39 Steps to the Genius of Hitchcock
James Bell
Language: English
Pages: 152
ISBN: 2:00271595
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This is the first in a new series of compendia from the British Film Institute. This oversized volume features 39 heavily-illustrated essays of varying lengths. Most of the authors are culled from Sight and Sound magazine, but other contributors include Charles Barr, Sidney Gottlieb, Patrick McGilligan, Ken Mogg, David Thomson, Camille Paglia, Laura Mulvey, Kent Jones, Bill Krohn, and Guillermo del Toro, who himself has written a book on Hitchcock that is yet to be translated into English.
The Best Years of Our Lives (BFI Film Classics)
The Manchurian Candidate (BFI Film Classics)
Cat People (BFI Film Classics)
more closely with an innocent man than with a villain. but they also want to imagine a better version of themselves, as embodied in the star personas of Cary Grant, Ivor Novello, Robert Donat and others. Hitchcock knew and respected this. but the expectations attached to the star system could also be a frustration, and shaped some of his films contrary to his original intentions. Broadly speaking, Hitchcock's falsely accused men can be divided into those we know are innocent of the specific crime
our blessing, and one of Selznick's great errors of vanity, that he liked to preserve every memo on this process, and Leonard Leff‘s book is richly illustrated with them. It has become customary to conclude from this battleground that Rebecca is not quite a Hitchcock lm, and that it suffers from the producers interference. l think that's unjust and inaccurate. Rebecca is the story of an uncertain female soul under great pressure of circumstances and several malign presences - not least Rebecca
/- 1 5 0‘ "/‘_ » . if I .j\ The Wrong Man The Lady Vanishos ‘I 1.-\ r M /\ DO /_< =1 is also the most obscure. Waltzes from Vienna, an Ocdipal operetta depictinglonanne Strauss Jr‘s overthrow of his father as the Waltz King through the composition and premiere of the Blue Danube waltz. A notonous flop, Waltzes is nonetheless one of Hitchcock's most musically daring movies. In its staging of an orchestra from multiple points of view. its exposition of how a song is composed, its
Hitch's vision and in the end, the dream was diluted. It was not lmed in searing sunshine as Hitch had hoped, but on a sound stage using miniatures and painted backdrops, and was later reworked by Selznick's new recruit, art director William Cameron Menzies. The nal 90»second sequence, full of scissors, eyes and masked faces, is a homage to surrealism, but it contained only three of the many scenes Dali had envisaged, omitting such spectacles as 15 heavy, lavishly sculpted pianos swinging from
knife. He spoke about filmmaking not in terms of pure theory and la\v, but in parables and maxims. making his knowledge seem accessible and easy to paraphrase "The better the villain, the better the film"; "A lot of directors create slices of life. l create slices of cake"; "Drama is life with the dull parts cut out"; "Repetition with conscience is style"; "Suspense comes from dispensing information to heighten emotion, not by withholding it " And yet. behind all his quotable phrases and
