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Quick LinksThe Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) Was Based on Alfred Hitchcock’s Own 1934 FilmJimmy Stewart Worked On Four Films Total With Alfred HitchcockOne of Doris Day’s Biggest Hits Made Its Premiere in the Man Who Knew Too Much

Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) is a film with an interesting history. The concept started off as a book of short stories by author G.K. Chesterton and morphed into a movie in 1934 directed by a young Alfred Hitchcock. It was a prime example of spy fiction before it was being churned out en masse. Most modern audiences will probably remember Hitchcock's later version starring Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day. In an unconventional move, Hitchcock chose to revisit his own film 22 years after the release of the first.

The remake of The Man That Knew Too Much shares few similarities with its predecessor. Much in the same way,...

As the nights grow longer and the air turns crisp, it’s the perfect time to settle in with some of the best spooky films ever made. From eerie silent classics to modern horror hits, spooky cinema has evolved across decades, yet each era has its own spine-tingling gems. Whether you love atmospheric terror or heart-pounding scares, here’s a journey through the best films from the 1920s to today that will give you chills. Things to do: Subscribe to The Hollywood Insider’s YouTube Channel, by clicking here. Limited Time Offer – Free Subscription to The Hollywood Insider Click here to read more on The Hollywood Insider’s vision, values and mission statement here – Media has the responsibility to better our world – The Hollywood Insider fully focuses on substance and meaningful entertainment, against gossip and scandal, by combining entertainment, education, and philanthropy. 1920s - 1980s ‘The Haunting’ (1963) Cast: Julie Harris,...

Alfred Hitchcock played a major role in popularizing a screenwriting technique that is still used 43 years after his death. Hitchcock is undeniably one of the greatest filmmakers of all time and is remembered for iconic movies such as Psycho and Rear Window. While Hitchcock never won an Oscar, the innovative filmmaker is credited with changing the industry. One of his most popular innovations was the zoom dolly, most famously imitated by Steven Spielberg in Jaws.

Hitchcock is also the master of suspense, using various camera angles to make his audiences feel uneasy. The director was known for his intense storyboards, where he allegedly mapped out every detail of every shot. However, there's a lesser-known element of filmmaking that Hitchcock had a massive impact on. With decades passed since the filmmaker was working in the industry, this trick is still used in Hollywood.

Related: Every Alfred Hitchcock & James Stewart Movie Ranked...

They should call it Mission: Exceptional. Given that this is a series that began on television 57 years ago and over the past 27 years has delivered seven big feature films, no one would be terribly surprised if it were to begin flagging a bit. But Tom Cruise & Co. will have none of that; to the contrary, this new entry, officially called Dead Reckoning Part One, ramps up the excitement and sheer flat-out impressiveness to a new level, with the absolute final piece of the puzzle already shot and due to open in a year’s time.

Few films have come into existence that display so much confidence and conviction in what they’re doing and can follow through with their ideas onscreen virtually without regard to budgetary constraints. To put things in perspective, the normal budget for a one-hour episode of M:i on television in the late 1960s was $225,000, which...

All those British crime films once deemed undesirable for the National Image are beginning to get the attention they deserve. This story of a single day in a working class section of London has plenty of criminal activity but blends it in with the everyday crimes of desperation and boredom. The Sandigate girls are flirting with trouble but Googie Withers’ Rose Sandigate has gone much further: she’s hiding an escaped fugitive who was once her lover in the vain hope of recapturing her lost youth. Director Robert Hamer examines a dozen distinctive characters on the edge of respectability, in one of the most original ‘Brit noirs’ we’ve seen to date.

It Always Rains on Sunday

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1947 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 92 min. / Street Date November 5, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Googie Withers, John McCallum, Jack Warner, Edward Chapman, Susan Shaw, Patricia Plunkett, Nigel Stock, David Lines, Sydney Tafler,...

Can a war movie be reassuring in a time of crisis? Each of the films in this excellent collection stress people working together: to repel invaders, escape from or attack the enemy, and just to survive in sticky situations. All are inspirational in that they see cooperation, organization and leadership doing good work. See: the ‘other’ great escape picture, the original account of Dunkirk, and the aerial bombing movie that inspired the final battle in Star Wars. Plus a tense ‘what if?’ invasion tale, and a desert trek suspense ordeal that’s one of the best war films ever. The most relevant dialogue in the set? Seeing the total screw-up at Dunkirk, Bernard Lee determines that England will have to re-organize with new people in key leadership positions, people who know what they’re doing. I’m all for that Here and Now, fella.

Their Finest Hour 5 British WWII Classics

Went The Day Well,...

Film Movement, a self-described “film service” that traffics in esoteric theatrical and home video product has released two notable examples of post-war British comedy with Whisky Galore! and The Maggie – both are seafaring satires directed by Alexander Mackendrick featuring some of Ealing Studio’s most memorable players.

Whiskey Galore!/The Maggie

Blu ray

Film Movement

1949, 1954 / 1:33:1 / 82 min., 92 min.

Starring Joan Greenwood, Paul Douglas

Cinematography by Gerald Gibbs, Gordon Dines

Directed by Alexander Mackendrick

The men and women of Ealing emerged from the second World War with their cheerful cynicism intact and more than ready to take a bite out of the hand what fed them – from Passport to Pimlico to Kind Hearts and Coronets those artists happily took potshots at the class systems they had fought so hard to defend. Though these satires had teeth (Kind Hearts was especially lethal), romance was never far away – it’s no wonder...

Dan Norman Oct 10, 2018

Grab your passport and bring a sidekick. We're hunting for Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest MacGuffins

This article comes from Den of Geek UK.

Spoilers lie ahead for The Trouble With Harry, Psycho, North By Northwest, To Catch A Thief, The Lady Vanishes, and...Star Wars

The MacGuffin is one of those storytelling inventions that operates by a vague “I know it when I see it” rule. The man who popularized its use, Alfred Hitchcock, didn’t help matters. When asked to define the MacGuffin – as he frequently was – he would repeat the same nonsensical joke.

In Hitchcock’s interview with François Truffaut, Truffaut attempts to establish limits on the phrase (is it “the pretext for the plot”? is it ideally “forgotten” amongst the rush of the action?). Each time, Hitch replies with an answer that amounts to little more than "sort of."

Without any exact definitions being...

Stars: Will Hay, Charles Hawtrey, Peter Croft, Barry Morse, Peter Ustinov, Anne Firth, Frank Pettingell, Leslie Harcourt, Julien Mitchell, Jeremy Hawk, Raymond Lovell | Written by Angus MacPhail, John Dighton | Directed by Basil Dearden, Will Hay

I always enjoy reviewing re-releases of old films, they remind us – and in some cases introduce us to – some classics. One such release is The Goose Steps Out which is getting a special 75th Anniversary release, and is a comedy great from the 1940s…

Will Hay plays William Pots, a bumbling teacher who turns out to be the double of a German general. Sent to Germany to impersonate the general and steal a new bomb the Nazis are working on, he finds himself having to teach a group of students how to spy on the British.

Watching The Goose Steps Out it is easy to see this was a piece of propaganda used to...

Alfred Hitchcock's true-life saga of a man wrongly accused may be Hitchcock's most troublesome movie -- all the parts work, but does it even begin to come together? Henry Fonda is the 'ordinary victim of fate' and an excellent Vera Miles is haunting as the wife who responds to the guilt and stress by withdrawing from reality. The Wrong Man Blu-ray Warner Archive Collection 1956 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 105 min. / Street Date January 26, 2016 / available through the WBshop / 21.99 Starring Henry Fonda, Vera Miles, Anthony Quayle, Harold J. Stone, John Heldabrand, Doreen Lang, Norma Connolly, Lola D'Annunzio, Robert Essen, Dayton Lummis, Charles Cooper, Esther Minciotti, Laurinda Barrett, Nehemiah Persoff. Cinematography Robert Burks Art Direction Paul Sylbert Film Editor George Tomasini Original Music Bernard Herrmann Written by Maxwell Anderson and Angus MacPhail Produced and Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Wrong Man sees Alfred Hitchcock at the end of...

The Noc List - Mission: Impossible

Artist and illustrator Truck Torrence, who goes by the moniker 100% Soft, has a show on at Bottleneck Gallery, and it is cute and fun. The show is called Lil' MacGuffins and focuses on movie MacGuffins — you know, those objects that everyone in the movie is trying to get their hands on, which drives the plot. Alfred Hitchcock is credited with coining the term, although it may have actually come from screenwriter Angus MacPhail. Whoever did the naming, Torrence has chosen ten of his favorites and illustrated them in his own, inimitable style, which is cartoony and adorable. I love that he did the black and white movies in greyscale.

You can head over to Bottleneck Gallery’s website to buy prints of any of these. Unfortunately, if you buy a print of The Noc List, it won’t be animated. You can’t print gifs.

Above: Spectacular full-scale derailment from the 1931 version of The Ghost Train (and also the 1941 version).

Arnold Ridley is fondly remembered in the UK as one of the stars of seventies sitcom Dad’s Army, about an incompetent and mainly superannuated group of volunteer soldiers in the WWII home guard, a show which made Ridley a national star at age 72 (it continued until he was 81). His sweetly doddering persona made a brilliant foil to the petulant Arthur Lowe, the dithering John Le Mesurier and gloomy Scot John Laurie.

One day, shooting on location in a graveyard, one of Ridley’s younger co-stars mused, “Hardly worth your leaving, is it, Arnold?” A rather harsh bit of humor: if you find it too mean, take comfort in the fact that the young thesp predeceased Ridley by some years, owing to liver failure. What larks!

But looong before Dad’s Army, Arnold Ridley found...

Went the Day Well? (1942)

Director: Alberto Cavalcanti

Based on Graham Greene’s short story The Lieutenant Died Last

Screenplay by John Dighton

UK , 1942

How many films and TV shows have left you quaking at the thought of your quiet home town being overrun by flesh-eating zombies or sex-crazed vampires? When Ealing Studios released Went the Day Well? in 1942, anxieties were focused on equally fiendish invaders from across the English Channel. You never know, that polite British officer sipping tea in your drawing room, might turn out to be part of the advance party from the Third Reich.

Based on a short story by Graham Greene, Alberto Cavalcanti’s film is set in the idyllic English village of Bramley End (in reality, Turville in Buckinghamshire). A framing device introduces us first to the church warder (played by Mervyn Johns), who sets the scene for the extraordinary events of Whitsun weekend 1942. The...

The Halfway House (1943)

Director: Basil Dearden

A young girl tries to bring her estranged parents back together by contriving a mini-break at a charming Welsh inn. It might sound a bit like The Parent Trap, but The Halfway House is an intriguing but uneven wartime fantasy drama from Ealing Studios. Director Basil Dearden’s film was co-written by Angus MacPhail and Diana Morgan (Went The Day Well?) and also features one of the most grating Welsh accents I’ve ever heard – courtesy of Glynis Johns.

The Halfway House begins with a series of brief vignettes introducing the main characters. There’s young Joanna (Sally Anne Howes), whose bickering parents Richard and Jill (Richard Bird and Valerie White) are on the brink of divorce. A disgraced army officer Fortescue (Guy Middleton) is released from prison, after serving time for pilfering the regimental funds. At a Welsh port, ex-navy captain Harry Meadows...