A gentlemanly crow lights Tippi Hedren’s cigarette.
I think we can safely assume that this was a promotional shot for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
Via Retronaut
A moment of Hollywood cool. Steve McQueen had already made 2 episodes of Alfred Hitccock Presents, and was about to start filming The Magnificent Seven, when he visited Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh on the set of Hitchcock’s Psycho. I wonder what they were talking about?
Previously on Dangerous Minds
To ensure he made a return on his investment, Alfred Hitchcock created a set of rules for watching his 1960 classic horror film Psycho.
We won’t allow you to cheat yourself. You must see PSYCHO from the very beginning. Therefore, do not expect to be admitted into the theatre after the start of each performance of the picture. We say no one — and we mean no one — not even the manager’s brother, the President of the United States, or the Queen of England (God bless her)!
In foyer’s across the States, a Pinkerton guard was hired to bar any late comers.
Hitchcock had invested $806,947.55 of his own money, via his company Shamley Productions, into Psycho, after the Hollywood studios denounced it a sick film which would most likely destroy the great director’‘s reputation. It didn’t. Instead it made Hitchcock a lot of money, a generation of younger fans, and inspired a whole range of psychotic slasher movies.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Happy Birthday Norman Bates: ‘Psycho’ turns 50 today
Behind the Scenes: Alfred Hitchcock directs ‘Frenzy’ in 1972
Via Open Culture
Incredible behind-the-scenes footage of Alfred Hitchcock directing Frenzy from 1972.
Frenzy was greatly undervalued on its initial cinematic release - considered by many as too dark, unnecessarily seedy, and not worthy of Hitchcock’s talents, but I always thought it a superbly suspenseful and complex film that captured the lonely heart at the center of our everyday world. Taken form the novel by Arthur La Bern, Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square (which is worth reading), it was Hitchcock’s last great film, and contained some exceptionally fine characterizations by Jon Finch, Barry Foster, Anna Massey, Billie Whitelaw and in particular Alec McCowen as Chief Inspector Oxford.
The sound quality is non-existent, but just enjoy the pictures.
With thanks to Nellym
Cinema’s master of the macabre defines “happiness.”
Via Dude Craft
Nice panoramic timelapse of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window by Jeff Desom. According to the information on Vimeo, “The order of events is pretty much as seen in the movie.”
Via Nerdcore
Alfred Hitchcock Presents…Back for Christmas, based on John Collier‘s story of a man who plans to murder his wife, and bury her in the cellar. Collier’s short story was originally printed in the New Yorker magazine in 1939, this was the story’s first TV outing, there were 3 different versions made for radio, including one with Peter Lorre, and was latter remade for Roald Dahl’s series Tales of the Unexpected in the 1970s.
Collier wrote dozens of stories, many of which were successfully produced for various radio, TV and film productions - including “Green Thoughts”, the basis for Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors. He also contributed to such screenplays as the Humphrey Bogart / Katharine Hepburn movie The African Queen and the play based on Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories” I Am A Camera. Towards the end of his life, Collier jokingly said of himself:
“I sometimes marvel that a third-rate writer like me has been able to palm himself off as a second-rate writer.”
Hitchock’s version of Back for Christmas stars John Williams as Herbert Carpenter and Isobel Elsom as Hermione Carpenter, and was first broadcast in March 1956.
Part 2, after the jump…
I couldn’t care less about the whole Angry Birds phenomenon, but I’m digging on this design titled “Them Birds” by Dan Eijah Fajardo and Pedro Kramer. It’s a nice mash-up.
(via My Modern Met)
James Brown mistakes William Castle’s Homicidal for an Alfred Hitchcock film in this 1969 clip from the Mike Douglas show. Rod McKuen tries to clarify things while Joan Rivers looks on.
Homicidal was a knock-off of Psycho. Hitch saves Brown some embarrassment by not correcting him. Class act.
Three reels of Alfred Hitchcock’s earliest surviving feature film, 1924’s The White Shadow have been found by archivists working in New Zealand. Hitchcock, then just 24-years-old was the assistant director, art director, editor, and wrote the film, which which starred actress Betty Compton as twins, one good and, you guessed it, one who is evil. Although incomplete, the film offers a glimpse at the great director’s budding vision.
From the Hollywood Reporter:
For The White Shadow, an atmospheric British melodrama picked up for international distribution by Hollywood’s Lewis J. Selznick Enterprises, Hitchcock is credited as assistant director, art director, editor and writer. He was 24 when he worked on the film; his feature directorial debut would come soon afterward on The Pleasure Garden (1925).
The film, which stars Betty Compson in a dual role as twin sisters — one angelic and the other “without a soul” — turned up among the cache of unidentified American nitrate prints safeguarded at the New Zealand Film Archive in Wellington. The first three reels of the six-reel feature were found; no other copy is known to exist.
“These first three reels of The White Shadow — more than half the film — offer a priceless opportunity to study [Hitchcock’s] visual and narrative ideas when they were first taking shape,” said David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and author of The Films of Alfred Hitchcock.
The White Shadow was one of several silent films saved by New Zealand film collector Jack Murtagh, who died in 1989. There will be an announcement this week about a U.S. screening. Some of Hitchock’s silent films (The Lodger, The Ring, Blackmail and The Pleasure Garden) are getting new scores in preparation for a BFI retrospective in London that will a part of the Cultural Olympiad festival next summer.
More stills after the jump…
Hitch is a graduation project made by Felix Meyer, Pascal Monaco, Torsten Strer, at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hannover. Hitch is:
The Ultimate Hitch Cookbook, an animated book containing the recipes for Alfred Hitchcock’s classics. It’s made for Hitchcock enthusiasts and every other couch potato out there.
With thanks to Maria Guimil
Today in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was released, ushering in the age of ultra-violence in American cinema and to some extent the independent movie (Paramount were aghast at Psycho‘s script, so Hitchcock financed the film via his own Shamley Productions for $806,947.55)
Based on the novel of the same name by famed author Robert Bloch, Psycho was inspired by real-life murderer Ed Gein. It was filmed in black and white, not just to save money, but because Hitchcock knew that the shower scene would have just been too much in color. Principle filming took place on the set of Revue Studios, the same location where Hitchcock shot his television show. The Bates Motel set is still standing at the Universal Lot (see above).
Janet Leigh was apparently so upset after she saw the infamous shower scene (which had over 50 edits and used chocolate sauce for as the blood stand-in) that she tried to avoid them for the rest of her life. Leigh told documentary producers in 1997 that she would only shower if everything in the house was locked down first and she felt safe. She also always left the bathroom door open.
As, well, psychotic as Psycho is, it would take another twelve years before Hitchcock would film his sickest film of all, Frenzy. You wanna talk about a sick film? Frenzy makes Psycho seem tame by comparison. Today’s “torture porn” ain’t got nuthin’ on Hitch, baby!
Alfred Hitchcock made a habit of appearing in his own films, it became such a distraction that the great director ensured his trade-mark profile appeared soon after the opening titles, so audiences could concentrate on the intricacies of the plot rather than play Where’s Alfie?.
Over the years, other directors have adopted the Hitchcockian cameo (M Night Shyamalan being the most irritating), or turned it into a memorable scene - Martin Scorsese’s creepy cameo as a cuckolded husband in Taxi Driver is a small film all of its own. There have also been the directors who give cameos to the film-makers who influenced or inspired their careers - Jean-Luc Goddard’s homage to the genius Sam Fuller in Pierre le Fou, where the legendary director of The Steel Helmet, Underworld USA, The Naked Kiss and Shock Corridor expounds on cinema:
“Film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word . . . emotion.”
Here is just a small selection of some notable cameos by directors in their own and in other director’s films.
Legendary director Sam Fuller appears in this party scene from Jean-Luc Goddard’s ‘Pierrot le Fou’ (1965)
More directors in front of the camera, after the jump…
Alfred Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, poses lovingly with a refrigerated prop head of her dear husband. Photo by by Philippe Halsman.
(via KMFW)
