Amph The Films of Alfred Hitchcock: Disc: ]Alfred Hitchcock's Secret of Happiness

I've seen stills from "The Pleasure Garden"...don't expect much.

North by Northwest starting on TCM in 8 minutes.

And yes, it never gets old. That's talent.

In "Hitchcock/Truffaut", Hitchcock tells Truffaut that as a crew he had a cameraman and a newsreel cameraman for the drowning scene and that's it. The film was shot at Lake Como on a tiny budget. Hitchcock borrowed money from his cameraman and from his leading man to make ends meet. The first actress he hired couldn't go in the water (she was menstruating, which AH claimed that he had never heard of before), so AH had to hire another girl, considerably heavier, whom his leading man couldn't lift. Take after take, he keep dropping her. The leading lady brought another actress with her, which increased costs; he ended up with one pfennig left.

I can't even remember watching The Pleasure Garden, but according to IMDb, I did so. Mustn't have been much chop.

Fortunately, The Lodger is superb. But there's an awful lot of tosh in the British period of Hitchcock's career.

Newswire Director of Anvil! might take over Alfred Hitchcock biopic

by Sean O'Neal January 20, 2011

"The L.A. Times reports that Sacha Gervasi, director of heavy-metal documentary Anvil! The Story Of Anvil, is in talks to helm the long-in-the-planning Alfred Hitchcock And The Making Of Psycho, a biopic (based on Stephen Rebello?s book of the same name) about Hitch?s journey to create his iconic thriller and compete an industry increasingly crowded with younger, cheaper imitation shock-merchants?a story not 180 degrees from that of the influential metal band, in other words. The project has been kicking around for years now, most recently with Anthony Hopkins attached to play the lead, although there?s no indication that Hopkins is still involved; we suppose that might depend on whether he?s too busy playing a rabies-infected Viking or something. Anyway, if Gervasi finally makes a go of it, the film might actually be made before the Dan Fogler-starring Number 13?a mystery-comedy the Balls Of Fury actor once described as in the spirit of Shakespeare In Love?which is still in a holding pattern while prospective co-star Ben Kingsley mulls those not-inconsiderable details over."

Lordy. Who should (could?) direct this? Who should (could?) play Hitchcock? Perkins? Leigh?

This is an absolutely terrible idea for a film, and I'm not encouraged by who is involved.

Can't we just enjoy Psycho on it's own? It's bad enough the film itself got remade, now this?

Ugh. Just leave it alone.

Actually, I think it sounds kind of intriguing. The problem is: it never matches your imagination. They tried it with "Shadow of the Vampire" (which was about the making of "Nosferatu") and which I thought was very flat-footed. Somehow what seemed creepy in B & W (and "Psycho" is in B & W) looks bland in colour, or at least, in ordinary colour). And who could play AH?

Sydney Greenstreet could have played Hitchcock. That's the only person I can think of, and I think he's a bit long in the tooth now.

I have no problem with the concept of the film, though. RKO 281 didn't impede my enjoyment of Citizen Kane; it enhanced it. I can understand people hating the idea of remakes, but a film about the making of a film should be about as inoffensive as it can get.

Agreed on Shadow of the Vampire though. There's less to it than there really should be. And it was a great concept.

I've heard some interesting ideas concerning the casting of Hitch, actually. James Gandolfini and Brendan Gleeson, to name two. Don't know why a Hitchcock biopic has to be focused in this particular time period, but whatever.

Gandolfini isn't even British; maybe Gleeson. Greenstreet is not long in the tooth; he *is* the tooth, being dead. I'm sure that's what you meant.

And yeah, they missed the boat on the "Nosferatu" movie. Loads of possibilities.

They also tried "The Wizard of Oz" ("Under the Rainbow"--unspeakably lame)

Casting against type is all very well, but AH was a very proper Brit, born 1900. That takes a lot of imagination to carry off.

Al Pacino in "Revolution". I rest my case.

Paul Giammati, properly fattened, would make an excellent Hitchcock for this project which should never see the light of day. I case my rest.

Acting cannot generally overcome miscasting.

Oh, for Charles Laughton, though. He could have done it beautifully.

Jimmy Stewart's Vertigo Apartment

I did not realize that Lombard Street was the 'crookedest street in America'...

Raymond Chandler's Scathing Letter to Alfred Hitchcock

Actually, the film was brilliant, and nearly every critic thought Chandler *had* written it; but it was actually written by a young woman named Czerzi Ormonde, who had the advantage of being more mallable, and not being an alcoholic.

Courtesy of JohnWesleyDowney:

A clip of two separate interviews of Hitchcock, the first by Pia Lindstrom (Ingrid Bergman's daughter), which isn't so good, and the second one by a man who has seen Hitchcock's early stuff and gets him talking about the great German director, F. W. Murnau, and asks him some interesting questions.

Interviews with Alfred Hitchcock

I particularly liked the question about story boarding a movie and then giving it to another director. Hitchcock knows this is a bad idea--there's the question of tempo and image size, he says. And control.

And boy is he right, given Gus Van Sant's version of "Psycho".

I particularly liked the question about story boarding a movie and then giving it to another director. Hitchcock knows this is a bad idea--there's the question of tempo and image size, he says. And control.

And boy is he right, given Gus Van Sant's version of "Psycho".

That remake is the best possible refute to the question posed that could ever exist.

It lacks the master's touch, which is distinctive and personal and cannot be ordered into existence by a studio executive's edict.


This version of Psycho received mostly negative reviews; it was awarded two Golden Raspberry Awards, for Worst Remake or Sequel and Worst Director for Gus Van Sant, while Anne Heche was nominated as Worst Actress. Camille Paglia commented that the only reason to watch it was "to see Anne Heche being assassinated", but that "it should have been a much more important work and event than it was."

A number of critics and writers viewed Van Sant's version more as an actual experiment in shot-for-shot remakes. Many people refer to this film as a duplicate of the 1960 film rather than a remake. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote that the film "demonstrates that a shot-by-shot remake is pointless; genius apparently resides between or beneath the shots, or in chemistry that cannot be timed or counted." Screenwriter Joseph Stefano, who worked on the 1960 version, thought that although she spoke the same lines, Anne Heche portrays Marion Crane as an entirely different character. Even Van Sant admitted that it was an experiment that proved that no one can really copy a film exactly the same way as the original.