MoMA.org | Interactives | Exhibitions | 1999

The Birds. 1963. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Evan Hunter, based on the short story by Daphne du Maurier. Cinematography by Robert Burks. With Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette, and Veronica Cartwright. Hitchcock: "In The Birds there is a very light beginning, girl meets boy, and then she walks into a very complicated situation... I deliberately started out with ordinary, inconsequential behavior... I felt it was vital to get to know the people, the mother especially...and we must take our time before the birds come. Once more, it is fantasy. But everything had to be as real as possible... And the birds themselves had to be domestic birds--no wild birds... I believe that people will rise to the occasion when catastrophe comes... It's like the people in London, during the wartime air raids. [In The Birds] there are 371 trick-shots, and the most difficult was the last shot. That took 32 pieces of film." The Birds was shot in part in Bodega Bay, a village north of San Francisco. 120 min. Sunday, June 5, 5:00; Monday, June 7, 2:30

The Blackguard. 1925. Great Britain. Directed by Graham Cutts. Screenplay by Alfred Hitchcock, based on a novel by Raymond Paton. With June Novak, Walter Rilla, Frank Stanmore, Bernhard Goetzke, and Martin Hertzberg. In 1920 the American company that would become Paramount opened a studio in London, and Hitchcock, at age twenty-one, began writing intertitles for its films. Two years later the British film pioneer Michael Balcon opened his own studio and asked Hitchcock to join as script writer, set designer, and assistant director to Cutts. The Blackguard, a melodrama about a Russian princess, a violinist, and the Revolution, was shot at the studios of Universumfilm Aktien gesellschaft (Ufa) outside Berlin, where Balcon produced a number of his British films. Silent film with piano accompaniment by Stuart Oderman. 95 min. Friday, April 16, 2:30; Monday, April 19, 6:00. T1

Blackmail. 1929. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Hitchcock, Charles Bennett, Benn W. Levy, and Garnett Weston, based on a play by Bennett. Cinematography by Jack Cox. With Anny Ondra, Sara Allgood, Charles Paton, John Longden, and Donald Calthrop. Hitchcock's first sound film, indeed Britain's first "all-talkie," is a classic. A girl (Ondra) stabs an artist who tries to rape her, and is hounded by a blackmailer. Ondra, speaking with a central-European accent, had to be dubbed right on the set by Joan Barry. Hitchcock began shooting Blackmail as a silent film, and indeed the silent version was released in England months after the sound film to cinemas that had not yet converted. A minor note of interest is that although Hitchcock made a brief appearance in The Lodger, Blackmail represents his first calculated on-screen cameo. Silent version of Blackmail with piano accompaniment by Stuart Oderman. Sound: 86 min. Silent: 75 min.
Friday, April 23, 6:00 (sound version); Friday, April 23, 8:00 (silent version); Sunday, April 25, 1:30 (sound and silent versions)

British Government Films:
Bon Voyage. 1944. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by J. O. C. Orton and Angus McPhail, based on an original subject by Arthur Calder-Marshall. Cinematography by Gunther Krampf. With John Blythe and the Molière Players. Courtesy Milestone Film and Video, New York. 26 min.
Aventure Malgache. 1944. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Cinematography by Gunther Krampf. With the Molière Players. Courtesy Milestone Film and Video, New York. 31 min.
The Memory of the Camps (Title allocated by the Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive to edited unreleased footage). 1945. Great Britain. Photographed by service newsreel cameramen with the British, American, and Russian armies liberating various Nazi concentration camps. Edited by Stewart McAllister and Peter Tanner. Treatment advisor: Alfred Hitchcock. Commentary by Colin Wills. Produced by Sidney Bernstein and Sergei Nolbandov. Print courtesy the Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive, London. 55 min.
In 1944 Hitchcock, "anxious to do something in the war," returned to England and made two short narratives for the Ministry of Information to raise morale in occupied France. The two films, Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache, starred the MoliÞre Players, a group of refugee French actors who found shelter in London. The films were shown throughout France from 1944 until war's end but were prohibited from screening in Britain until recently. The program concludes with The Memory of the Camps, a documentary that was assembled in London in 1945 but never released, which depicts the liberation of the German concentration camps. Hitchcock was originally appointed director of what began as an Anglo-American project. The footage had been shot by servicemen before Hitchcock's brief stay in London in 1945. He advised the film's editor and recommended certain footage be used; the Imperial War Museum, which has preserved this material, credits Hitchcock as a "treatment advisor." Monday, May 17, 6:00; Thursday, May 20, 2:30

Champagne. 1928. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Hitchcock and Eliot Stannard, based on a story by Walter C. Mycroft. Cinematography by John J. Cox. With Betty Balfour, Jean Bradin, Theo von Alten, and Gordon Harker. A producer suggested to Hitchcock he make a film about champagne, and so he wrote a mordant and cautionary tale that was transformed into a "dreadful hodge podge." A spoiled daughter is punished by her father for wanting to marry a man of whom the father disapproves. She is made to believe the family is bankrupt, and finds work in cabaret. While Hitchcock believed Champagne to be his career's "lowest ebb," François Truffaut thought the film to have some of "the lively quality of [D. W.] Griffith's comedies." Silent film with piano accompaniment by Stuart Oderman. 84 min. Sunday, April 18, 5:00; Saturday, April 24, 1:00

Dial M for Murder. 1954. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Frederick Knott, based on his play. Cinematography by Robert Burks. With Ray Milland, Grace Kelly, Robert Cummings, John Williams, and Anthony Dawson. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Hitchcock remarked of this film, "When your batteries run dry, when you are out creatively, and you have to go on...take a comparatively successful play that requires no great creative effort on your part and make it.... I think the whole conception of a play is confinement within the proscenium.... In Dial M for Murder I made sure I would go outside as little as possible. I had a real tile floor laid down, the crack under the door, the shadow of the feet, all part of the stage play and I didn't want to lose that." Dial M for Murder was the first of three Hitchcock films starring Kelly, his ideal heroine, a contradiction--at once ice and fire, elegance and sauciness, a cool surface masking a roiling libido. 105 min. Friday, May 28, 6:00; Monday, May 31, 2:00

Downhill (In U.S.: When Boys Leave Home). 1927. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Eliot Stannard, based on the play by David LeStrange (pseudonym of Ivor Novello and Constance Collier). Cinematography by Claude McDonell. With Ivor Novello, Isabel Jeans, Ian Hunter, Ben Webster, and Lilian Braithwaite. A student (Novello) is expelled from school when he is mistaken for a thief. Shamed and disowned by his father, he goes to Paris, where he becomes a dancer and has an affair; he then moves to Marseilles in the hope of catching a boat to the colonies. Silent film with piano accompaniment by Stuart Oderman. 95 min. Saturday, April 17, 1:00; Tuesday, April 20, 6:00

Easy Virtue. 1927. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Eliot Stannard, based on the play by Noel Coward. Cinematography by Claude McDonell. With Isabel Jeans, Robin Irvine, Franklin Dyall, Enid Stamp-Taylor, and Violet Farebrother. 1999 marks Noel Coward's 100th birthday as well, and Easy Virtue provides the only occasion in which the two centenarians' careers intersect. Hitchcock believed his version of the Coward play was notable for having the worst intertitles the filmmaker ever wrote. A divorcée who has led men to suicide marries an infatuated youth only to lose him. When approached by photographers she exclaims, "Shoot, there's nothing left to kill." Even in this "routine" work Hitchcock's dry trickery is evident, for example in the marriage proposal. Silent film with piano accompaniment by Stuart Oderman. 79 min. Saturday, April 17, 3:00; Thursday, April 22, 6:00

Elstree Calling. 1930. Great Britain. Directed by Adrien Brunel in association with Andre Cherlot, Paul Murray, and Jack Hulbert. Screenplay by Val Valentine. Cinematograpy by Claude Friesse-Greene. With Will Fyffe, Tommy Handley, Lily Morris, Jack Hulbert, and Gordon Harker. Of his contribution to this 1930s musical Hitchcock says it is "of no interest whatsoever." He may be right. British International Pictures wanted an English counterpart to the self-celebrating American studios' musical reviews like MGM's The Hollywood Revue (1929) and Paramount's Paramount on Parade (1930). A variety film made at BIP's Elstree Studios and supervised by Brunel, Hitchcock's film included popular film personalities "coming on to do their party pieces," music hall sketches, and chorus girls. The compendium was patched together by six segments (directed by Hitchcock) of a frustrated householder, played by the noted comic Harker, trying to fix his television (1930?!) in time to catch the acts that the film audience sees. Although these episodes last under ten minutes they were excised completely from Hello, Everybody, the 40-minute American release version of Elstree Calling. 86 min. Saturday, May 1, 1:00; Monday, May 3, 6:00 (screened together with Harmony Heaven)

Family Plot. 1976. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Ernest Lehman, based on the novel The Rainbird Pattern, by Victor Canning. Cinematography by Leonard South. With Karen Black, Bruce Dern, Barbara Harris, William Devane, and Ed Lauter. In his final film, Hitchcock was intrigued by narrative structure: How could he get two separate plots and two separate groups of people to come together gradually, inevitably, and naturally? Moreover, he wanted one group to kidnap a bishop in the middle of Mass. "In this story," he told John Russell Taylor, "the way I see it, the villains are actually rather dull characters...whereas the more ordinary couple are actually very peculiar... [And] each is moved some way in the direction of the other..." Relaxed if not mellow, Hitchcock's last offbeat comedy about missing heirs, spiritualists, and frustrated cab drivers is, thank goodness, not without its homicidal moment. 120 min. Sunday, June 13, 2:00; Tuesday, June 15, 6:00

The Farmer's Wife. 1928. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Hitchcock, based on the play by Eden Philpotts. Cinematography by John J. Cox. With Jameson Thomas, Lillian Hall Davis, Gordon Harker, Maud Gill, and Louise Pounds. Hitchcock considered his version of Philpotts's enormously successful comedy dull, "a photograph of a play with lots of titles instead of dialogue." Thomas plays the eponymous farmer who, when widowed, scours the countryside for a new helpmate, and finds her only after the audience does. Silent film with piano accompaniment by Stuart Oderman. 100 min. Sunday, April 18, 3:00; Tuesday, April 20, 2:30

Foreign Correspondent. 1940. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison, James Hilton (dialogue), and Robert Benchley (dialogue). Cinematography by Rudolph Maté. With Joel McCrea, Loraine Day, Herbert Marshall, George Sanders, and Edmund Gwenn. "When I am given a locale--and this is very important in my mind--it's got to be used, and used dramatically. We're in Holland. What have they got in Holland? Windmills..." Hitchcock originally offered the title role to Gary Cooper and felt he was turned down because Americans treat the "thriller-suspense" film as second-rate, while in England "it's part of literature." McCrea got the role, and the location work was done in Amsterdam. Getting there from London during wartime was hazardous and the first shipment of equipment was torpedoed by the Germans. It is said that Goebbels brought in a copy of Foreign Correspondent through Switzerland and enjoyed it enormously. 119 min. Tuesday, May 11, 6:00; Saturday, May 15, 1:00

Frenzy. 1972. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Anthony Shaffer, based on the novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, by Arthur La Bern. Cinematography by Gil Taylor. With Jon Finch, Barry Foster, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Anna Massey, and Alex McCowen. Hitchcock's penultimate film returned him not only to London but to a ladykiller, the subject of The Lodger, the film that first made him famous over forty-five years earlier. Working with playwright Shaffer, then celebrated for Sleuth, Hitchcock devised a witty thriller about a psychotic killer and the man he eagerly frames for his crimes. Hitchcock's enthusiasm for London, food, shifting identities, and elegant camera movement informs a thriller that is both horrific and darkly humorous. Although there were dissenters who felt that the style and tone did not redeem the representation of the murders, the majority of critics welcomed Hitchcock at seventy-two back to his breathless practice of the macabre. 116 min. Saturday, June 12, 5:00; Monday, June 14, 6:00

From the Alfred Hitchcock Collection. A compilation of outtakes, behind-the-scenes footage, and home movies drawn from the Alfred Hitchcock Collection at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, made from 1939 through 1975 in Hollywood. The program was assembled by Michael Friend, Director, Academy Film Archives, from the collection donated by the Estate of Alfred Hitchcock. 120 min. Thursday, June 10, 6:00