Alfred Hitchcock: Filming Our Fears (Oxford Portraits)
Gene Adair
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 0195119673
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Alfred Hitchcock is a fascinating look at the life of one of the most influential filmmakers in the world -- a man known for his portly profile and distinct, leery voice almost as much as for his groundbreaking movies. From Hitchcock's first film, Blackmail -- the first British movie with sound -- to his blockbuster Hollywood successes, Psycho, The Birds, Rear Window, and Vertigo. Alfred Hitchcock chronicles the Master of Suspense's close working relationship with his wife, Alma, who was an integral part of his filmmaking process, and the struggle to gain full artistic control over his work. With illustrations throughout and sidebars showcasing Hitchcocks techniques and directing style, Alfred Hitchcock reveals how some of the greatest films ever created came to be through the life and work of one of the most admired filmmakers ever.
Oxford Portraits are informative and insightful biographies of people whose lives shaped their times and continue to influence ours. Based on the most recent scholarship, they draw heavily on primary sources, including writings by and about their subjects. Each book is illustrated with a wealth of photographs, documents, memorabilia, framing the personality and achievements of its subject against the backdrop of history.
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Pictures two more films, which he made in quick succession in 1927. First, there was Downhill, based on a play cowritten by his leading actor from The Lodger, Ivor Novello, who also starred in the new picture. The story traces the misadventures of a young man who is accused of stealing and whose life goes “downhill” from there. That movie was followed by Easy Virtue, an adaptation of a Noël Coward play about a woman whose inability to escape her past wrecks her second marriage. Unfortunately,
Harrison had a separate apartment in the same building, and her quarters became the base of operations for continuing work on the adaptation of Rebecca. Patricia was enrolled in a Catholic day school, and her father regularly drove her to class, as well as to Sunday Mass, in a little English-made car he had purchased. The rest of the Hitchcock party did not adjust so well. “We had indifferent luck with the group,” the director remembered. “The maid got homesick and returned to England; the cook
but the corpse of Rusk’s latest victim. Inspector Oxford (McCowan), the Scotland Yard detective in charge of the case, arrives at the scene just moments ahead of Rusk, who shows up hauling a large trunk in which he intended to conceal his victim’s body. “Mr. Rusk,” the inspector remarks dryly as the film ends, “you’re not wearing your tie.” In previous films, especially Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock had exposed the dark desires of his protagonists, revealing these
final scene, when he shows himself to be quite as capable of murder as Rusk. With Frenzy, Hitchcock took his flawed protagonist to the logical extreme. Pushed to the limit, Blaney is ready to act on the destructive impulses that had long been boiling near the surface of his personality. In its treatment of sex and violence, Frenzy was the most graphic film that Hitchcock ever made, more so even than Psycho. With the establishment of a new motion picture rating system a few years earlier, movies
paints a sad picture of a filmmaker suffering from arthritis and a heart ailment, drinking too much (in part to dull his physical pain), and desperately lonely. There Image Not Available were still more honors during this period—a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute (AFI)—but according to Freeman, such attention depressed Hitchcock more than it A U.S. postage stamp flattered him: “As far as he was concerned, they were issued in 1998.