Time to stretch… Swap from fiction to documentary. Enjoy the master of suspense!
REVIEW ALLMOVIE
A rare glimpse into the mind of the notorious cagey master filmmaker, this documentary was shot on the set of Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie. With remarkable candor Hitchcock discusses his career and his passion for movies. — Jonathan CrowRead More »
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Roddy, first son of the rich Berwick family, is expelled from school when he takes the blame for his friend Tim’s theft. His family sends him away and all of his friends leave him alone. Roddy decides to go to Paris where he spends what little money he has and starts working as a dancer. He soon becames a victim of alcoholism. Roddy manages to move to England’s colonies but some sailors send him back to his rich family hoping for a reward.Read More »
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Manny Ballestero is an honest hardworking musician at New York’s Stork Club. When his wife needs money for dental treatment, Manny goes to the local insurance office to borrow on her policy. Employees at the office mistake him for a hold-up man who robbed them the year before and the police are called. The film tells the true story of what happened to Manny and his family.Read More »
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Marnie Edgar is a habitual liar and a thief who gets jobs as a secretary and after a few months robs the firms in question, usually of several thousand dollars. When she gets a job at Rutland’s, she also catches the eye of the handsome owner, Mark Rutland. He prevents her from stealing and running off, as is her usual pattern, but also forces her to marry him. Their honeymoon is a disaster and she cannot stand to have a man touch her and on their return home, Mark has a private detective look into her past. When he has the details of what happened in her childhood to make her what she is, he arranges a confrontation with her mother realizing that reliving the terrible events that occurred in her childhood and bringing out those repressed memories is the only way to save her.Read More »
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Wealthy, sheltered Joan Fontaine is swept off her feet by charming ne’er-do-well Cary Grant. Though warned that Grant is little more than a fortune-hunter, Fontaine marries him anyway. She remains loyal to her irresponsible husband as he plows his way from one disreputable business scheme to another. Gradually, Fontaine comes to the conclusion that Grant intends to do away with her in order to collect her inheritance…a suspicion confirmed when Grant’s likeable business partner Nigel Bruce dies under mysterious circumstances. To his dying day, Hitchcock insisted that he wanted to retain the novelist Francis Iles’ original ending, but that the RKO executives intervened. Fontaine won an Academy Award for her work.Read More »
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Alfred Hitchcock spent his entire career experimenting with, and perfecting, the storytelling structure of the thriller. He had a legitimate “prestige” film with his first American production, “Rebecca,” but even that more than qualifies to be considered in the same genre vein as “Vertigo,” “Psycho,” “North By Northwest” or “Strangers on a Train.” This particular attention to genre is likely why Hitchcock did not receive an Oscar until the Honorary one he got at the end of his life, but that snub has always been attributed more to the stuffiness of the Academy than any lack of worthiness on Hitch’s part.Read More »
A bizarre entry in Alfred Hitchcock´s filmography: Johann Strauss Jr. is the son of the famous conductor and composer, and plays the violin in his father’s orchestra. He hasn’t had any of his own compositions performed or published because Strauss Sr. sternly discourages it. Not dismayed, Strauss Jr gives singing lessons to his gifted sweetheart Resi, the daughter of a pastry chef, and dedicates all his songs to her. Then he meets a Countess who has written some verses and asks his help in setting them to music. When her husband hears from a servant that a young man is upstairs with his wife, he storms into the music room, but the name of Strauss placates him. Later, Resi isn’t so easily placated, for she senses a rival. However, the Countess essentially has Strauss Jr’s best interests at heart. With a publisher friend, she successfully plots to have the elder Strauss delayed one night so that Jr’s new composition, “The Blue Danube” may receive a performance. Strauss Jr. conducts the waltz himself, becoming the sensation of Vienna. Soon afterwards, though the Prince’s suspicions have briefly been aroused again, everyone is finally reconciled.
In his interview with François Truffaut in 1964 and in many other interviews, Alfred Hitchcock referred to this film as “the lowest ebb of my career”.Read More »
A gang of thieves gather at a safe house following a robbery, but a detective is on their trail.Read More »
The Moliere players are in their dressing room, getting ready to go on set. One actor mentions to another that his face reminds him of an opportunist turncoat he knew when he was in the Resistance. He then relates the adventure that he had in the Resistance, running an illegal radio station and dodging the Nazis.Read More »