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Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock KBE (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English film director. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. [1] In a career spanning six decades, he directed over 50 feature films, [a] many of which are still widely watched and studied today.
(1899–1980). English-born American motion-picture director Alfred Hitchcock was a master of suspense and horror films. His artistry, often coupled with humorous touches, was…
Oct 28, 2011 · Introduction. Alfred Hitchcock (b. 1899–d. 1980) is unquestionably one of the most well-known and important filmmakers to date. His career spanned the silent and sound eras, and although he was known primarily as a maker of suspenseful thrillers, his works also include distinctive elements of comedy, romance, melodrama, documentary, and ...
- Alfred Hitchcock Was Afraid of Law Enforcement ... and Breakfast.
- Alfred Hitchcock Began His Work in Silent Films.
- Alfred Hitchcock Learned from Another Cinema Master.
- Alfred Hitchcock Brought Sound to British Movies.
- Alfred Hitchcock Popped Up on screen All The time.
- Alfred Hitchcock Literally Wrote The Encyclopedia Entry on How to Make Movies.
- Alfred Hitchcock Popularized The MacGuffin.
- Alfred Hitchcock Scrapped His Own Documentary About The Holocaust.
- Alfred Hitchcock Didn't Want You to See Five of His Famous Films For decades.
- Alfred Hitchcock Didn't Want to Work with Jimmy Stewart After Vertigo.
Hitchcock’s mastery of thrillers may have earned him the nickname the “Master of Suspense,” but the plucky filmmaker had phobias of his own. His lifelong fear of police stemmed from an incident in his childhood when his strict father, William, punished him by sending him to the local Leytonstone police station on the outskirts of his family's home ...
Known for the complex title sequences in his own films, Hitchcock began his career in cinema in the early 1920s, designing the art title cards featured in silent films. The gig was at an American company based in London called the Famous Players-Lasky Company (it would later become Paramount Pictures, which produced five Hitchcock-directed films). ...
In 1924, Hitchcock and his wife Alma were sent to Germany by Gainsborough Pictures—the British production company where he was under contract—to work on two Anglo-German films called The Prude’s Fall and The Blackguard. While working in Neubabelsberg, Hitchcock was taken under the wing of expressionist filmmaker F.W. Murnau, who created the chillin...
The 1929 movie Blackmail, about a murder investigation headed up by the murderer’s fiance, was Hitchcock’s first hit film, and also the first “talkie” film released in Britain. (The first full-length talkie, The Jazz Singer,was released in the U.S. in 1927.) While Blackmail was originally conceived and created as a silent film, the final cut was du...
The most constant image in Hitchcock’s films seem to be Hitchcock himself. The filmmaker perfected the art of the cameo, making blink-and-you’ll-miss-them appearances in 39of his own films. His trickier appearances include the single-location film Lifeboat, where he appears in a weight-loss advertisement in a newspaper read by one of the film’s cha...
The filmmaker would write (at least part of) the book on the medium that made him famous. Hitchcock personally contributed to writing a portion of the “Motion Pictures, Film Production” entry in the 14th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, giving typically cheeky first-hand insight into the fundamentals and technical aspects of filmmaking. On t...
Even if you don’t know it by name, you know what it is. The MacGuffin is the so-called motivating element that drives a movie’s plot forward. Think: the eponymous statue in The Maltese Falcon, or the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, or the airplane engine plans in Hitch’s own The 39 Steps. The term was coined by Angus MacPhail (note the prefix in his sur...
Hitch’s films flirted with mentioning the escalating tensions in Europe that would spark World War II, like in the shocking plane crash climax of 1940’s Foreign Correspondent. But the film Hitchcock collaborated on about the explicit horrors of the war would go unseen for decades. Memory of the Camps, a 1945 documentary filmed by crews who accompan...
Vertigo may have topped many best-of movie polls, but for over 20 years, between 1961 and 1983, it and four other Hitchcock classics were almost virtually impossible to see. It turns out it was Hitchcock’s fault that Vertigo, Rear Window, Rope, The Trouble with Harry, and The Man Who Knew Too Much were purposefully unavailableto the general public....
Everyman actor Jimmy Stewart worked with Hitchcock a number of times, including as the nosy, wheelchair-bound photographer in Rear Window, and as the dastardly murderer in the “one-take” film Rope. After Stewart appeared in Vertigo in 1958, the actor prepared to appear in Hitchcock’s follow-up a year later, North by Northwest. But Hitch had other p...
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Apr 25, 2024 · Alfred Hitchcock is a legendary filmmaker who worked in both England and America. Here is a ranking of 20 of his best movies. Apr 25, 2024 • By Cory Claus, BA Classical Studies & English Literature. Alfred Hitchcock had a remarkable directorial career spanning more than 50 years.
With more than fifty feature films to his credit, in a career spanning six decades, from silent film to talkies to the color era, Hitchcock remains one of the best known and most popular directors of all time, famous for his expert and often unrivaled control of pace and suspense throughout his films.
Introduction: Re-viewing Hitchcock's Films; Gary McCarron, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia; Book: Cultural Theory in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock; Online publication: 28 February 2024
