“Hitch Begins”
By Raymond Benson
The British silent film period of director Alfred Hitchcock is simultaneously interesting and frustrating. It’s the former because it allows one to view a genius at the very beginning of his career—the kernels of motifs and themes, as well as stylistic choices, can be spotted and analyzed. It’s the latter because only one or two of the nine silent pictures he made are truly memorable and most are available today solely as poor quality public domain transfers.
The Criterion Collection has just released a bang-up, marvelous new edition of Hitchcock’s most celebrated silent work, The Lodger—A Story of the London Fog. The disk also contains one of the rarer silent titles, Downhill (also 1927), which might be reason enough for Hitchcock enthusiasts to purchase the package.
A bit of history: Hitchcock was working for Gainsborough Pictures under the auspices of Michael Balcon...
By Raymond Benson
The British silent film period of director Alfred Hitchcock is simultaneously interesting and frustrating. It’s the former because it allows one to view a genius at the very beginning of his career—the kernels of motifs and themes, as well as stylistic choices, can be spotted and analyzed. It’s the latter because only one or two of the nine silent pictures he made are truly memorable and most are available today solely as poor quality public domain transfers.
The Criterion Collection has just released a bang-up, marvelous new edition of Hitchcock’s most celebrated silent work, The Lodger—A Story of the London Fog. The disk also contains one of the rarer silent titles, Downhill (also 1927), which might be reason enough for Hitchcock enthusiasts to purchase the package.
A bit of history: Hitchcock was working for Gainsborough Pictures under the auspices of Michael Balcon...
- 6/29/2017
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
Hitchcock’s first self-professed ‘Hitch’ picture is still a winner. Many of his recurring themes are present, and some of his visual fluidity – in this finely tuned commercial ‘shock’ movie with witty visual tricks from Hitchcock’s own background as an art director. And hey, he secured a real box office name to star as the mysterious maybe-slayer, ‘The Avenger.’
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 885
1927 / B&W + Color tints / 1:33 Silent Ap / 91 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date June 27, 2017 / 39.95
Starring: Ivor Novello, June Tripp, Marie Ault, Arthur Chesney, Malcolm Keen.
Cinematography: Gaetano di Ventimiglia
Film Editor + titles: Ivor Montagu
Assistant director: Alma Reville
Written by Eliot Stannard from the book by Marie Belloc Lowndes
Produced by Michael Balcon and Carlyle Blackwell
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock became the most notable English film director for all the right reasons — he was talented and creative,...
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 885
1927 / B&W + Color tints / 1:33 Silent Ap / 91 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date June 27, 2017 / 39.95
Starring: Ivor Novello, June Tripp, Marie Ault, Arthur Chesney, Malcolm Keen.
Cinematography: Gaetano di Ventimiglia
Film Editor + titles: Ivor Montagu
Assistant director: Alma Reville
Written by Eliot Stannard from the book by Marie Belloc Lowndes
Produced by Michael Balcon and Carlyle Blackwell
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock became the most notable English film director for all the right reasons — he was talented and creative,...
- 6/13/2017
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
There's nothing more earnest than an English national epic, and this is a valiant expedition that becomes a low-key disaster. Told straight and clean, it's a primer on how to behave in the face of doom. Scott of the Antarctic Region B Blu-ray Studiocanal (UK) 1948 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 110 min. / Street Date June 6, 2016 / Available from Amazon UK £ 14.99 Starring John Mills, Derek Bond, Harold Warrender, James Robertson Justice, Kenneth More, Reginald Beckwith. Cinematography Osmond Borradaile, Jack Cardiff, Geoffrey Unsworth Editor Peter Tanner Original Music Vaughan Williams Written by Walter Meade, Ivor Montagu, Mary Hayley Bell Produced by Michael Balcon Directed by Charles Frend
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
English film companies fell on hard times during the postwar austerity period. But the relatively small Ealing Studios maintained its creative underdog brand even after it was taken over by Rank, and is still celebrated for wartime greats like Went the Day Well?, the singular masterpiece Dead of Night,...
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
English film companies fell on hard times during the postwar austerity period. But the relatively small Ealing Studios maintained its creative underdog brand even after it was taken over by Rank, and is still celebrated for wartime greats like Went the Day Well?, the singular masterpiece Dead of Night,...
- 7/10/2016
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
In his final column for the Observer, our film critic welcomes the re-release of two influential classics from the late 1950s
What goes around comes around. Or "This is where we came in!", the words we'd whisper back in the days of continuous movie performances, before heading for the exit when we reached the point at which we'd entered the cinema. Appropriately in the week I write my final film column, two classic movies, Bonjour Tristesse (1958) and Plein Soleil (aka Purple Noon, 1959), are re-released from that period at the end of the 1950s when I was embarking on a career as a professional writer. Both appear in beautiful new prints that do full justice to the Mediterranean sun which dictates their mood of dangerous eroticism, and both are closely associated with what was popularly known as the French Nouvelle Vague. In the first of them an English-speaking cast play French...
What goes around comes around. Or "This is where we came in!", the words we'd whisper back in the days of continuous movie performances, before heading for the exit when we reached the point at which we'd entered the cinema. Appropriately in the week I write my final film column, two classic movies, Bonjour Tristesse (1958) and Plein Soleil (aka Purple Noon, 1959), are re-released from that period at the end of the 1950s when I was embarking on a career as a professional writer. Both appear in beautiful new prints that do full justice to the Mediterranean sun which dictates their mood of dangerous eroticism, and both are closely associated with what was popularly known as the French Nouvelle Vague. In the first of them an English-speaking cast play French...
- 8/31/2013
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Our critic has been awarded an OBE for services to film. Here he reflects on a life of cinema and chooses extracts from five of his movie reviews
Casting my mind back to my Observer debut, it occurred to me that, had I been celebrating half a century of writing on films for the paper in 1963, I would have been reflecting on a career begun by reviewing the arrival of Charlie Chaplin and going on to Dw Griffith's Birth of a Nation. But the Observer didn't have a movie critic until the mid-1920s, when the Honourable Ivor Montagu (a peer's son, table tennis champion, lifelong communist, the man who saved Hitchcock's bacon by re-editing The Lodger) joined the paper. He was succeeded in 1928 by the Manchester Guardian's critic, CA Lejeune, who helped create the view widely held in Fleet Street that reviewing films was women's work. Indeed, her first...
Casting my mind back to my Observer debut, it occurred to me that, had I been celebrating half a century of writing on films for the paper in 1963, I would have been reflecting on a career begun by reviewing the arrival of Charlie Chaplin and going on to Dw Griffith's Birth of a Nation. But the Observer didn't have a movie critic until the mid-1920s, when the Honourable Ivor Montagu (a peer's son, table tennis champion, lifelong communist, the man who saved Hitchcock's bacon by re-editing The Lodger) joined the paper. He was succeeded in 1928 by the Manchester Guardian's critic, CA Lejeune, who helped create the view widely held in Fleet Street that reviewing films was women's work. Indeed, her first...
- 12/30/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
In conversation with François Truffaut in the 1960s, the Master called his 1927 thriller "the first true Hitchcock movie", and it's being rereleased in a carefully restored version as part of the BFI Southbank's extended Hitchcock celebrations. The matinee idol Ivor Novello plays the eponymous lodger, who rents a room with a working-class London family. Their blond daughter is being courted by a Scotland Yard detective, and he becomes a suspect in the hunt for "the Avenger", a serial killer specialising in murdering fair-haired women.
The movie is very much in the German expressionist manner and contains the seeds of Hitch's subsequent work (the fascination with technique and problem-solving, the obsession with blondes, the fear of authority, the ambivalence towards homosexuality) and there's a brief personal appearance, though such traits were not to be obligatory until after Rebecca. The producers found the film baffling and it took Ivor Montagu, the Observer's movie critic,...
The movie is very much in the German expressionist manner and contains the seeds of Hitch's subsequent work (the fascination with technique and problem-solving, the obsession with blondes, the fear of authority, the ambivalence towards homosexuality) and there's a brief personal appearance, though such traits were not to be obligatory until after Rebecca. The producers found the film baffling and it took Ivor Montagu, the Observer's movie critic,...
- 8/11/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
British agency concluded that actor – described by Us counterparts as 'parlour Bolshevik' – was no security risk
MI5 opened a file on Charlie Chaplin while he was being hounded by J Edgar Hoover's FBI for alleged communist sympathies.
The FBI, which described the star of Modern Times and The Great Dictator as one of "Hollywood's parlour Bolsheviks", asked MI5 for information to help get him banned from the Us. The results, including information gathered through eavesdropping, are contained in an extensive personal MI5 file released on Friday at the National Archives.
"Chaplin has given funds to communist front organisations … He has been involved in paternity and abortion cases," an MI5 liaison officer in Washington warned in October 1952.
MI5 noted that a decade earlier Chaplin had told the Los Angeles branch of the National Council of American Soviet Friendship: "There is a great deal of good in communism. We can use the good and segregate the bad.
MI5 opened a file on Charlie Chaplin while he was being hounded by J Edgar Hoover's FBI for alleged communist sympathies.
The FBI, which described the star of Modern Times and The Great Dictator as one of "Hollywood's parlour Bolsheviks", asked MI5 for information to help get him banned from the Us. The results, including information gathered through eavesdropping, are contained in an extensive personal MI5 file released on Friday at the National Archives.
"Chaplin has given funds to communist front organisations … He has been involved in paternity and abortion cases," an MI5 liaison officer in Washington warned in October 1952.
MI5 noted that a decade earlier Chaplin had told the Los Angeles branch of the National Council of American Soviet Friendship: "There is a great deal of good in communism. We can use the good and segregate the bad.
- 2/17/2012
- by Richard Norton-Taylor
- The Guardian - Film News
British agency concluded that actor – described by Us counterparts as 'parlour Bolshevik' – was no security risk
MI5 opened a file on Charlie Chaplin while he was being hounded by J Edgar Hoover's FBI for alleged communist sympathies.
The FBI, which described the star of Modern Times and The Great Dictator as one of "Hollywood's parlour Bolsheviks", asked MI5 for information to help get him banned from the Us. The results, including information gathered through eavesdropping, are contained in an extensive personal MI5 file released on Friday at the National Archives.
"Chaplin has given funds to communist front organisations … He has been involved in paternity and abortion cases," an MI5 liaison officer in Washington warned in October 1952.
MI5 noted that a decade earlier Chaplin had told the Los Angeles branch of the National Council of American Soviet Friendship: "There is a great deal of good in communism. We can use the good and segregate the bad.
MI5 opened a file on Charlie Chaplin while he was being hounded by J Edgar Hoover's FBI for alleged communist sympathies.
The FBI, which described the star of Modern Times and The Great Dictator as one of "Hollywood's parlour Bolsheviks", asked MI5 for information to help get him banned from the Us. The results, including information gathered through eavesdropping, are contained in an extensive personal MI5 file released on Friday at the National Archives.
"Chaplin has given funds to communist front organisations … He has been involved in paternity and abortion cases," an MI5 liaison officer in Washington warned in October 1952.
MI5 noted that a decade earlier Chaplin had told the Los Angeles branch of the National Council of American Soviet Friendship: "There is a great deal of good in communism. We can use the good and segregate the bad.
- 2/17/2012
- by Richard Norton-Taylor
- The Guardian - Film News
In the 1920s and 30s it was a struggle against the censors to get the likes of Battleship Potemkin shown in the UK. Now the BFI is celebrating these pioneering Russian films
Some Russian films of the early 20th century that sent shockwaves through Europe, making an impact outside the realm of cinema, are celebrated in a two-month BFI Southbank season. John Lehmann, poet, Hogarth Press editor, and brother of novelist Rosamond, wrote in 1940 that their appearance in London "was an event that had a decisive formative influence on the minds of the most alert of the new generation". Yet the films' arrival was staggered to say the least.
Bedecked with endorsements from Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, the world's most famous couple, Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin had done sensational business in Germany in 1926, but distributors' hopes of repeat success in Britain ran aground. "Officialdom," complained an out-of-character Daily Express,...
Some Russian films of the early 20th century that sent shockwaves through Europe, making an impact outside the realm of cinema, are celebrated in a two-month BFI Southbank season. John Lehmann, poet, Hogarth Press editor, and brother of novelist Rosamond, wrote in 1940 that their appearance in London "was an event that had a decisive formative influence on the minds of the most alert of the new generation". Yet the films' arrival was staggered to say the least.
Bedecked with endorsements from Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, the world's most famous couple, Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin had done sensational business in Germany in 1926, but distributors' hopes of repeat success in Britain ran aground. "Officialdom," complained an out-of-character Daily Express,...
- 5/26/2011
- The Guardian - Film News
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