Hitchcock's answer for the cold season

Amour, at work: Michael Haneke, the Hitchcock for a new generation

Michael Haneke (left) on the set with Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant.

Michael Haneke’s films are like sunburns: you don't feel their their full brunt until the next day. In his latest film, Amour, Anne and Georges (Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant) are an educated Parisian couple who must deal with the grim reality of old age. Haneke spares us none of the tedium and horror of their final days, measured out in spoon after increasingly bitter spoon. Driving home from the theater, Amanda and I were silent. The next day, we could talk about nothing else.

In this aspect, among others, Haneke’s films resemble those of Alfred Hitchcock, whose films likewise impart a long afterglow. In fact, for years, I’ve maintained that Haneke is the artistic heir to Hitchcock, and each new movie of his confirms it. Their artistic sensibilities are almost identical.  For instance, Haneke declared that “the principal theme of all my films” is the question of “What is reality in cinema?” Ground also covered by Hitchcock.

Of course, Haneke is no mere dime-a-dozen “Hitchcockian” director. Instead, I sense a tradition at work. Just as Hitch stood on the shoulders of F. W. Murnau and D.W. Griffith while contributing his ideas and voice to cinema, Haneke stands on the shoulders of Hitchcock. He's an auteur in the old school tradition, and it’s that mastery of his medium, coupled with his singleness of vision, that places him in Hitch’s league. Like Hitch, he deals in the big questions of the human condition, which, it turns out, are also the most urgent and intimate. What is love? What is loyalty? What is sin?

What is the next loving/loyal/unsinful thing to do?

In his universe (as well as in Hitch's), the answer to that question is never simple. Amour demonstrates that the next right act can be as horrific as anything Hitchcock showed us. And then he takes it one step further: while Hitch’s films invite self-reflection, showing us the way to forgiveness (or at least cutting our enemies a little slack in the larger scheme), Haneke’s films scrape down to the next level, causing you to wonder whether you’re up to the task.

With Hidden (French: Caché), he explored the Hitchcockian theme of shared guilt and our collective complicity, not just in sin itself, but in the shared costs its cover-up measures out to our selves, our families and society. Not since Topaz, perhaps, has the subject been mined so ruthlessly. I wrote a bit about the film here.

Psycho, a film about toilets, cross-dressing, taxidermy and serial-killing (not that there’s anything wrong with those things), was conceived by Hitchcock as one long joke. I suspect Haneke would say the same about The Piano Teacher, a film about a psychotic, sado-masochistic conservatory instructor, who, it should be added, has mother issues of her own. Not since Hitch’s 1960 film has the intersection where anger and eros meet been so objectively and I would add, compassionately, understood. And, yes, the humor is pitch-black. Amour, too, is front-loaded with its own quiet, subversive humor, as in this whispered conversation:

Anne: “What would you say if no one came to your funeral?”
Georges: “Nothing, presumably. 

Amour is stripped of any suspense. Its opening scene gives us Anne laid out on her deathbed, now a makeshift a funeral bier. The rest of the film is about what comes before. But even without that, as her mental and physical functions disperse one by one, even a child would know how this movie ends. The film shackles us to the couple, forcing us to join them in the here and now—which is all we’ve got, anyway; and if the film has a moral, it’s this cold comfort of pop philosophy. Hitchcock often bristled at the constraints the title Master of Suspense imposed on him. Given time, I can see him making a thriller like this. 

The claustrophobic single settings of Lifeboat, Rope, Dial M for Murder and the final act of The Birds suggest that the trappings of domesticity, not to mention wealth, are indeed a trap and that those who allow themselves to be thus caught can only escape by facing harsh judgment or death (or both). Haneke seems to have picked up on and continued that message. Like Dial M for Murder—another movie about domestic homicide—Amour takes place almost entirely inside the couple’s elegant apartment. Unlike her globetrotting, concert-performing students, Anne, a piano teacher to elite students, has evidently spent her lifetime ensconced in these rooms, watching and instructing, but never fully doing. If Schubert's piano works—i.e. chamber pieces—ever provided any comfort for their souls (a tenuous assumption, if Haneke's earlier The Piano Teacher has anything to say about it), they are now only a reminder of their ineluctability of their destiny. Just about every wall of their home is packed floor-to-ceiling with books and art and curios accumulated over the years. I found my eyes wandering to the bookcases to peruse their titles, only to discover that most of them had indecipherable, if not blank bindings, as if at this stage of the game, all of their literature and learning will be useless for dealing with such situations as when Anne wakes up to find herself soaked in her own urine. Even in their dreams, there's no escaping this place.

Haneke's earlier films also hint at what Norman Bates characterized as "private traps." For example, inside a posh lakeside mansion, the well-to-do family of Funny Games is tormented by a pair of demoniac teenagers who seem to have no more motive for killing than do Rope’s Brandon and Phillip—unless you consider complacency to be a punishable offense, a point on which both Hitch and Haneke would agree.

Haneke’s Hitchcockian credentials are further reinforced by his camera’s self-awareness as a stand-in for both the author and his audience. Following the opening scene, which is more of a prologue, Amour opens with a wide shot (reminiscent of the end of Hidden) of an audience waiting for a piano recital to begin. The anonymity of this crowd prefigures the blank spines visible in the couple’s library; at first, the eye doesn’t know where to land, as it searches the milling crowd for a familiar face. The camera has been placed on stage and the sensation it evokes is either the laid-bare feeling of having a mirror unexpectedly held up to us, or, conversely, that we are the performers in this drama looking out at our audience. Either discomforting interpretation is plausible. William Rothman wrote that one of Hitchcock’s “deepest insights is that no moment in any film can be fully comprehended without accounting for the camera. Another is that, in the camera’s tense and shifting relationships with its human subjects, the author’s and viewer’s roles are intimately revealed.” Haneke takes Hitchcock’s insights into new territory. Hitchcock saw voyeurism as a theme to be developed; for Haneke it’s an accepted fact of life. Haneke’s contribution is to ask, “What will you make of it?” 

Behind the simplicity of Haneke's storylines and technique—excruciatingly long takes with a stationary, unblinking camera—lies a subtle mind that has thought through the meaning of his stories and the medium in which he tells them, clear to their difficult, often abhorrent, end. At one point, Georges slaps Anne in the face, and we are not spared the force of it through clever editing or stagecraft: we watch her face implode under the weight of his hand. He immediately realizes that he’s gone too far and, with a murmured apology, retreats from the room. The camera, too, cuts away, as if in shame, to rest on a series of paintings hanging on their bedroom wall. I’m reminded of the long take in Frenzy, which spares us the details of unspeakable violence happening in an upstairs flat as the camera backs discreetly away and out to the street.

Amour's incidental music (Schubert's Impromptus, mostly, along with an impromptu performance of one of Beethoven's Bagatelles: I'll leave the interpretation to you), all of which occurs diegetically, is constantly interrupted or shut off. (One rejected title of the film was The Music Stops.) Like Phillip’s unfinished stabs at Poulenc’s Perpetual Motion in Rope, these fragmentary performances are a reminder that all life, even that of these octogenarians’, is doomed to a premature end. I think that both Hitch and Haneke would embrace Joseph Campbell’s words: “Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.”

Hitch loved to tell reporters a story from his younger days about a boy and girl he espied while on a train to Paris. The boy was urinating against a red brick wall, “but the girl had a hold of his arm and she never let go. She'd look down at what he was doing, and then look around at the scenery, then back again at the boy. I felt this was true love at work.” That impression stayed with him and inspired such scenes as the “world’s longest kiss” in Notorious. As its title insists, Amour is also a story of “true love at work,” despite incontinence, immobilization and dementia. As her health deteriorates, Anne shifts from stoic acceptance to stubborn refusal to go any further. Things get ugly. It’s easy to say that, in her pain, she withdrew her affection from her husband. But I don’t see it that way. I think she saw her end coming and was preparing her husband to take on the most excruciating act of love he would ever render. As with the mother’s suicide in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, “she was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.”

To love another is to forfeit all defenses against suffering—yours and theirs. Hitchcock offers little and Haneke offers even less in the way of comfort. Neither director was ever comfortable with the bland reassurances of the Hollywood ending. In place of mere optimism, they offer us wisdom. And with wisdom comes hope. If you're lucky, you'll share your last days with someone who will do for you what you can't do for yourself, even if it's the imparting of oblivion. That, too, is amore.

Congratulations to Michael Haneke for taking home a 2013 Oscar for Amour in the Best Foreign Film category. 

My Hookup With Hitchcock: Part II

By Elisabeth Karlin

When I set out to write my play Bodega Bay I was Hitchcockful of ideas. I knew I wanted to send my protagonist off on an adventurous cross-country journey that would actually be a trip to self-knowledge. I knew I wanted to touch on themes of appearance vs. reality, the fragility of our ordered world and how the dead affect the living. I knew I would use the sea as a place of emotional confrontation. I knew I would deal in images of birds, bathrooms and eyeglasses and that my script would be peppered with allusions and in-jokes for the Hitchophiles. And I knew that I wanted to do all this in the heightened style of German Expressionism that Hitchcock was so rooted in.

Like Hitchcock, I approach story-telling as a character-driven endeavor and in Louise Finch (kudos to those who know right off the bat where I got that name) I created a natural descendant of all the familiar folk in the Hitchcock oeuvre with lives in need of purpose and meaning. Yet even with character and story in place, I still didn't have much more than a cerebral exercise. Determined to avoid a spoofy send-up or a reverential homage, I hoped to create a play that would stand on its own for those oblivious to the the Hitchcock overlay. The best dramas are written from the gut and have to come from the inside out.

Oddly, I discovered the viscera of my Hitch-inspired project in the movie that Hitchcock never made. Mary Rose is a play by J. M. Barrie that Hitchcock saw and loved as a youth. He never let go of the desire to film this fey, romantic ghost story. He wanted to do it with Grace Kelly and then with Tippi Hedren and when that relationship soured he considered unknown Claire Griswold. Because of a clear lack of enthusiasm from MCA/Universal (Hitch joked that the studio would likely have backed any project of his as long as it wasn't Mary Rose) it never happened but he never lost hope.

Mary Rose, the play, is an antique and like most antiques, it is not to everyone's taste. When I read the screenplay that Marnie screenwriter Jay Presson Allen drafted for Hitch, on the Writing With Hitchcock website (thank-you Steven DeRosa!) I wondered how such a moist and misty artifact of fantasy about a girl who disappears on "the island that likes to be visited," comes back and disappears on it again to return once more as an aching ghost, could hold such an unrelenting fascination for the sophisticated Hitchcock.

And yet, something about the script's final scene spoke to me in a strange way. It made me delve further and I came across a review of a revival of the play by critic John Lahr in the New Yorker. About the background of  J. M. Barrie and Mary Rose Lahr wrote:

"He [Barrie] knew from experience that a mother could be both alive and dead. In 1867, when he was six, his thirteen year old brother David was killed in a skating accident. Barrie's mother, Margaret, took to her bed and became a ghostly presence who was both there and not there for her little boy...In life, Barrie could not heal his haunted mother or reclaim her. In Mary Rose written when Barrie was almost sixty, he does both."

I typed this quote and put it over my desk. I taped it to the inside cover of my notebook. I looked at it every time I needed to remind myself why I was writing this play. And every time I looked at it, the words "could not heal his haunted mother" blazed back at me, evoking my own mother who in her life was always both there and not there, shielded from me and the world by her dark glasses and an opaque haze of cigarette smoke and depression. I rode those words all the way to the last draft of Bodega Bay.

His failure to film Mary Rose is considered to be the great creative disappointment of Hitchcock's life. He thought it might be his masterpiece. Meanwhile, his acknowledged masterpiece, Vertigo, waded into many of the same themes and moods--how the dead affect the living and how a ghostly figure of desire can be there and not there.

In his interview with Francois Truffaut, Hitch is characteristically flip about the whole Mary Rose thing. "You should make the picture," he told the French director. "You would do it better. It's not really Hitchcock material," he said as if covering his broken heart. For more than Grace Kelly, more than Tippi Hedren, it seems that it is the spectral Mary Rose who was really the girl that got away.

A young man saw a play that stayed with him the whole of his life. And in some slightly phantasmagorical Mary Rose way, I wrote my own play while basking in his presence on our shadowy astral plane of an island that likes to be visited. I came back with the liberating lesson that what is cinematic or theatrical need not be sensible and logical, only truthful. But it was not the great maestro of anxiety who I found on that island. It was not the majestically monumental Hitchcock. It was only the watchful and yearning Alfred--a boy who liked to go to the theatre.

Elisabeth Karlin's play BODEGA BAY plays at The Abingdon Theatre in New York City through February 17th. For information go to www.abingdontheatre.org.

My Hookup With Hitchcock: Part I

By Elisabeth Karlin

The epithet "Master of Suspense" that clings to Alfred Hitchcock like moss on a rock has always rung feebly for me. "Master of Dark Psychological Undertones, Chaos in an Ordered Universe and Moral Ambiguities" is more like it. I admit that it's a bit too wordy. That's why I stick simply with "The Master." This is the account of our collaboration, even though we never met.

Hitchcock has been on my mind quite a lot these past couple of years. As adjutant to Joel Gunz on the Alfred Hitchcock Geek Facebook Page and contributor to this blog, I have a daily dedication to saying something about the man. When fellows respond to what I put out there with their own thoughts I think about him some more. And of course I read Hitchcock savants like Gunz, Stephen Rebello, Steven DeRosa and Dan Auiler, and soon I feel like the composer in Rear Window, with Hitch in my apartment, adjusting my clock. You see, the more you think about Hitchcock, the more intrusive he becomes in your life. The more you look deeply into his work, the more you see. And the more you see, the more you want to say about it.

There was no fighting it. With Hitchcock a fixture in my consciousness, I had to dream up my own drama dealing in his deepest and most compelling themes. For me, the lure of Hitchcock has never been the spilling and splattering of blood. Rather, it is the question of what runs in our blood that gets me going back to the films. It is the way Hitchcock has of guiding his audience to disturbing discoveries about what makes us who we are that I see as the crux of his craft.

The result of this divine hookup with Hitch is Bodega Bay, a play about Louise Finch, the mousy sister of a meth addict, who leaves Staten Island for a cross-country odyssey to find the mother who mysteriously walked away years ago. Now, meth addicts on Staten Island might not sound like standard Hitchcock fare while transcontinental journeys and missing mothers might, and in upcoming posts I will elucidate and elaborate on the particular points of this creative embrace between The Master and me.

Elisabeth Karlin's play BODEGA BAY opens at The Abingdon Theatre in New York City on January 25th. For information go to www.abingdontheatre.org.

Jules Dassin: Hitchcock's "Wrong Man?"

It’s almost a cardinal rule for film school graduates to cite Alfred Hitchcock as an influence, but the fact is that smart filmmakers have always stolen his ideas. Hitch, for his part, might have been the greatest thief of all—though, in the general accounting, he gave back more than he took. One such exchange that hasn’t been much commented on is that between him and director Jules Dassin (Rififi, Topkapi, and much more).

Dassin served as an assistant to Hitch during the making of Mr. And Mrs. Smith (1941), and it seems he was all but Hitch’s disciple. He would hang out on the set and watch the elder director at work with such unflagging attention that Hitch, in jest, started checking with him to see if the take was okay. When he left RKO for MGM to direct short films, Hitch advised him: "Don't ever make a picture with children, animals or Charles Laughton." (He went on to break all three directives.)

His very first directorial effort was a 1941 short adaptation of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. And if that assignment wasn’t Hitchcockian enough, its multiple tracking shots and subjective POV editing spoke to his careful study of the Master. Dassin’s extreme close-ups on the main character’s ear as he hears those phantom heartbeats come right out of the Hitchcock playbook. In fact, the entire 20-minute piece feels like an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Seven years later, Dassin directed the police caper The Naked City. From the first frames, I knew there was more than a passing relationship here. (Stream it on Netflix here.)

For instance, there’s the scene where the oh-so Irish Detective Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) rouses suspect Frank Niles (Howard Duff) from unconsciousness. It matches the framing, action, tone and comic relief of the scene in Hitch’s Spellbound (1945), where the oh-so Viennese psychiatrist Dr. Brulov corners his wrong man, J.B. (Gregory Peck), for a round of questioning.

The Naked City

Spellbound

The acrophobia-inducing climactic chase atop the Williamsburg Bridge in The Naked City so recalls the final chase on the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (1942) that the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther called it “a roaring 'Hitchcock' end.”

In The Naked City, the bad guy, Garzah (Ted de Corsia) plunges several stories in this vertiginous shot. Apparently a dummy was used for the scene.

In a process shot layered with a tiny dissolve over his face, Frye (Norman Llloyd) exits this world from atop the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur.

The Naked City starts out, Hitchcockianly enough, with a series of “God’s eye” shots of Manhattan, New York. Over the noise of the helicopter’s engines, the film’s producer says,

“Ladies and gentlemen, the picture you are about to see is called “The Naked City.” My name is Mark Hallinger. I was in charge of its production. I might as well tell you directly that it’s a bit different from anything you’ve ever seen. It was not photographed in a studio. Quite to the contrary, the… actors played out their roles on the streets, in the apartment houses, on the skyscrapers of New York itself.”

This prologue—and the film that follows—appears to have influenced Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, eight years later, in several key ways. Hitch delivers the prologue to that film, speaking across the empty expanse of a darkened soundstage:

“This is Alfred Hitchcock speaking. In the past, I have given you many kinds of suspense pictures. But this time, I would like you to see a different one. The difference lies in the fact that this is a true story, every word of it. And yet it contains elements that are stranger than all the fiction that has gone into many of the thrillers that I've made before.”

In both cases, director and producer:

• Introduce himself by name and deliver a prologue.
• Take the audience out of the cinematic experience by reminding it that it is watching a movie.
• Draw attention to their movies’ realism.
• Make claims that this movie is unlike any the audience has yet seen.

Both films also take place in a New York that is both foreground and background, itself a character; and both are filmed in a neo-realistic documentary style. Perhaps most importantly, while both follow a police procedural format, Hitch’s film deals exclusively with the point of view of the accused—and that difference gives us a clue to Hitch’s greater intentions.

If The Naked City did indeed exert some influence on The Wrong Man, the fate that befell its creator might well have also have been on Hitch’s mind at that time, too. Dassin’s career in Hollywood was cut short when, in 1951, he was accused of Communist activities and blacklisted by the House of Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC). Like everyone else in Hollywood, Hitch very likely concluded that such blacklisting could easily happen to him. (See Lifeboat, which flopped in 1944 because it portrayed Americans and Germans alike in an ambivalent light. If Hitch had made that film at the height of the red scare, he’d have been run out of town.) For that reason, I see a connection between The Wrong Man and The Naked City, as well as Dassin himself.

Film critic Colin Macarthur has called The Wrong Man “the film which perhaps best conveys the underlying unease of 50s America.” It was (sort of) Hitch's response to the Arthur Miller's 1953 play about the Salem Witch Trials, The Crucible: anyone could be accused of Communist leanings, guilty until proven innocent. Jules Dassin was just another “wrong man.”

The Naked City has another scene that apparently clicked with Hitch. Detective Muldoon watches children skipping rope in the street below his window, chanting this rhyme:

"Mother, Mother, I am ill

Send for the doctor over the hill

Call for the doctor, call for the nurse

Call for the lady with the alligator purse."

Hitchcock used that same rhyme twice in Marnie. In this latter case, it works on several levels, carrying forward ideas related to childhood danger, predatory animals, illness that is “nothing” and purses. But the way the rhyme is presented in down-at-the-heels urban settings in both films also suggests that Hitch was again thinking of his former protogee’s film.

The Naked City

 

Marnie

The rhyme doesn’t appear in the source novel, Marnie, by Winston Graham; it was suggested by screenwriter Jay Presson Allen, who, according to Tony Lee Moral in his book Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie, “thought it would be funny and amusing.” Hitch would surely have known about its earlier use and smiled. By the same token, when Marnie Edgar coolly, methodically, robs the Rutland safe, the suspense, attention to detail and silence of that scene resembles the famous heist scene in Rififi, directed by Dassin while in exile in France. Hitch’s direction almost begs for that comparison.

Of course, Hitch made his creative choices for a multiplicity of reasons. Yet, beyond such artistic considerations, why would he drop details into a film that would be just an in-joke between a half-dozen people at the max (plus an unspecified number of future film geeks)? Well, for starters, just about every film Hitch made contained a wink or two just like that. Also, consider this: Marnie came out in 1964, the same year that Dassin finally returned to Hollywood to make Topkapi. Maybe, on some level, it was Hitch’s way of saying, “Welcome back.”

That’s speculation, of course. Still, one thing seems fairly certain: these two first-rate directors had enough mutual respect that they could riff on each others’ work, while following their own artistic lights. 

Anthony Hopkins' Hitchcock: I need you to be Alfred one more time.

“Like all great artists, Alfred Hitchcock is impossible to live with, but well worth the effort.” So says one of the characters in the eagerly anticipated Hitchcock (Fox/Searchlight), which both sums up the main point of the film and explains why I recently found my bags packed and on the porch. Apparently, I’m not the artist I thought I was.

That was a maudlin thought. Then again, Hitchcock is rife with maudlin humor and asides--along with enough Easter egg-like in-jokes to keep Hitchcock fans and re-watching the film for years. For instance, in a line borrowed from one of the final scenes in Vertigo, Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston) invites Alma to join him for “one of those big juicy steaks we love so much.”

The first-ever legitimate biopic (or is it docudrama?) about the director, Hitchcock prudently avoids a career-spanning flyover of his half century in movies and focuses instead on the obstacles he faced just to make one film: Psycho. But don’t let that limited scope fool you. Restricting the story to just a few months between 1959 and 1960 allowed director Sacha Gervasi and screenwriter John J. McLaughlin ample room to explore the complicated relationships that existed between Hitch and Alma and Hitch and his leading ladies, while also comparing the dark corners of his psyche with the entertainments he brought to generations of audiences. History was provided by Stephen Rebello's excellent and readable book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho.

Gervasi pulls out a variety of tricks to get those ideas across without resorting to dry exposition. In a series of imaginary sequences, real-life serial killer Ed Gein (Michael Wincott) and inspiration behind novelist Robert Bloch’s Norman Bates, plays Hitch’s muse, confidant, psychotherapist and Jungian shadow. Such fantasy scenes (fantascenes?) were a bit fresher when Tony Soprano first engaged in them, but here they show us what we suspected all along--that Hitch, ever the good Catholic, loved his murderers as he did himself.

Hitchcock isn't a term paper, it's a movie. The creators don't shy away from creative license in order to get the all-too-true story across. For example, Hitchcock was always famously cool on the set, and for the filming of the shower scene in particular, Janet Leigh recalled, “it went very professionally and very quickly.” Suffice it to say that in this movie, Hitch steps in and proves to be a real cut-up. What we lose in historical accuracy, we gain in further insight into Hitch's creative rage.

In a later scene, at Psycho's premier, Hitch pretends to direct the audience as if it were an orchestra. Untethered from historical facts, the scene reveals what the real payoff was for Hitch, who spent 50 years hiding  in the dark behind a camera. Moments like this were what Hitch lived for.

When you realize that Anthony Hopkins himself played Hannibal Lechter, the screen’s second-most beloved serial killer, it follows that he was an inspired choice to play Hitch. (Hell, Hopkins could have played Alma if he’d wanted to.) And he brought a sense of Hitch’s troubled nature to the role. But I do have a beef. Like Toby Jones’ portrayal of Hitch in The Girl, Hopkins’ Hitchcock is based on Hitchcock’s public persona, with all the black humor and droll imperiousness unwaveringly in place. (At least in HBO's bio-waste The Girl, we get to hear a few of Hitch's classic, filthy limericks. I took notes.) In this new film, Hopkins' Hitch is either the Buddha of Deadpan or he’s a ravenous, knife-wielding glutton.

In preparation for the role, Hopkins admitted the he “watched a lot of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" episodes. That was his first mistake. And that prosthetic fat-man makeup didn't make his job easier. But the real Alfred Hitchcock, the one I’d hoped to glimpse, at least in the scenes he shares in private with his closest confidants, was in fact a spirited raconteur, quick with a smile, whose eyes—as with those of his characters—revealed everything, as this interview shows.

For me, the show-stopper was Helen Mirren, who serves up an Alma Hitchcock who’s cunning, resolute and funny—and who knew the score all too well as the loyal wife who lived in the shadow of her famous husband’s fantasy mistresses, without losing herself along the way. If Hitchcock gets a Best Picture Oscar where the master’s films always came up short, in order to complete the symmetry, Mirren ought to receive a Best Supporting Role where Alma never did.

Alfred Hitchcock lived to make movies. The story of his films cannot be separated from his life—and the converse is true as well. For film lovers in general along with casual fans and hard core Hitchcock Geeks, Hitchcock has a little something for everyone.

The film also stars Scarlett Johansson, who plays herself dressed up to look like Janet Leigh and Michael Stuhlbarg as Hitch’s smooth-as-scotch yet ravenous-as-a-vampire superagent, Lew Wasserman. James D’Arcy reincarnates Anthony Perkins and Jessica Biel keeps her chin up as Hitch's spurned muse, Vera Miles. Opens Friday in select theaters.

Portland's Cinema 21 just launched it First Annual Hitchcock Fest

I am thrilled to announce Cinema 21's "First Annual" (only an oxymoron to the most pessimistic) Hitchcock Film Festival, which started last night and runs through Wednesday. So you know where I'll be camping this week! And, just to show that fresh prints isn't just a rap star, that's how you'll be seeing these movies! Here are the deets:

DATES: Runs Friday November 2 thru Wednesday November 7
TICKETS: $6 each; $9 per DOUBLE FEATURE; $40 per Festival pass
ADDRESS: Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave
FORMAT: ALL IN GLORIOUS, FRESH 35MM!!

Showtimes follow this fascinating interview with festival creator and curator, Ian Berry:

Who are you and what's your association with cinema 21?
"I've been a projectionist at Cinema 21 for 5 years now -- a projectionist in general since 1998. But I was a weekly fixture at Cinema 21 long before I worked there. It's always been my favorite movie theater. It's more than my home away from home; it's my church.

Why you? Why a Hitchcock festival?
I've actually been bugging my boss, Tom, for a while to do a Hitchcock festival. I originally wanted to do it on Hitch's birthday in August two years ago. But sometimes these things roll very slowly. With the success of the noir series back in March (another thing I had to pester him into), I think Tom finally saw that we could do a tribute to Hitchcock and he wouldn't lose his shirt. Plus it just seemed like the timing couldn't be better. The Sight & Sound pronouncement, the new movies, Hitchcock is just in the air right now. For personal and sentimental reasons, though, one of the greatest film-going experiences I ever had was seeing Rear Window for the first time as a young adult at Cinema 21. I was so completely blown away I returned the very next night to watch it again, just to be sure it wasn't a one night stand, that the movie was actually THAT GOOD. So I wanted to bring that feeling back to the theater, if only for selfish reasons.

In an era in which projection is increasingly digital, What is involved in putting together a 35mm film festival?
It's fairly difficult. First of all, there's the availability and condition of the existing prints. Film is a delicate medium. Some films are just plain unavailable. (For instance, we couldn't program The Birds because it's currently making the rounds as part of Universal's 100th anniversary tour. I really wanted Lifeboat but we were told there wasn't a print in circulation right now.) Some prints are in poor condition. In fact, when we got our print of Vertigo, we looked at it and very quickly realized that the print had seen better days. We immediately asked Universal if there was a better print available and we dished out the extra money to get it here.

Which leads right into Part Two: it can be very expensive to do a festival of 35mm films. We actually sought out private sponsorship to make this festival possible, mostly for the shipping costs of these prints. But we felt like we had to show these films ON FILM, the way The Master intended.

When we did the noir series, Tom was on the fence about going film or going digital. (Let's make this clear: I was not on the fence. I wanted film very badly.) Tom has to watch the prices of everything, so I don't blame him for being tempted by the lower costs of digital versions, especially where older films are concerned because the shipping costs are drastically reduced. Additionally, he's so busy that he doesn't watch the films in the theater as often as he'd probably like to and therefore is a bit removed sometimes from the power of celluloid. So when we came up with a list of the films we wanted to program, we found prints where we could, but then we compromised on a few titles (the ones we couldn't get 35mm prints) by showing the blu-ray versions. The very first film of the series was The Killers, of which we managed to get a brand new 35mm print. Tom and I watched it and afterwards he turned to me and vowed, right then and there, that we would always get 35mm prints for these types of festivals in the future. He was no longer on the fence. The print looked THAT amazing. He was a believer again!

When judging these prints up against a digital copy (a comparison which I've done on the big screen), I think the difference is unmistakable. Film is most assuredly the superior format. It not only looks better, it actually FEELS better, too. It's a whole other experience. And by the way, for this festival we've managed to get stunning brand new prints of The Lady Vanishes, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and Marnie.

If the restored Dial M for Murder makes a theatrical run, can we hope to see it at Cinema 21? Will it be digital or (I hope!) a restored film version?
We showed Dial M in 3D the summer before last on film. It was spectacular! Tom and I wanted to program it for this year's festival, but decided it was too soon. So I feel very confident we'll have it in next year's festival. However, I noticed that the Film Forum in New York played the new digital version in 3D over the summer and I wonder how it looked. If it's possible to make the 3D effect better digitally than in the celluloid version, I think we might give it a try. We have a new digital projector and when we showed Pina in 3D, it looked incredible. So... maybe? But, like you, I also hope for a restored film version.

Showtimes:

Friday November 2nd
4:30pm - Strangers on a Train
7pm - Vertigo
9:30pm - Rear Window

Saturday November 3rd
Noon - Notorious
2:10pm - Rebecca
4:45pm - The Lady Vanishes
7pm - North by Northwest
9:40pm - Psycho

Sunday November 4th
Noon - Marnie
2:30pm - The 39 Steps
4:30pm - Strangers on a Train
7pm - Notorious
9:10pm - Rebecca

Monday November 5th
4:30pm - Marnie
7pm - North by Northwest
9:40pm - Rear Window

Tuesday November 6th
4:30pm - Strangers on a Train
7pm - Rear Window
9:10pm - The 39 Steps

Wednesday November 7th
5pm - The Lady Vanishes
7pm - Vertigo
9:30pm - Psycho