Hitchcock

Here are my notes for this week's screening:

Hitchcock

USA 2012                    98 minutes

Director:                      Sacha Gervasi

Starring:                        Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, James D'Arcy, Jessica Biel, Michael Stuhlbarg, Scarlett Johansson, Toni Collette

Awards and Nominations

• BAFTA,  Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Best Actress Nominations for Helen Mirren
• 12 other nominations

 “Many people, including his studio, Paramount, had warned against this project [Psycho]: the material threatened to be nasty and gruesome, without Hitchcock’s urbane and attractive people – you couldn’t cast Cary Grant as Norman Bates (and I doubt Hitch could have brought himself to murder Grace Kelly).  The shower killing and the looming mother seemed like exploitation, or Grand Guignol, as well as trouble with the censor.  With his agent, Lew Wasserman, Hitchcock persevered.  So long as he worked cheaply, using the crew from his television show, and staying in black and white, Psycho could be set up in a deal to make more money for Hitch than he had ever known before.”

David Thomson: The Big Screen

After the great popular success of North By Northwest (1959) many critics claimed that Hitchock (Antony Hopkins) was losing his edge and growing old.  Determined to prove them wrong he decides to make Psycho and his wife Alma (Helen Mirren) acts as his chief adviser, censor and muse.

The film, with a script by John McLaughlin, is based on Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, a fascinating factual study of the film’s creation, with both Hopkins and Mirren having great fun with their roles.  However for legal reasons the film shows no footage from the completed film and the director was even forbidden to shoot any footage at the location of the Bates Motel, which still exists on a Hollywood back lot.

Psycho was an immediate international success, and despite the critical acclaim for Hitchcock’s other films (with Vertigo (1958) being voted first place in Sight & Sound’s 2012 poll of the greatest films of all times,  when it displaced Citizen Kane from the position it had occupied since 1962) it is arguably his best known film.  To date it has generated three sequels plus the pilot for a failed TV series in the 1980s.  More recently in 1998 Gus Van Sant made a version of Psycho in colour that was an almost shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock’s original, and in 2012 a series called Bates Motel, set in contemporary Oregon and thus re-booting Hitchcock’s original story, was successfully screened in the US.

 

Here's one of the trailers:

 

 

 

 

And another one:

 

 

Gothic

With Halloween approaching The Observer has published a Top Ten List of Gothic films:

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2013/oct/25/10-best-gothic-films-mark-kermode

We're getting into the spirit of it later this week by screening Hichcock.  To get into the mood, here's the trailer for Psycho:

Our New Season

I spent an enjoyable evening with the Film Club (aka Community Cinema) Committee selecting films for our new season.

Between us all we came up with a list that would enable us to schedule a screening every night (well until Doctor Who and Sherlock return there is nothing much to see on TV).  However we finally cam up with the following:

Song For Marion

Lincoln

 

 

 

Les Miserables

 



Hitchcock

Beautiful Lies

A Late Quartet

It looks like it's going to be a good Autumn...

The 20 Best Films of all Time chosen by me - Part 3

And now we move on to thrillers.  Once again this is my own selection, and the only criterion is that I have to have seen any film I nominate.

1. The Lady Vanishes
I read some time last year that you could not consider yourself a serious film fan unless you had seen The Lady Vanishes.  I'd read about it many times but had never seen it - at least no consciously.  Fortunately a quick internet order remedied the deficiency: I really enjoyed it and it has an amazing vitality that belies its 1938 release date.

2. The Long Good Friday
I'd been a fan of Helen Mirren ever since O Lucky Man - I'd even watched her on Jackanory reading a story in an amazingly low cut Jacobethen dress - but this was the first time I'd seen her in a role that did justice to her talent.  Bob Hoskins is pretty good too (understatement) and the whole film really caught the zeitgeist.

3. Casablanca
I'm not sure if this is a thriller or a lovely story, but who cares.  It's a film I could see forever, and it was the film that my wife and I went to on our first date: a double bill with Play It Again Sam. We'll always have Casablanca.

4. Fargo
In our film society we try t show the best of releases, but several years ago we made an exception for Fargo - still one of the best films in a very strong field from the Coen brothers.  since I'd first seen it I'd actually visited Minnesota several times for work and recognised the accent, but fortunately all my trips were in the Spring or the Autumn.  And now I even have my own wood chipper.

5. Chinatown
I first saw this in my first year at university when I suddenly became aware of the big world of films that opened up around me. It's a brilliant homage to Hollywood of the 1940s as well as a key film of the 1970s - and several of the characters play key roles in David Thomson's brilliantly unsettling novel Suspects.

The Ten Best British Films Of All Time

The Daily Telegraph, which usually includes some good journalism about films, has just published a list of the Ten Best British Films Of All Time:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/classic-movies/10027283/10-best-British-films-of-all-time-chosen-by-David-Gritten.html

There's plenty to argue about here, and although I would not dispute Don't Look Now, Kes, and Kind Hearts and Coronets, there is nothing by Hitchcock (in his pre-Hollywood phase), Bill Forysth (especially Local Hero) or John Boorman (Excalibur or Hope and Glory). 

Other major omissions are Peter Greenaway, Ken Russell and Terry Gilliam.

Trying to compile a list of best films is about as much use as speculating about who will be the new Doctor Who!!!