Movie Reviews
Waltzes From Vienna
Hitchcock described this film as the lowest point in his career. He had no real interest in it, but he had to do something, He had just come off of the pretty bad Rich and Strange, followed by the truly awful Number Seventeen. His next film would be the classic The Man Who Knew Too Much, and he would follow ... Read more »
Number Seventeen
At only 63 minutes, this barely qualifies as a feature film. And, sad to say, it doesn’t qualify at all as a good film. Hitchcock didn’t want to make this, he had another project in mind, but for some reason he didn’t get any choice. It’s based on a stage play that probably made sense, but very little of what we see here does. Number Seventeen is a house near a railroad station where a ... Read more »
Rich and Strange
Rich? I guess. Strange, definitely. Here we have Hitchcock’s second talkie, and it’s a Frankenstein’s monster hybrid, with pieces of sound and hunks of silent all sewn together with liberal helpings of stock footage from around the world. Then there are black-screen titles, both to announce a change of location and to comment on the action. There are no dialogue titles, and that’s all ... Read more »
Mary
Here’s something remarkable. This is a shot-for-shot remake … well, that’s not the right word, as the two films were shot at the same time. A simul-make? Anyway, this is Hitchcock’s Murder!, but with a whole different cast, and in German! Apparently that wasn’t uncommon in those days. There were a lot of movies made in Hollywood using some of their stars, mouthing words in a language they ... Read more »
The Skin Game
Opening screen: A talking film by John Galsworthy! Like so many of these early talkies, it was more economical and made a better impression to film as many scenes as possible without sound, plug in sound effects later, and keep the story moving. Because when we got back to the studio with the bulky, balky sound equipment in a padded room to keep out the noise, everything ground to a static ... Read more »
Murder!
A movie so nice, they made it twice! And no, not like the two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much, 24 years apart, but at the same time, on the same sets, but with different actors. (For an explanation, see Mary, below.)
This is only Hitchcock’s second sound film, and the previous one, Blackmail, ... Read more »
Elstree Calling
A rather odd movie, and certainly not a “Hitchcock” film, but it’s listed in his credits because he had a small hand in directing parts of it. It’s a revue film, different acts coming on rather like they would on stage. It’s all British music hall stuff, which is sort of like American Vaudeville, but in many ways even worse. I don’t think many Americans would get it. There are said to be ... Read more »
Juno and the Paycock
What a rip-off! The only big name in the film is Barry Fitzgerald. He gets top billing. And what happens? Why, he delivers a stirring speech about freedom in Ireland, and then three minutes and twenty-seven seconds—by actual count—into the movie he gets machine-gunned to death! That’s all we see of him!
Paycock is the Irish pronunciation of peacock, and that’s exactly what this ... Read more »
Blackmail
We happened to see this one back-to-back with another Hitchcock film, Sabotage, made seven years later. It was interesting to note the similarities. In both films a woman kills a man. In this one, the man was trying to rape her. In the other, the victim was her husband who had set off a bomb that killed her brother. Both eminently justifiable, most people would ... Read more »
The Manxman
This seems to have been Hitchcocks’ last silent film, though Blackmail was released in both silent and sound versions. Childhood friends Pete, a fisherman, and Phil, a lawyer with eyes to be a Deemster (which is what they call a magistrate on the Isle o’ Man, go figure, but then they call themselves Manx and have cats with no tails, so you know these are weird people), are both in love ... Read more »