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Hitchcock's legendary movies owed their success to talented actors like Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, and James Stewart. Performances by stars like Janet Leigh and Robert Walker brought depth and intensity to Hitchcock's iconic characters. Alfred Hitchcock's collaborations with actors like Tippi Hedren and Anthony Perkins elevated his films.

Throughout his career, Alfred Hitchcock worked with many of the best actors of his time, and they delivered some iconic performances for him. His regular stars included Cary Grant, James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman and more. Each of these actors elevated his movies in their own ways, delivering unforgettable performances that have helped enshrine Hitchcock's reputation as a legendary director.

Alfred Hitchcock's best movies wouldn't be the same without the input of some Hollywood icons. His movies often work by delving into the darkest corners of human psychology, so they need great actors. His most famous characters, such as...

Hitchcock's villains terrify through their ability to blend into society while ruthlessly pursuing their sinister goals. They exude unsettling menace through sheer competence and manipulation. The performances of actors like James Mason, Judith Anderson, and Barry Foster bring depth and nuance to these villainous characters, highlighting their cold-blooded duplicity. Hitchcock's villains are not overtly monstrous, but rather expose the evil lurking within humanity itself, making them some of cinema's most enduring and haunting antagonists.

Alfred Hitchcock is celebrated for creating some of cinema’s most powerful horror films, featuring unforgettable and chilling villain performances. As the master of suspense, Hitchcock built tension through an uncanny ability to craft a creeping sense of unease and impending doom simmering below the surface of everyday life. Though not frightening in a conventional sense, Hitchcock's villains exude a more unsettling menace through their sheer competence and relentless pursuit of their sinister goals. Unlike masked slasher villains,...

Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed “Oppenheimer,” which revolves around J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist considered the father of the atomic bomb, is one of the most highly anticipated films of the summer. Actually of the year. Over the decades there have been several films dealing with the Manhattan Project that culminated with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki thus ending World War II on Sept. 2, 1945.

Soon after the global conflict ended MGM, Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox were rushing to be the first studio to greenlight a movie dealing with the birth of the atomic bomb that ushered in the Cold War. MGM quickly put a project in motion hiring Robert Considine to write a story . The studio was circling the likes of its “A’ stars Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable and Van Johnson. Meanwhile over at Paramount, producer Hal Wallis was preparing a $1.5 million atomic bomb film called “Top Secret.

Toot Toot! The Little Engine that Could becomes a tale of the little town that could, when their tiny rail service is discontinued. A crackerjack cast of Ealing regulars — Stanley Holloway, Naunton Wayne, John Gregson — band together to take over the little spur line and keep it running. We get to see a vintage locomotive from the early 1800s in action, but the appeal isn’t limited to lovers of trains — Ealing’s knack for inspired, understated comedy is all over this show. Plus, it’s the company’s first feature in Technicolor, and is beautifully remastered.

The Titfield Thunderbolt

Blu-ray

Film Movement Classics

1953 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 84 min. / Street Date , 2020 /

Starring: Stanley Holloway, George Relph, Naunton Wayne, John Gregson, Godfrey Tearle, Hugh Griffith, Gabrielle Brune, Sidney James, Reginald Beckwith, Edie Martin, Michael Trubshawe, Jack MacGowran, Ewan Roberts.

Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe

Film Editor: Seth Holt

Original Music: Georges Auric

Written by...

Stars: Mandy Miller, Phyllis Calvert, Jack Hawkins, Terence Morgan, Godfrey Tearle, Marjorie Fielding, Nancy Price, Edward Chapman, Patricia Plunkett, Eleanor Summerfield, Colin Gordon | Written by Nigel Balchin, Jack Whittingham | Directed by Alexander Mackendrick

When you watch Mandy, you can’t help but feel it was a film ahead of its time. The story of a deaf girl unable to speak, the new Blu-ray is the perfect chance to watch the movie again.

When Mandy’s (Mandy Miller) parents discover that their child is deaf, they struggle to help her communicate not only with the outside world, but with themselves too. When Christine (Phyllis Calvert), the mother, decides to take Mandy to a school for deaf children, her husband’s reluctance to allow this puts a strain on their marriage.

What is impressive about Mandy is that it doesn’t over dramatise the story of a little girl trapped in her own little world,...

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger officially become ‘The Archers’ for this sterling morale-propaganda picture lauding the help of the valiant Dutch resistance. It’s a joyful show of spirit, terrific casting (with a couple of surprises) and first-class English filmmaking.

One of Our Aircraft is Missing

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1942 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy /103 82 min. / Street Date November 15, 2016 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98

Starring Godfrey Tearle, Eric Portman, Hugh Williams, Bernard Miles, Hugh Burden, Emrys Jones, Pamela Brown, Joyce Redman, Googie Withers, Hay Petrie, Arnold Marlé, Robert Helpmann, Peter Ustinov, Roland Culver, Robert Beatty, Michael Powell.

Cinematography Ronald Neame

Film Editor David Lean

Camera Crew Robert Krasker, Guy Green

Written by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Produced by The Archers

Directed by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

There are still a few more key Powell-Pressburger ‘Archer’ films waiting for a quality disc release, Contraband and Gone to Earth for just two.

Stop! Don't touch that dial... if you like your atom-age propaganda straight up, MGM has the movie for you, an expensive 1946 docu-drama that became 'the official story' for the making of the bomb. The huge cast includes Brian Donlevy, Robert Walker, Tom Drake, Audrey Totter, Hume Cronyn, Hurd Hatfield, and Joseph Calleia. How trustworthy is the movie? It begins by showing footage of a time capsule being buried -- that supposedly contains the film we are watching. Think about that. Mom, Apple Pie, the Flag and God are enlisted to argume that we should stop worrying and love the fact that bombs are just peachy-keen dandy. The Beginning or the End DVD-r The Warner Archive Collection 1947 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 112 min. / Street Date September 22, 2015 / available through the WBshop / 21.99 Starring Brian Donlevy, Robert Walker, Tom Drake, Beverly Tyler, Audrey Totter, Hume Cronyn, Hurd Hatfield, Joseph Calleia, Godfrey Tearle, Victor Francen,...

Robert Walker: Actor in MGM films of the '40s. Robert Walker: Actor who conveyed boy-next-door charms, psychoses At least on screen, I've always found the underrated actor Robert Walker to be everything his fellow – and more famous – MGM contract player James Stewart only pretended to be: shy, amiable, naive. The one thing that made Walker look less like an idealized “Average Joe” than Stewart was that the former did not have a vacuous look. Walker's intelligence shone clearly through his bright (in black and white) grey eyes. As part of its “Summer Under the Stars” programming, Turner Classic Movies is dedicating today, Aug. 9, '15, to Robert Walker, who was featured in 20 films between 1943 and his untimely death at age 32 in 1951. Time Warner (via Ted Turner) owns the pre-1986 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer library (and almost got to buy the studio outright in 2009), so most of Walker's movies have...

'The Beginning or the End' 1947 with Robert Walker and Tom Drake. Hiroshima bombing 70th anniversary: Six movies dealing with the A-bomb terror Seventy years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima. Ultimately, anywhere between 70,000 and 140,000 people died – in addition to dogs, cats, horses, chickens, and most other living beings in that part of the world. Three days later, America dropped a second atomic bomb, this time over Nagasaki. Human deaths in this other city totaled anywhere between 40,000-80,000. For obvious reasons, the evisceration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been a quasi-taboo in American films. After all, in the last 75 years Hollywood's World War II movies, from John Farrow's Wake Island (1942) and Mervyn LeRoy's Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) to Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor (2001), almost invariably have presented a clear-cut vision...

Rex Harrison hat on TCM: ‘My Fair Lady,’ ‘Anna and the King of Siam’ Rex Harrison is Turner Classic Movies’ final "Summer Under the Stars" star today, August 31, 2013. TCM is currently showing George Cukor’s lavish My Fair Lady (1964), an Academy Award-winning musical that has (in my humble opinion) unfairly lost quite a bit of its prestige in the last several decades. Rex Harrison, invariably a major ham whether playing Saladin, the King of Siam, Julius Caesar, the ghost of a dead sea captain, or Richard Burton’s lover, is for once flawlessly cast as Professor Henry Higgins, who on stage transformed Julie Andrews from cockney duckling to diction-master swan and who in the movie version does the same for Audrey Hepburn. Harrison, by the way, was the year’s Best Actor Oscar winner. (See also: "Audrey Hepburn vs. Julie Andrews: Biggest Oscar Snubs.") Following My Fair Lady, Rex Harrison...

The power of trains and the terror of one getting out of control, as both something real and a metaphor for modern life, were subjects of great fascination for writers of the Victorian era. Dickens himself survived a major rail disaster and went on to write the horrific ghost story The Signal-Man; Zola's La Bête humaine is set in the railway world and ends with a runaway train taking its passengers to their deaths. The cinema picked up this preoccupation, and Tony Scott's Unstoppable, a white-knuckle thriller, is in a tradition that includes Bernard Vorhaus's British B-movie classic The Last Journey (1935) in which Godfrey Tearle goes berserk driving an express locomotive in the West Country, and the Hollywood Runaway Train, scripted by Akira Kurosawa and shown in competition at Cannes in 1986.

Scott's picture is set in rust belt Pennsylvania and is a tribute to blue-collar Americans. It stars...

This week I was able to return to viewing a few films out of my ordinary movie-watching schedule and just a few minutes ago finished watching Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang on Blu-ray, what a solid film. As for the films featured one was spurred by the obvious introduction of the sequel trailer this week and one was just passed due and I felt I finally needed to see it.

Remember, when sharing the films you watched this past week, give a sentence or two describing your thoughts and not just a letter grade in hopes to spur on some additional conversation. Now, for what I watched...

Wall Street (1987) Quick Thoughts: A friend of mine saw the trailer for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and hadn't seen the original so I obliged them. To my satisfaction they enjoyed the original and we both hold out hope the sequel will at least...