{filmmaker flashcard} Hitchcock
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In honor of the new biopic Hitchcock, here’s a filmmaker flashcard to start your week. A prolific master of suspenseful storytelling, Hitchcock’s name has become synonymous with shivers, and rightly so. I have a lot of his early British works to catch up on, but have been a big fan of the later Hollywood films since high school. Rear Window (with Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly), Vertigo (with Kim Novak and Jimmy again) and North by Northwest (with Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint) are all on my drop-everything-if-this-is-on-and-watch list.
The new film is directed by Sacha Gervasi (director of the well-received rock doc Anvil: The Story of Anvil and writer of Spielberg’s The Terminal) and stars another knight, Sir Anthony Hopkins, in the title role. The story focuses on the filming of Psycho and Hitchcock’s relationship with his wife, screenwriter Alma Reville, played by Helen Mirren. Critics are very mixed on this movie (only a 61% rating currently at Rotten Tomatoes), but Hopkins and Mirren seem to be getting approval for their portrayal of the couple. Roger Ebert gives the film three stars but suggests you’ll learn more about Hitchcock as a filmmaker from director Francois Truffaut’s book-length interview with him, first published in 1967. I’m adding it to my reading list right now.
so many films! it’s easy to think — oh, hitchock! i know what he’s done — when really i only know a hand full of what he’s accomplished. i’m looking forward to the film. seems odd that it’s not getting very high ratings.
From my quick overview of Rotten Tomatoes, it looked like a lot of critics found the story they chose to focus on not the story they wanted to focus on. Curious what you’ll make of it! I’m not sure I’ll get to it this week, but it’s on my watch list.
Looking forward to this one, though I once read a script about the couple of years Hitchcock spent as an underling film editor, during which he secretly lived out of the studio and clandestinely used the sound stages and equipment to shoot and edit his own films by night. It was an amazing script, and it’s hard to know it’s still out there not being made.
Ooof. That’s painful to know the possibility is out there. It sounds like the script you read is the one a lot of critics would have rather seen!