as in Strangers on a Train. In Frenzy , Hitchcock allowed nudity for the first time. Two scenes show naked women, one of whom is being raped and strangled; [ ] Donald Spoto called the latter "one of the most repellent examples of a detailed murder in the history of film".
Both actors, Barbara Leigh-Hunt and Anna Massey , refused to do the scenes, so models were used instead. Hitchcock would add subtle hints of improprieties forbidden by censorship until the mids. Yet, Patrick McGilligan wrote that Breen and others often realised that Hitchcock was inserting such material and were actually amused, as well as alarmed by Hitchcock's "inescapable inferences".
Family Plot was Hitchcock's last film. It relates the escapades of "Madam" Blanche Tyler, played by Barbara Harris , a fraudulent spiritualist, and her taxi-driver lover Bruce Dern , making a living from her phony powers. Screenwriter Ernest Lehman originally wrote the film, under the working title Deception , with a dark tone but was pushed to a lighter, more comical tone by Hitchcock where it took the name Deceit , then finally, Family Plot.
Despite preliminary work, it was never filmed. Hitchcock's health was declining and he was worried about his wife, who had suffered a stroke. Asked by a reporter after the ceremony why it had taken the Queen so long, Hitchcock quipped, "I suppose it was a matter of carelessness. His last public appearance was on 16 March , when he introduced the next year's winner of the American Film Institute award.
His remains were scattered over the Pacific Ocean on 10 May The " Hitchcockian " style includes the use of editing and camera movement to mimic a person's gaze, thereby turning viewers into voyeurs , and framing shots to maximise anxiety and fear. The film critic Robin Wood wrote that the meaning of a Hitchcock film "is there in the method, in the progression from shot to shot.
A Hitchcock film is an organism, with the whole implied in every detail and every detail related to the whole. Hitchcock's film production career evolved from small-scale silent films to financially significant sound films. Whilst visual storytelling was pertinent during the silent era, even after the arrival of sound, Hitchcock still relied on visuals in cinema; he referred to this emphasis on visual storytelling as "pure cinema".
Hitchcock later said that his British work was the "sensation of cinema", whereas the American phase was when his "ideas were fertilised". Afterward, he discovered Soviet cinema , and Sergei Eisenstein 's and Vsevolod Pudovkin 's theories of montage. Earning the title "Master of Suspense", the director experimented with ways to generate tension in his work.
And I play with an audience. I make them gasp and surprise them and shock them. When you have a nightmare, it's awfully vivid if you're dreaming that you're being led to the electric chair. Then you're as happy as can be when you wake up because you're relieved. One of the dramatic reasons for this type of photography is to get it looking so natural that the audience gets involved and believes, for the time being, what's going on up there on the screen.
He responded:. I'm English. The English use a lot of imagination with their crimes. I don't get such a kick out of anything as much as out of imagining a crime. When I'm writing a story and I come to a crime, I think happily: now wouldn't it be nice to have him die like this? And then, even more happily, I think: at this point people will start yelling.
It must be because I spent three years studying with the Jesuits. They used to terrify me to death, with everything, and now I'm getting my own back by terrifying other people. Hitchcock's films, from the silent to the sound era, contained a number of recurring themes that he is famous for.
Alma reville biography: Alfred Hitchcock. Director: Psycho. Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, Essex, England. He was the son of Emma Jane (Whelan; - ) and East End greengrocer William Hitchcock ( - ). His parents were both of half English and half Irish ancestry.
His films explored audience as a voyeur , notably in Rear Window , Marnie and Psycho. He understood that human beings enjoy voyeuristic activities and made the audience participate in it through the character's actions. In most cases, it is an ordinary, everyday person who finds themselves in a dangerous situation.
It's easier for them to identify with him than with a guilty man on the run. According to Robin Wood, Hitchcock retained a feeling of ambivalence towards homosexuality, despite working with gay actors throughout his career. Moreover, Shadow of a Doubt has a double incest theme through the storyline, expressed implicitly through images. Hitchcock appears briefly in most of his own films.
For example, he is seen struggling to get a double bass onto a train Strangers on a Train , walking dogs out of a pet shop The Birds , fixing a neighbour's clock Rear Window , as a shadow Family Plot , sitting at a table in a photograph Dial M for Murder , and riding a bus North by Northwest , To Catch a Thief. Hitchcock's portrayal of women has been the subject of much scholarly debate.
Bidisha wrote in The Guardian in "There's the vamp, the tramp, the snitch, the witch, the slink, the double-crosser and, best of all, the demon mommy. Don't worry, they all get punished in the end. They were icy and remote. They were imprisoned in costumes that subtly combined fashion with fetishism. They mesmerised the men, who often had physical or psychological handicaps.
Sooner or later, every Hitchcock woman was humiliated. Hitchcock's films often feature characters struggling in their relationships with their mothers, such as Norman Bates in Psycho. In North by Northwest , Roger Thornhill Cary Grant is an innocent man ridiculed by his mother for insisting that shadowy, murderous men are after him.
In The Birds , the Rod Taylor character, an innocent man, finds his world under attack by vicious birds, and struggles to free himself from a clinging mother Jessica Tandy. The killer in Frenzy has a loathing of women but idolises his mother. The villain Bruno in Strangers on a Train hates his father, but has an incredibly close relationship with his mother played by Marion Lorne.
Sebastian Claude Rains in Notorious has a clearly conflicting relationship with his mother, who is rightly suspicious of his new bride, Alicia Huberman Ingrid Bergman. I told her that my idea of a good actor or good actress is someone who can do nothing very well. I said, "That's one of the things you've got to learn to have Whether you do little acting, a lot of acting in a given scene.
You know exactly where you're going. And these were the first things that she had to know. Emotion comes later and the control of the voice comes later. But, within herself, she had to learn authority first and foremost because out of authority comes timing. Hitchcock became known for having remarked that "actors should be treated like cattle".
Smith , Carole Lombard brought three cows onto the set wearing the name tags of Lombard, Robert Montgomery , and Gene Raymond , the stars of the film, to surprise him. Hitchcock responded by saying that, at one time, he had been accused of calling actors cattle. What I probably said, was that all actors should be treated like cattle In a nice way of course.
Hitchcock believed that actors should concentrate on their performances and leave work on script and character to the directors and screenwriters. He told Bryan Forbes in "I remember discussing with a method actor how he was taught and so forth. He said, 'We're taught using improvisation.
We are given an idea and then we are turned loose to develop in any way we want to. That's writing. Recalling their experiences on Lifeboat for Charles Chandler, author of It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock A Personal Biography, Walter Slezak said that Hitchcock "knew more about how to help an actor than any director I ever worked with", and Hume Cronyn dismissed the idea that Hitchcock was not concerned with his actors as "utterly fallacious", describing at length the process of rehearsing and filming Lifeboat.
Critics observed that, despite his reputation as a man who disliked actors, actors who worked with him often gave brilliant performances. James Mason said that Hitchcock regarded actors as "animated props". He should be willing to be used and wholly integrated into the picture by the director and the camera. He must allow the camera to determine the proper emphasis and the most effective dramatic highlights.
Hitchcock planned his scripts in detail with his writers. In Writing with Hitchcock , Steven DeRosa noted that Hitchcock supervised them through every draft, asking that they tell the story visually. Once the screenplay is finished, I'd just as soon not make the film at all. All the fun is over. I have a strongly visual mind. I visualize a picture right down to the final cuts.
I write all this out in the greatest detail in the script, and then I don't look at the script while I'm shooting.
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I know it off by heart, just as an orchestra conductor needs not look at the score. It's melancholy to shoot a picture. When you finish the script, the film is perfect. But in shooting it you lose perhaps 40 per cent of your original conception. Hitchcock's films were extensively storyboarded to the finest detail. He was reported to have never even bothered looking through the viewfinder , since he did not need to, although in publicity photos he was shown doing so.
He also used this as an excuse to never have to change his films from his initial vision. If a studio asked him to change a film, he would claim that it was already shot in a single way, and that there were no alternative takes to consider. After investigating script revisions, notes to other production personnel written by or to Hitchcock, and other production material, Krohn observed that Hitchcock's work often deviated from how the screenplay was written or how the film was originally envisioned.
For example, the celebrated crop-spraying sequence of North by Northwest was not storyboarded at all. Because of failing health, he retired from directing after Family Plot. He was knighted in and died soon afterward in Los Angeles on April 29, Hitchcock's films enjoyed new popularity in the s. After a restored version of Vertigo was released in and was surprisingly successful, plans were made to re-release other films, such as Strangers on a Train.
According to Entertainment Weekly, as of plans were underway to remake as many as half a dozen Hitchcock films with new casts, an idea that met with mixed responses from Hitchcock fans. Mogg, Ken. The Alfred Hitchcock Story. Dallas: Taylor, Perry, George. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Spoto, Donald. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock.
New York: Hopkinson and Blake,