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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...

An important, if perhaps apocryphal, moment in the history of cinema was the afternoon little Alfie Hitchcock spent in the care of His Majesty. So terrified was little Hitch of the momentary incarceration (on his father’s orders no less) that his subsequent filmography maypoles artfully around fear in all its forms. Known by cinephiles the world over as the ‘Master of Suspense’, Hitchcock’s films are rightfully celebrated as some of the best the artform has produced. Not for nothing, but ten years ago Hitchcock’s 1958 exploration of obssession and grief Vertigo was voted the best film of all time.

Many of our favourite moments from Hitch’s filmography are easily recalled as scenes perfect in their own right. Today we’re taking a look at some of the scenes that, while not as instantly recognisable, are quiet miracles of cinemas. They show that Hitchcock was a director entirely...

Netflix has ordered “The 39 Steps,” a limited series based on the 1915 John Buchan novel that will star Benedict Cumberbatch, with Edward Berger at the helm and Mark L. Smith writing.

The series will reunite Cumberbatch and Berger, who last worked together on Showtime’s 2018 mini-series “Patrick Melrose.” The at least six-hour series will be produced by Anonymous Content, Chapter One Pictures and SunnyMarch, the U.K.-based film and TV production company founded by Cumberbatch, Adam Ackland and Adam Selves.

“The 39 Steps” has already been adapted several times, most famously by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935, starring Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll. Buchan’s original spy thriller takes place just before the outset of World War I, centering on Richard Hannay, a man who comes into possession of a key to a global conspiracy and goes on the run.

Cumberbatch was most recently seen in “The Mauritanian,” and remains in the thick of the Marvel Cinematic Universe,...

Today is a good day because Benedict Cumberbatch has secured another paycheck. The Sherlock actor is slated to star in a limited series, The 39 Steps, inspired by John Buchan’s novel of the same name, our sister site Deadline reports. Alfred Hitchcock previously adapted the book into a 1935 film.

The updated series, which doesn’t have a network attached yet, is described as a “provocative, action-packed conspiracy thriller” that “updates the classic novel for our times,” per the official description. It will center on Richard Hannay, an ordinary man who unwittingly becomes a pawn in a far-reaching global conspiracy to...

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“I’Ve Given Up Kissing Strange Women”

By Raymond Benson

Bob Hope had a stellar career that stretched from the late 1930s through the 1960s, with subsequent star power appearances in his senior years on television in variety and awards shows. His efforts to entertain troops overseas for decades are highly commendable. What many punters today don’t realize, unless one is a Hope aficionado, is that his early solo comedies (or the duos with Bing Crosby) are absolute comic gems. Woody Allen has gone on the record to say that he based much of his early 1970s screen persona on Bob Hope, and one can easily see that nebbish, albeit here decidedly non-Jewish, “character” in My Favorite Blonde.

The story of this 1942 outing is credited to longtime Hope collaborators Melvin Frank and Norman Panama (the screenplay is by Don Hartman and Frank Butler...

Today marks the birthday of Fred MacMurray. Writer Joe Elliott provides a fitting tribute to the late actor.

By Joe Elliott

Classic Hollywood actor Fred MacMurray is probably best remembered today as the easy-going father in the popular, long-running 1960s family sit-com “My Three Sons.” As the head of the growing Douglas clan, the pipe-smoking, sweater-clad MacMurray each week dispensed his gentle blend of wisdom and humor to the delight of American television audiences. One might have thought this was the kind of role MacMurray had always played. Not so, a fact that was first brought home to me by my mother. I recall as a kid hearing her say she didn’t much care for him. Not like Fred MacMurray??? “But why?” I asked. “Because of the jerks he played in the movies,” she told me. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered what she meant. As many CinemaRetro readers will know,...

Today marks the birthday of Fred MacMurray. Writer Joe Elliott provides a fitting tribute to the late actor.

By Joe Elliott

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Classic Hollywood actor Fred MacMurray is probably best remembered today as the easy-going father in the popular, long-running 1960s family sit-com “My Three Sons.” As the head of the growing Douglas clan, the pipe-smoking, sweater-clad MacMurray each week dispensed his gentle blend of wisdom and humor to the delight of American television audiences. One might have thought this was the kind of role MacMurray had always played. Not so, a fact that was first brought home to me by my mother. I recall as a kid hearing her say she didn’t much care for him. Not like Fred MacMurray??? “But why?” I asked. “Because of the jerks he played in the movies,” she told me. It wasn’t until much later...

The Lady Eve

Blu ray

Criterion

1941/ 94 min.

Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, William Demarest

Cinematography by Victor Milner

Directed by Preston Sturges

In The Lady Eve a wealthy ophiologist named Charlie Pike and a sexy card shark named Jean Harrington fall in love. It’s a rapid-fire romance fueled by equal portions of love and lust and when the affair crashes and burns, director Preston Sturges simply restarts the movie: Jean reintroduces herself to Charlie as a British socialite named Eve and la affaire d’amour begins anew. The brazenness of her charade is part and parcel of Sturges’s own impudent take on the Human Comedy – the result is a screwball work of art.

Henry Fonda is Charlie and Barbara Stanwyck plays Jean – they meet aboard a cruise ship where Jean’s father, an avuncular but remorseless con man played by Charles Coburn, has pigeonholed Charlie as a sucker par excellence.

As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.And now they've quietly disappeared William Fox's name from the company: guilty by association with Rupert Murdoch, even though he never associated with him.***"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars," Oscar Wilde as purred by George Sanders, is enough to make any film worth while.A friend of mine once appeared on a daytime quiz show, on which he was required to complete the quote from the word "...but..." His heroic stab at an answer was, "...but some of us belong there?" I suppose one of the achievements of Otto Preminger's The Fan, a 1950 film of Wilde's 1892 play Lady Windermere's Fan,...

Helping you stay sane while staying safe… featuring Leonard Maltin, Dave Anthony, Miguel Arteta, John Landis, and Blaire Bercy from the Hollywood Food Coalition.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Plague (1979)

Target Earth (1954)

The Left Hand of God (1955)

A Lost Lady (1934)

Enough Said (2013)

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)

Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939)

Heaven Can Wait (1978)

Down to Earth (2001)

Down To Earth (1947)

The Commitments (1991)

Once (2007)

Election (1999)

About Schmidt (2002)

Sideways (2004)

Nebraska (2013)

The Man in the Moon (1991)

The 39 Steps (1935)

Casablanca (1942)

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

The Night Walker (1964)

Chuck and Buck (2000)

Cedar Rapids (2011)

Beatriz at Dinner (2017)

Duck Butter (2018)

The Good Girl (2002)

The Big Heat (1953)

Human Desire (1954)

Slightly French (1949)

Week-End with Father (1951)

Experiment In Terror (1962)

They Shoot Horses Don’t They? (1969)

Ray’s Male Heterosexual Dance Hall (1987)

Airport (1970)

Earthquake (1974)

Drive a Crooked Road (1954)

Pushover (1954)

Waves (2019)

Krisha (2015)

The Oblong Box (1969)

80,000 Suspects (1963)

Panic In The Streets (1950)

It Comes At Night (2017)

Children of Men (2006)

The Road (2009)

You Were Never Really Here...

Trevor Nunn is not the first director to accrue both a glorious stage résumé and a paltry, pedestrian screen one. Still, given the talent involved, it’s disappointing that “Red Joan” does so little to change that — his first theatrical feature since a decent “Twelfth Night” adaptation 22 years ago is a would-be sweeping epic that instead turns out tweedy, dreary, and unconvincing.

Something was surely lost along the way as the real-life story of one Melita Norwood — a British civil servant of scant note until her pro-ussr espionage was revealed when she was an elderly retiree — turned into a 2014 novel by Jessica Rooney, then into this tepid film incarnation. Beyond all other intrigue, our heroine here proves an under-radar key player in shaping the power dynamics of the Cold War. So it’s dismaying that so little drama is wrung out of the tale, and that what we get too...

Author Caroline Young has just released a fascinating new book entitled Hitchcock’s Heroines (published by Insight Editions). It celebrates and studies the women in Hitchcock movies; their influence, semblance and iconography. What’s more, Young also examines the role costume design plays with these women, both the characters and the actresses who played them, and how they can be interpreted as far more than just ‘icy blondes’. Here we have an extract of the book exclusively for Clothes on Film:

Kim Novak’s grey suit the colour of San Francisco fog in Vertigo, Grace Kelly as the too-perfect woman in Rear Window, and Janet Leigh’s black and white sets of underwear to indicate both good and evil in Psycho – these are just some of the classic imagery of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, where the style and elegance of his leading lady was carefully planned.

Hitchcock was meticulous about the visuals,...

170 fims from unknown sources released for free online.

The British Film Institute (BFI) has launched a collection of more than 170 films known as the Orphan Works.

Source: BFI National Archive

The Little Match Girl (1914), D. Percy Nash, part of the Orphan Works collection

Including features, shorts, corporate films, adverts, animation and documentary, the collection is comprised of works that have unknown or uncontactable rights-holders.

The BFI archive team has performed due diligence on the films by attempting to contact the copyright owners, and as such the organisation is now able to show them for free online.

The digitally-restored films will be available to view on BFI’s Youtube channel in the UK and internationally.

Actors featuring in the works include Christopher Lee, David Jason, Honor Blackman, John Le Mesurier, Lupino Lane, Madeleine Carroll, Norman Beaton, Peter Ustinov and Richard Burton. There are also interviews with footballing legends such as George Best,...

170 fims from unknown sources released for free online.

The British Film Institute (BFI) has launched a collection of more than 170 films known as the Orphan Works.

Source: BFI National Archive

The Little Match Girl (1914), D. Percy Nash, part of the Orphan Works collection

Including features, shorts, corporate films, adverts, animation and documentary, the collection is comprised of works that have unknown or uncontactable rights-holders.

The BFI archive team has performed due diligence on the films by attempting to contact the copyright owners, and as such the organisation is now able to show them for free online.

The digitally-restored films will be available to view on BFI’s Youtube channel in the UK and internationally.

Actors featuring in the works include Christopher Lee, David Jason, Honor Blackman, John Le Mesurier, Lupino Lane, Madeleine Carroll, Norman Beaton, Peter Ustinov and Richard Burton. There are also interviews with footballing legends such as George Best, Jack and Bobby Charlton...

Ronald Colman: Turner Classic Movies' Star of the Month in two major 1930s classics Updated: Turner Classic Movies' July 2017 Star of the Month is Ronald Colman, one of the finest performers of the studio era. On Thursday night, TCM presented five Colman star vehicles that should be popping up again in the not-too-distant future: A Tale of Two Cities, The Prisoner of Zenda, Kismet, Lucky Partners, and My Life with Caroline. The first two movies are among not only Colman's best, but also among Hollywood's best during its so-called Golden Age. Based on Charles Dickens' classic novel, Jack Conway's Academy Award-nominated A Tale of Two Cities (1936) is a rare Hollywood production indeed: it manages to effectively condense its sprawling source, it boasts first-rate production values, and it features a phenomenal central performance. Ah, it also shows its star without his trademark mustache – about as famous at the time as Clark Gable's. Perhaps...

Joop van den Berg's 1929 poster for AtlanticE.A. Dupont achieved early fame for Varieté (1925), a grimly saucy slice of Weimar doom and spiciness, and followed it up with prestigious British productions Moulin Rouge (1928) and Piccadilly (1929), the latter starring Anna May Wong—but just as his career was on the upswing he fell prey to the advent of sound, producing a big-budget version of the Titanic disaster in English and German versions.Atlantic, or Atlantik, became something of a laughing-stock in Britain, owing to Dupont's unfortunate combination of Teutonic tendencies and technical trepidation. The actors were directed to communicate as slowly as possible, perhaps so that Dupont could follow what they were saying. His desire to inflect each syllable with suitable weight and portent robbed the film of any sense of urgency, despite it being set on a ship that starts sinking around twenty minutes in (none of the ninety-minute time-wasting...

Constance Cummings in 'Night After Night.' Constance Cummings: Working with Frank Capra and Mae West (See previous post: “Constance Cummings: Actress Went from Harold Lloyd to Eugene O'Neill.”) Back at Columbia, Harry Cohn didn't do a very good job at making Constance Cummings feel important. By the end of 1932, Columbia and its sweet ingenue found themselves in court, fighting bitterly over stipulations in her contract. According to the actress and lawyer's daughter, Columbia had failed to notify her that they were picking up her option. Therefore, she was a free agent, able to offer her services wherever she pleased. Harry Cohn felt otherwise, claiming that his contract player had waived such a notice. The battle would spill over into 1933. On the positive side, in addition to Movie Crazy 1932 provided Cummings with three other notable Hollywood movies: Washington Merry-Go-Round, American Madness, and Night After Night. 'Washington Merry-Go-Round...

Greta Garbo movie 'The Kiss.' Greta Garbo movies on TCM Greta Garbo, a rarity among silent era movie stars, is Turner Classic Movies' “Summer Under the Stars” performer today, Aug. 26, '15. Now, why would Garbo be considered a silent era rarity? Well, certainly not because she easily made the transition to sound, remaining a major star for another decade. Think Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, William Powell, Fay Wray, Marie Dressler, Wallace Beery, John Barrymore, Warner Baxter, Janet Gaynor, Constance Bennett, etc. And so much for all the stories about actors with foreign accents being unable to maintain their Hollywood stardom following the advent of sound motion pictures. A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer star, Garbo was no major exception to the supposed rule. Mexican Ramon Novarro, another MGM star, also made an easy transition to sound, and so did fellow Mexicans Lupe Velez and Dolores del Rio, in addition to the very British...

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. ca. 1935. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was never as popular as his father, silent film superstar Douglas Fairbanks, who starred in one action-adventure blockbuster after another in the 1920s (The Mark of Zorro, Robin Hood, The Thief of Bagdad) and whose stardom dates back to the mid-1910s, when Fairbanks toplined a series of light, modern-day comedies in which he was cast as the embodiment of the enterprising, 20th century “all-American.” What this particular go-getter got was screen queen Mary Pickford as his wife and United Artists as his studio, which he co-founded with Pickford, D.W. Griffith, and Charles Chaplin. Now, although Jr. never had the following of Sr., he did enjoy a solid two-decade-plus movie career. In fact, he was one of the few children of major film stars – e.g., Jane Fonda, Liza Minnelli, Angelina Jolie, Michael Douglas, Jamie Lee Curtis – who had successful film careers of their own.

Teresa Wright: Later years (See preceding post: "Teresa Wright: From Marlon Brando to Matt Damon.") Teresa Wright and Robert Anderson were divorced in 1978. They would remain friends in the ensuing years.[1] Wright spent most of the last decade of her life in Connecticut, making only sporadic public appearances. In 1998, she could be seen with her grandson, film producer Jonah Smith, at New York's Yankee Stadium, where she threw the ceremonial first pitch.[2] Wright also became involved in the Greater New York chapter of the Als Association. (The Pride of the Yankees subject, Lou Gehrig, died of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in 1941.) The week she turned 82 in October 2000, Wright attended the 20th anniversary celebration of Somewhere in Time, where she posed for pictures with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. In March 2003, she was a guest at the 75th Academy Awards, in the segment showcasing Oscar-winning actors of the past. Two years later,...

'Cat People' 1942 actress Simone Simon Remembered: Starred in Jacques Tourneur's cult horror movie classic (photo: Simone Simon in 'Cat People') Pert, pouty, pretty Simone Simon is best remembered for her starring roles in Jacques Tourneur's cult horror movie Cat People (1942) and in Jean Renoir's French film noir La Bête Humaine (1938). Long before Brigitte Bardot, Mamie Van Doren, Ann-Margret, and (for a few years) Jane Fonda became known as cinema's Sex Kittens, Simone Simon exuded feline charm in a film career that spanned a quarter of a century. From the early '30s to the mid-'50s, she seduced men young and old on both sides of the Atlantic – at times, with fatal results. During that period, Simon was featured in nearly 40 movies in France, Italy, Germany, Britain, and Hollywood. Besides Jean Renoir, in her native country she worked for the likes of Jacqueline Audry...

Martha Stewart: Actress / Singer in Fox movies apparently not dead despite two-year-old reports to the contrary (Photo: Martha Stewart and Perry Como in 'Doll Face') According to various online reports, including Variety's, actress and singer Martha Stewart, a pretty blonde featured in supporting roles in a handful of 20th Century Fox movies of the '40s, died at age 89 of "natural causes" in Northeast Harbor, Maine, on February 25, 2012. Needless to say, that was not the same Martha Stewart hawking "delicious foods" and whatever else on American television. But quite possibly, the Martha Stewart who died in February 2012 -- if any -- was not the Martha Stewart of old Fox movies either. And that's why I'm republishing this (former) obit, originally posted more than two and a half years ago: March 11, 2012. Earlier today, a commenter wrote to Alt Film Guide, claiming that the Martha Stewart featured in Doll Face, I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now,...

Hedy Lamarr: 'Invention' and inventor on Turner Classic Movies (photo: Hedy Lamarr publicity shot ca. early '40s) Two Hedy Lamarr movies released during her heyday in the early '40s — Victor Fleming's Tortilla Flat (1942), co-starring Spencer Tracy and John Garfield, and King Vidor's H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), co-starring Robert Young and Ruth Hussey — will be broadcast on Turner Classic Movies on Wednesday, November 12, 2014, at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. Pt, respectively. Best known as a glamorous Hollywood star (Ziegfeld Girl, White Cargo, Samson and Delilah), the Viennese-born Lamarr (née Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler), who would have turned 100 on November 9, was also an inventor: she co-developed and patented with composer George Antheil the concept of frequency hopping, currently known as spread-spectrum communications (or "spread-spectrum broadcasting"), which ultimately led to the evolution of wireless technology. (More on the George Antheil and Hedy Lamarr invention further below.) Somewhat ironically,...

Honorary Award: Gloria Swanson, Rita Hayworth among dozens of women bypassed by the Academy (photo: Honorary Award non-winner Gloria Swanson in 'Sunset Blvd.') (See previous post: "Honorary Oscars: Doris Day, Danielle Darrieux Snubbed.") Part three of this four-part article about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Honorary Award bypassing women basically consists of a long, long — and for the most part quite prestigious — list of deceased women who, some way or other, left their mark on the film world. Some of the names found below are still well known; others were huge in their day, but are now all but forgotten. Yet, just because most people (and the media) suffer from long-term — and even medium-term — memory loss, that doesn't mean these women were any less deserving of an Honorary Oscar. So, among the distinguished female film professionals in Hollywood and elsewhere who have passed away without...

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Shirley Temple, and Oscar movies: Library of Congress’ March 2014 screenings (photo: Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote in ‘Capote’) Tributes to the recently deceased Shirley Temple and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and several Academy Award-nominated and -winning films are among the March 2014 screenings at the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus Theater and, in collaboration with the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, The State Theatre, both located in Culpeper, Virginia. The 1934 sentimental comedy-drama Little Miss Marker (March 6, Packard) is the movie that turned six-year-old Shirley Temple into a major film star. Temple would become the biggest domestic box-office draw of the mid-1930s, and, Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, Sonja Henie, Don Ameche, Loretta Young, and Madeleine Carroll notwithstanding, would remain 20th Century Fox’s top star until later in the decade. Directed by Alexander Hall (Here Comes Mr. Jordan, My Sister Eileen), Little Miss Marker — actually, a Paramount...

Jeanne Crain: Lighthearted movies vs. real life tragedies (photo: Madeleine Carroll and Jeanne Crain in ‘The Fan’) (See also: "Jeanne Crain: From ‘Pinky’ Inanity to ‘Margie’ Magic.") Unlike her characters in Margie, Home in Indiana, State Fair, Centennial Summer, The Fan, and Cheaper by the Dozen (and its sequel, Belles on Their Toes), or even in the more complex A Letter to Three Wives and People Will Talk, Jeanne Crain didn’t find a romantic Happy Ending in real life. In the mid-’50s, Crain accused her husband, former minor actor Paul Brooks aka Paul Brinkman, of infidelity, of living off her earnings, and of brutally beating her. The couple reportedly were never divorced because of their Catholic faith. (And at least in the ’60s, unlike the humanistic, progressive-thinking Margie, Crain was a “conservative” Republican who supported Richard Nixon.) In the early ’90s, she lost two of her...

Jeanne Crain: From Pinky to Margie Jeanne Crain, one of the most charming Hollywood actresses of the ’40s and ’50s, is Turner Classic Movies’ "Summer Under the Stars" featured player on Monday, August 26, 2013. Since Jeanne Crain was a top 20th Century Fox star for about a decade — a favorite of Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck — TCM will be showing quite a few films from the Fox library. And that’s great news. (Photo: Jeanne Crain ca. 1950.) (See also: “Jeanne Crain Movies: TCM’s ‘Summer Under the Stars’ Schedule.”) Now, my first recommendation is actually an MGM release. That’s Russell Rouse’s 1956 psychological Western The Fastest Gun Alive, an unusual movie in that the hero turns out to be a "coward" at heart: quick-on-the-trigger gunslinger Glenn Ford is reluctant to face an evil challenger (Broderick Crawford) in a small Western town. But why? Jeanne Crain is his serious-minded wife...

Lupita Tovar turns 103: Actress starred in Spanish-language ‘Dracula’ and in the first Mexican talkie, ‘Santa’ (photo: Lupita Tovar in ‘Santa’) Mexican actress Lupita Tovar, best remembered for the Spanish-language version of Dracula and for starring in the first Mexican talkie, Santa, turned 103 years old on Sunday, July 27, 2013. Tovar was born in 1910 in the city of Oaxaca, the capital of the Mexican state of the same name. In an interview with author Michael G. Ankerich (Mae Murray: The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips) published on Ankerich’s site Close-ups and Long Shots, Tovar recalled her brief foray as a silent film actress at Fox (several years before it became 20th Century Fox): "Silent films were wonderful because you didn’t have to worry about your dialogue. You could say whatever you felt. We had music on the set all the time. It was absolutely wonderful." Unfortunately for Tovar, whose English was quite poor,...

Alfred Hitchcock silent movies added to Unesco UK Memory of the World Register (photo: Ivor Novello in The Lodger) The nine Alfred Hitchcock-directed silent films recently restored by the British Film Institute have been added to the Unesco UK Memory of the World Register, "a list of documentary heritage which holds cultural significance specific to the UK." The nine Hitchcock movies are the following: The Pleasure Garden (1925), The Ring (1927), Downhill / When Boys Leave Home (1927), The Lodger (1927), Easy Virtue (1928), Champagne (1928), The Farmer’s Wife (1928), The Manxman (1929), and Blackmail (1929) — also released as a talkie, Britain’s first. Only one Hitchcock-directed silent remains lost, The Mountain Eagle / Fear o’ God (1926). Most of those movies have little in common with the suspense thrillers Hitchcock would crank out in Britain and later in Hollywood from the early ’30s on. But a handful of his silents already featured elements and themes that would recur in...

Hitch’s 10 hottest gents, suspicious and sinister for your pleasure.

(Source)

Yesterday, Google celebrated the birth of legendary graphic designer Saul Bass with an awesome little animation on its main page. Bass was most known for his movie title sequences, which included three of Alfred Hitchcock‘s staples: Vertigo, North By Northwest, and Psycho. Just as Google intended, this got me thinking about how hot the male stars of Hitchcock movies are — specifically the 10 hottest dudes in the Hitchcock oeuvre. The results of my heavy contemplation are in.

Call “Mother!” because these 10 gents are psychotically hot.

10. Laurence Olivier, Rebecca

(Source, Source)

What could be hotter than a debonair man with mood swings? In Rebecca, Laurence Olivier (or as I prefer to call him, Mr. Vivien Leigh) basically traumatizes his new wife (Joan Fontaine) by bringing her into his ghostly old estate and subjecting her to an evil housekeeper (Judith Anderson...

Blacklisted screenwriter and president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

The screenwriter Fay Kanin, who has died aged 95, was the only female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in its 86-year history (apart from Bette Davis, who resigned after two months in 1941). She served as president from 1979 to 1983, for the maximum of four consecutive one-year terms. Kanin, who committed herself to the preservation of early Hollywood movies, was first elected president by a board consisting of 34 men and one woman.

"I'm a big feminist," she declared at the time that her play Goodbye, My Fancy opened on Broadway in 1948. "I've put into my play my feeling that women should never back away from life." The serious comedy, with Madeleine Carroll as a powerful congresswoman revisiting her alma mater to receive an honorary degree, ran for more than a year and was made into a 1951 film starring Joan Crawford.

Looking back at the early days of cinema allows us not only the opportunity to see the development of our favourite medium but also discover the hidden gems which may have been forgotten.

Network Releasing are shining their own particular light on some of the lesser-known films from one of the most important studios in British cinema history. The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection Vol. 1 (out on the 8th of April) contains early works from directors such as Carol Reed and Basil Dean and we’ve got a clip and a couple of rare production images from the wonderfully named Cheer Up! for you today.

A struggling playwright hopes to market a musical comedy that he has written in collaboration with another equally penurious composer. Anxious to secure the backing of a millionaire, the two composers only succeed in making him angry — until, following a chain of misunderstandings, they finally emerge triumphant.

Director Robert Altman.

Robert Altman: Eclectic Maverick

By

Alex Simon

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the April 1999 issue of Venice Magazine.

It's the Fall of 1977 and I'm a bored and rebellious ten year old in search of a new movie to occupy my underworked and creativity-starved brain, feeling far too mature for previous favorites Wily Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) and Return of the Pink Panther (1975), and wanting something more up-to-date and edgy than Chaplin's City Lights (1931). I needed a movie to call my favorite that would be symbolic of my own new-found manhood (and something that would really piss off my parents and teachers). Mom and Dad were going out for the evening, leaving me with whatever unfortunate baby-sitter happened to need the $10 badly enough to play mother hen to an obnoxiously precocious only child like myself. I scanned the TV Guide for what...

Two new biopics of the master of suspense depict him as a bully who abused his leading ladies. But where does the truth lie?

The appearance of two new films about Alfred Hitchcock, widely considered to be the greatest of Britain's filmmakers, is a reminder that there was a time when he was also considered lovable. His unmistakable profile, his deadpan, Droopy Dog style, and his sense of humour helped make Hitch a star as well as a director.

Then, in 1983, came Donald Spoto's biography, The Dark Side of Genius. Spoto revealed that Hitchcock had harassed actor Tippi Hedren on the set of 1963's The Birds to the point of physical and psychological collapse. During the filming of the followup, Marnie, Hedren claimed that he also "made an overt sexual proposition", and when she resisted "became threatening", saying he would ruin her career. He never forgave her for turning him down,...

Two new biopics of the master of suspense depict him as a bully who abused his leading ladies. But where does the truth lie?

The appearance of two new films about Alfred Hitchcock, widely considered to be the greatest of Britain's filmmakers, is a reminder that there was a time when he was also considered lovable. His unmistakable profile, his deadpan, Droopy Dog style, and his sense of humour helped make Hitch a star as well as a director.

Then, in 1983, came Donald Spoto's biography, The Dark Side of Genius. Spoto revealed that Hitchcock had harassed actor Tippi Hedren on the set of 1963's The Birds to the point of physical and psychological collapse. During the filming of the followup, Marnie, Hedren claimed that he also "made an overt sexual proposition", and when she resisted "became threatening", saying he would ruin her career. He never forgave her for turning him down,...

When people talk about  the "Hitchcock blondes" -- the women whom blonde fetishist Alfred Hitchcock tended to cast as his leading ladies -- the names most frequently mentioned are Grace Kelly (Rear Window, Dial M for Murder, To Catch a Thief), Kim Novak (Vertigo), Tippi Hedren (The Birds and Marnie), Madeleine Carroll (The 39 Steps and Secret Agent), Doris Day (The Man Who Knew Too Much), Eva Marie Saint (North by Northwest) and Janet Leigh (Psycho). Far too often forgotten is Vera Miles, whose beauty and talents so impressed "Hitch" -- who was seeking a "replacement" for Kelly after she became engaged and

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Before Psycho and North by Northwest, Hitchcock's 1935 thriller The 39 Steps was serving up some of cinema's most seminal moments. Here is a handful of highlights from the film

1. The opening

Alfred Hitchcock's innovative style is on display immediately, the first shot spelling out the words "M-u-s-i-c H-a-l-l" with each letter made up of light bulbs illuminated one by one as the camera glides past.

2. Oh, that's a MacGuffin

The 39 Steps is the first trademark Hitchcock movie, using many of the themes and story details cinema audiences came to identify with the master of suspense. The thin veneer of civilisation is exposed with at the heart of the story a spy plot involving an innocent man on the run, in the midst of a "double-chase" with police pursuing the hero, in this case Robert Donat as Richard Hannay, while he searches for the real villain. It was a template to...

By Allen Gardner

The Samurai Trilogy (Criterion) Director Hiroshi Inagaki’s sprawling epic filmed from 1954-56 is an early Japanese Technicolor masterpiece, rivaling the scope of filmmakers like David Lean and Luchino Visconti. Toshiro Mifune, Japan’s greatest actor, stars as real-life swordsman, artist and writer Musashi Miyamoto, following his growth from callow youth to disciplined warrior. The three films: the Oscar winning “Musashi Miyamoto,” “Duel at Ichijoji Temple,” and “Duel at Ganryu Island” are an incredible story of human growth, tender love and sublime, blood-soaked action. Not to be missed. Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Interviews with translator and historian William Scott Wilson; Trailers. Full screen. Dolby 1.0 mono.

The 39 Steps (Criterion) Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 story of spies, conspiracies and sexual tension put him on the map on both sides of the Pond. Robert Donat stars as an innocent thrust into a deadly plot alongside a cool blonde (Madeleine Carroll...

The writer and comedian explains how Hitchcock's 1935 thriller persuaded her that a relationship should begin with inexplicable kissing, running and shared peril

When I travel, I always carry DVDs with me to maintain my affection for the human race, despite missed trains, dodgy hotels and fumbled logistics. The 1935 version of The 39 Steps – the original and the best – is always among them.

The plot is, of course, exultantly unlikely. John Buchan's book makes a kind of sense, full of manly vigour, dastardly foreign threat and the ultimate triumph of British pluck. Long-time Hitch collaborator Charles Bennett adapted Buchan with the ideal level of disrespect and produced a joyful confection of subversive humour, intelligent twists and wild sexual tension. The movie has all the elements I love in film – it likes people, doesn't stand on its dignity and knows that if your characters are right you can get away with anything.

Well, the dog days of summer are fast approaching, and what better way to duck out of the heat than by spending a cool day inside, AC-blasting, with your Blu-ray player and an endless supply of chilled adult beverages. June sees the release of an Alfred Hitchcock classic (beautifully restored), a trio of Lina Wertmüller gems, a nearly lost Michael Curtiz effort, a movie about the sex lives of ghosts, and a plane crash survival tale sold on the, er, ample merits of its female lead.

“The 39 Steps” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)

Why You Should Care: Because “The 39 Steps,” a crackling (86 minutes!) spy thriller from Alfred Hitchcock, is one of the most beloved British movies of all time, coming in at fourth place in the British Film Institute’s poll of top British films, and more recently, named the 21st greatest British film of all time by movie magazine Total Film. The film,...

Marilyn Monroe, born June 1, 1926

I spend a lot of time resenting popular opinion about female icons. For instance, I don't think Madonna is just a "business-smart chameleon": She's cooler than Michael Jackson, cannier than Prince, smarter than Elvis, and her very essence was more meaningful than most poet laureates' magnum opuses. So there. I don't think Grace Kelly was just a "living fairytale": She was a killer screen star with astonishing charisma in three Hitchcock movies -- and Mogambo. I reserve my strongest feelings for the woman who would've turned 86 today, Marilyn Monroe, since her continued pop culture presence is shallower and lamer than any icon before or since. Based on how popular she remains and how unpopular most of her filmography is, you'd think the reason her legacy lives on is because people figure one historical blonde has to be most famous, and it may as well...

Deborah Kerr, Burt Lancaster, From Here to Eternity. With Deborah Kerr, it’s not the bare shoulders that matter. It’s the eyes. Deborah Kerr, who died at the age of 86 on Oct. 16, 2007, has usually been labeled the cinematic embodiment of the English Rose: ladylike from coiffure to pedicure, perfectly enunciated English, a distinctive coolness, poise and class. I won’t argue with that description (except to point out that this English Rose was born in Scotland), but all the same I wonder if any of those labelers have ever watched Deborah Kerr on screen other than the "Shall We Dance?" sequence in The King and I. Then there are those who have seen two Deborah Kerr scenes: "Shall We Dance?" and the kissing-on-the-beach bit in From Here to Eternity. Shocking! Who would have guessed that the cool, red-headed British lady could be so fiery? Well, anyone who has paid...

Funny faces to lost gems, war horses to strange censorship, silent film is a wondrous way to immerse oneself in history

A trip to the British silent film festival is a unique opportunity to wallow in some unfamiliar waters. Four days immersed in silent cinema is time spent in the company of many films that have been forgotten or misremembered, films that have only been seen before by archivists and researchers, and that may never get a public airing again. Some of these films are great, but even those that aren't are fascinating, as cinema history, and as a glimpse of what it was like to live in Britain 100 years ago.

1. "They didn't need dialogue, they had faces"

We're all familiar with Gloria Swanson's famous line in Sunset Boulevard, but she was talking about the blandly beautiful people of Hollywood. The faces of British silent cinema may not be attached to famous names,...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: June 26, 2011

Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95

Studio: Criterion

Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll simply can't get away from each other in The 39 Steps.

The 1935 film The 39 Steps remains one of filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock’s (Psycho) great thrillers and a mystery filled with the kind of moments that truly defined Hitchcock as “The Master of Suspense.”

The classic movie follows Canadian traveler Richard Hannay (Robert Donat, The Count of Monte Cristo), who stumbles into a spy-filled conspiracy that thrusts him into a hectic chase across the Scottish moors — a chase in which he is both the pursuer and the pursued — as well as into an expected romance with the cool Pamela (Madeleine Carroll, Cafe Society).

Adapted from the 1915 novel by John Buchan, The 39 Steps is one of Hitchcock’s classic wrong-man thrillers, anticipating such later Hitchcock movies as North by Northwest (1959) and, of course, The Wrong Man (1956).

Criterion’s...

Toby Jones/Sienna Miller = Alfred Hitchcock/Tippi Hedren? [Photo: Tippi Hedren / The Birds publicity shot.] Tippi Hedren once told The Times of London that Alfred Hitchcock — for whom she starred in The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964), and with whom she had an exclusive contract — "kept me under contract, kept paying me every week for almost two years to do nothing" after she refused his sexual advances. "I admired Hitch tremendously for his great talent and still do," Hedren told London's Daily Mail. "Yet, at the same time, I loathed him for his off-set behavior and the way he came on to me sexually. He was a great director – and he destroyed it all by his behavior when he got me alone." Hedren had no luck after she rid herself of her Hitchcock ties. She had a small supporting role in Charles Chaplin's box-office and critical flop A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), starring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren,...

Hollywood has been running out of ideas since filmmakers started making movies in Hollywood. Even the first "official" movie made in Hollywood proper, Cecil B. DeMille's 1914 Western The Squaw Man, wasn't an original story. DeMille's Western was based on Edwin Milton Royle's play. And prior to that, there had been movie shorts with titles such as The Squaw and the Man (1910), Cow-boy and the Squaw (1910), and The Squaw Man's Sweetheart (1912). So, no one should be too surprised that remakes, adaptations, and reboots have been Hollywood staples for decades. And here's another remake in the works: DreamWorks and Working Title Films are to revisit (or reboot, as the case may be) Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 Best Picture Oscar winner Rebecca, which starred Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. As per Variety, Eastern Promises' screenwriter Steven Knight will use Daphne Du Maurier's novel as the source for the project, sort...

Allegorical War Drama Highlights TCM.s Dec. 14 Salute

to The George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is set to make movie history this December when it presents the world television premiere of Fear and Desire (1953), the rarely seen debut film by legendary director Stanley Kubrick. Premiering Wednesday, Dec. 14, at 8 p.m. (Et), the allegorical war drama from the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and The Shining (1980) will be the centerpiece of an extraordinary 24-hour marathon honoring the preservation efforts of the Motion Picture Department at George Eastman House. TCM host Robert Osborne will be joined by Jared Case, Head of Cataloguing and Access at George Eastman House, to present 15 cinematic rarities from one of the country.s leading moving-image archives.

TCM.s Dec. 14 salute to the Motion Picture Collection at George Eastman House will begin at 6:15 a.m. (Et) with The Blue Bird...

We're picking out your finest responses to our My favourite film series, for which Guardian writers have selected the movies they go back to time and again.

Here's a roundup of how you responded in week five, when the selections were Dead Poets Society, The Thing, Blow-Up, The 39 Steps, Little Shop of Horrors, Way Out West and Double Indemnity

The fifth week of our My favourite film series opened with an act of defiance. Sarfraz Manzoor had the floor. He spoke of passion and inspiration, of the courage in seizing the moment. He covered romance and skipped realism, asked for your heart, promised adventure. And, one by one, you read his piece on Dead Poets Society, gave your classmates a nudge and laughed him off the lectern.

"Oh Sarfraz! Captain my captain, how could you?," said MyLeftFoot. "It really is the most cliche-ridden load of baloney." "Appropriate time to have...

In our writers' favourite film series, Saptarshi Ray gets caught up in Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 web of intrigue

• Not thrilled? Don't leave us in suspense, post your own review – or engage in some covert operations below

The 39 Steps was my first Hitchcock film. I saw it when I was about 13, with a movie-buff uncle on a battered old black-and-white TV set, on a trip to India. Sitting in the clammy heat and darkness that night, praying there wouldn't be a power cut as we were transported from West Bengal to the Scottish moors, it was the first time I grasped the full extent of cinema's escapist power.

It also inspired my appreciation of Hitchcock as a master film-maker – an artisan and sculptor, with a healthy dose of rogue, rolled into one; a man who crafted stories that blended technical ingenuity with aesthetic beauty without you even realising it.

The plot...

Although known for his silent movies, Miles Mander was a pioneer of the 'phonofilm', paving the way for directors such as Alfred Hitchcock

The BFI's restoration of the 1928 silent The First Born, with Stephen Horne's new score performed live, was one of the big events of the BFI London film festival. Full of surprises, including two racy "making eyes" scenes that had the Queen Elizabeth Hall audience all aflutter, it lives up to Michael Powell's description of the "fluent, expressive, visual story-telling" of late silent cinema that had been cut short by the introduction of synchronised sound. Directed by Miles Mander – a black-sheep Old Harrovian with a background in boxing promotion, aviation and sheep farming – it's a topical tale of a hypocritical, philandering politician who exploits his wife to mop up the women's vote. It was released just after the 1929 "Flapper Election", which brought women under 30 into the franchise for the first time,...