![]() ![]() The confusion is readily understandable the adaptation of Christie’s play about a wastrel (Tyrone Power) on trial for murder is steeped in Englishness, laced with wit, and hinges on a shocking late revelation that audiences were implored to keep secret, a gimmick later echoed by Psycho. It’s ironic, then, that he was regularly complimented for the handiwork of director/cowriter Billy Wilder on Witness for the Prosecution. Also somewhat surprisingly, he never made a film based on the work of Agatha Christie. When preparing Psycho (1960), Hitchcock shorthanded it to the press as a film “in the Diabolique genre.” In the meantime, he recovered from his disappointment by optioning the subsequent Boileau-Narcejac novel D’entre les morts ( From Among the Dead), which formed the basis for his most personal film, Vertigo.Īs anyone who has sat through The Paradine Case (1947) can testify, courtroom dramas were not Hitchcock’s strong suit. Clouzot’s film about the wife and the mistress of a sadistic schoolteacher teaming up to kill him became an international sensation. He sought the rights to the 1952 novel Celle qui n’était plus ( She Who Was No More) by the writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, but was beaten to the punch by French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot. It’s one of the most fascinating what-ifs of Hitchcock’s career. When Harrison became one of Hollywood’s only women producers in the 1940s, she hired Fly-by-Night’s director, Robert Siodmak, to helm her maiden production, the landmark noir Phantom Lady (1944). The surest sign that Fly-by-Night works on its own merits is that among its fans was Joan Harrison, who began as Hitchcock’s secretary and became an essential member of his inner circle she scouted projects for him and had writing credits on several of his films, including Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941). More importantly, it preserves Hitch’s light touch. Fly-by-Night is gossamer spy nonsense that may borrow liberally from Steps, but it does so with great flair. Paramount paid The 39 Steps the ultimate compliment when their B-movie unit basically copied it. The director had successes before The 39 Steps, but the 1935 thriller is in essence the first “Hitchcock movie.” All the elements are in place: the deft blending of suspense and comedy the signature “double chase” structure of the police pursuing the “wrong man” while he seeks the actual villains an icy blonde (Madeleine Carroll) to be thawed. Let’s start with the earliest Hitchcock knockoff. Think of it instead as representative, eighty years’ worth of films invisibly shaped by one of the essential artists of the twentieth century. ![]() The list is by no means definitive Hitchcock casts a shadow so large that it has its own shadows. Time for an appraisal of Alfred Hitchcock movies that were not directed by Alfred Hitchcock, although his spirit hangs over each and every one of them. Filmmakers were working in the Hitchcock style when he was operating at his peak, and they’re still doing so today. That dominance led to two of the highest compliments imaginable: an adjective (“Hitchcockian”) and scores of imitators. As she explained, “Hitchcock is a director who dominates every single scene of his pictures.” “Hitchcock thinks in terms of color,” she wrote in her memoir The Dress Doctor, noting “every costume is indicated when he sends me the script.” She simply had to adjust to his granular, all-encompassing style of filmmaking. Among the ten films in their partnership after Notorious are masterpieces like Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958), Hitchcock’s swan song Family Plot (1976), and the movie Edith named as her own favorite, To Catch a Thief (1955). Edith swiftly became one of his most valued collaborators. Several years later, Hitchcock pitched his tent at Paramount. Publicly, Edith was circumspect about the work, saying, “The job was tricky.” In private, though, she found the director demanding, asking her colleague Adele Balkan, who was designing costumes for the other women in the cast, “Is he giving you as much trouble as he is giving me?” I call her Edith because she’s one-half of the detective duo in the Golden Age Hollywood mysteries that I write with my wife Rosemarie under the pen name Renee Patrick.) Edith certainly understood the assignment a daring midriff-baring, zebra-striped top immediately establishes Bergman’s Alicia Huberman as a self-destructive party girl who can be molded into a spy by intelligence agent Cary Grant. She had been loaned out by her home studio, Paramount Pictures, at the request of star Ingrid Bergman, with whom Edith had developed a rapport. The storied costume designer Edith Head initially met Alfred Hitchcock during preproduction of his film Notorious (1946). Maybe we shouldn’t put so much stock in first impressions. ![]()
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