1958 - Dir.: Alfred Hitchcock
Shown at The FeckenOdeon on October 30th
What can one write without giving the game away?! This is perhaps the strangest and most frightening film we've ever shown at the FeckenOdeon with dark and disturbing undercurrents running beneath the seemingly straighforward plot. James Stewart, at his very best, brilliantly portrays a man at his most obsessed - not unlike the director? "Vertigo" came close to disappearing altogether but a painstaking restoration by Universal Pictures in 1996 gave us new prints with vibrant colours and a crystal clear soundtrack... but the tale of Stewart's heights-fearing detective who gets caught up with the woman he's investigating makes the restored spectacle almost irrelevant. If you're looking for jokes they're in short supply - but the thrills and tension are here... as is a dark and inescapable nightmarish compulsion. You don't want to look... but you simply have to.
The film is based upon "D'Entre les Morts" (From Among the Dead) which was written specifically for Hitchcock by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac after they heard that he had tried to buy the rights to their previous novel.
• San Juan Batiste, the Spanish mission which features in key scenes in the movie doesn't actually have a bell tower - it was added using trick photography.
• Uncredited second-unit cameraman Irmin Roberts invented the famous "forward zoom and reverse tracking" shot (now sometimes called "contra-zoom" or "trombone shot") to convey the sense of vertigo to the audience. The view down the mission stairwell cost $19,000 for just a couple of seconds of screen time.
In accordance with the instructions of Mr Hitchcock NO-ONE WILL BE ALLOWED TO ENTER ORLEAVE THE AUDITORIUM DURING THE FIRST 15 MINUTES OF "VERTIGO"
Showing posts with label Hitchcock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hitchcock. Show all posts
Friday, 14 August 2009
North by Northwest
1959 - Dir: Alfred Hitchcock
Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 25th October, 2003
This saga of a stranger in a strange land was still playing when Nikita Khrushchev became the first Soviet leader to tour the U.S. (His trip included several of the movie's spectacular locations). It is sometimes regarded as a forerunner to the later James Bond films but this is more sophisticated fare - there are thrills and spills galore and a good deal of humour but the Master keeps a sinister undercurrent of unease bubbling along throughout.
Hitchcock collaborators composer Bernard Herrmann and cinematographer Robert Burks are in top form in "North by Northwest". Burks lights the stage sets of Mount Rushmore with a fantastic glow and Herrmann's signature strident passages emphasize the danger and menace.
As screenwriter Ernest Lehman recalls, Hitchcock said to him, "We're not making a movie, we're constructing an organ". The movie was born from two key scenes that Hitchcock was desperate to realise. One was to be set at the United Nations, and the other was to be a chase across the presidential faces carved into the Mount Rushmore National Monument. It was Lehman's job to construct a film around these two visions, and out of them emerges a thriller so improbable that it becomes quite brilliant in evading even the most fantastic of audience guesses. Hitch delivers a series emotional highs and lows with perfect timing, allowing moments of relief to break out before mounting another crescendo of excitement. The effect is like a grand musical work, conducted with bravura audience manipulation.
Shown at The FeckenOdeon on 25th October, 2003
This saga of a stranger in a strange land was still playing when Nikita Khrushchev became the first Soviet leader to tour the U.S. (His trip included several of the movie's spectacular locations). It is sometimes regarded as a forerunner to the later James Bond films but this is more sophisticated fare - there are thrills and spills galore and a good deal of humour but the Master keeps a sinister undercurrent of unease bubbling along throughout.
Hitchcock collaborators composer Bernard Herrmann and cinematographer Robert Burks are in top form in "North by Northwest". Burks lights the stage sets of Mount Rushmore with a fantastic glow and Herrmann's signature strident passages emphasize the danger and menace.
As screenwriter Ernest Lehman recalls, Hitchcock said to him, "We're not making a movie, we're constructing an organ". The movie was born from two key scenes that Hitchcock was desperate to realise. One was to be set at the United Nations, and the other was to be a chase across the presidential faces carved into the Mount Rushmore National Monument. It was Lehman's job to construct a film around these two visions, and out of them emerges a thriller so improbable that it becomes quite brilliant in evading even the most fantastic of audience guesses. Hitch delivers a series emotional highs and lows with perfect timing, allowing moments of relief to break out before mounting another crescendo of excitement. The effect is like a grand musical work, conducted with bravura audience manipulation.
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