MoMA.org | Interactives | Exhibitions | 1999

Film schedules are available for April and May. The June film schedule will be posted shortly.

North by Northwest. 1959. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Ernest Lehman. Cinematography by Robert Burks. With Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Jessie Royce Landis, and Leo G. Carroll. In response to Peter Bogdanovich's query about this being the "final word on the chase film," Hitchcock responded, "It is. It's the American The 39 Steps--I'd thought about it for a long time. It's a fantasy. The whole thing is epitomized in the title--there is no such thing as north-by-northwest on the compass." Hitchcock worked with screenwriter Lehman to concoct an entertainment that would begin in New York (the Plaza Hotel, the United Nations, and Grand Central Station), stop off in Chicago, bring its hero to a sunny and empty cornfield, and end with a chase atop Mount Rushmore. Pursued both by federal agents who think he's a killer and by spies who believe he's a double-crosser, an advertising executive (Grant) flees cross-country and into the heart of a blonde (Saint). The climax is breathtaking. 136 min. Friday, June 4, 8:30; Saturday, June 5, 2:00

Notorious. 1946. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Ben Hecht, based on a subject by Hitchcock. Cinematography by Ted Tetzlaff. With Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern, and Madame Konstantin. François Truffaut: "This is truly my favorite Hitchcock picture; at any rate, it's the one I prefer in the black-and-white group. In my opinion, Notorious is the very quintessence of Hitchcock." John Russell Taylor: "Notorious is one of Hitch's most romantic, most simple, most secret films." Hitchcock: "This is the old love-and-duty theme. Grant's job is to get Bergman in bed with Rains, the other man. It's ironic really...and Rains [although he plays a villain] was sympathetic because he's the victim of a confidence trick and we always have sympathy for the victim no matter how foolish he is." 101 min. Friday, May 21, 2:30; Saturday, May 22, 5:45

Number Seventeen. 1932. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Alma Reville, Hitchcock, and Rodney Ackland, based on a play by J. Jefferson Farjeon. Cinematography by Jack Cox and Bryan Langley. With Leon M. Lion, Anne Grey, John Stuart, Garry Marsh, and Donald Calthrop. Hitchcock considered this assignment a disaster, a cheap melodrama with only a chase at the end to recommend it. In fact, the chase between a train and a bus is sustained and brilliant, while the first half of the film is remarkably fluid and atmospheric to the point of near abstraction. Many of Hitchcock's favorite themes are here, including false appearances and mistaken identities. 63 min. Friday, April 30, 8:00; Monday, May 3, 2:30

The Paradine Case. 1947. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by David O. Selznick and Alma Reville (adaptation), based on the novel by Robert Hichens. Cinematography by Lee Garmes. With Gregory Peck, Ann Todd, Charles Laughton, Charles Coburn, and Ethel Barrymore. Hitchcock described The Paradine Case as "a love story embedded in the emotional quicksand of a murder trial." Selznick controlled the casting and wrote the screenplay. Hitchcock thought the woman's immorality would have been better represented had the object of her lust been a "manure-smelling stable hand" rather than Louis Jordan. He also believed that the character played by Peck would have fallen harder for the femme fatale had he been played by someone less earthy and more dignified. 132 min. Friday, May 21, 8:00; Sunday, May 23, 5:00

The Pleasure Garden. 1926. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Eliot Stannard, based on a novel by Oliver Sandys. Cinematography by Baron Ventigmilia. With Virginia Valli, Carmelita Geraghty, Miles Mander, John Stuart, and Nita Naldi. When director Graham Cutts did not want to work with Hitchcock any longer, producer Michael Balcon promoted Hitchcock. The young man made his first film, The Pleasure Garden, in Munich. Adapted from a melodramatic novel, the film is about two London chorus girls, and the sad affair of one of them who finds her man behaving badly in the tropics. Silent film with piano accompaniment by Stuart Oderman. The screening on April 16 is introduced by Ann Fleming, Curator, NFTVA, London. Approx. 60 min. Friday, April 16, 6:00; Monday, April 19, 2:30

Psycho. 1960. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Joseph Stefano, based on the novel by Robert Bloch. Cinematography by John L. Russell. With Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, and Martin Balsam. For 1960 Psycho was a shockingly permissive film, not only in its violence, which was more graphic than explicit, but in its casual sexual assumptions and its recognition of bathroom plumbing. The film exploded notions of acceptability. By surprising the audience with such ferocity, and then sustaining an intense suspense for the hour following, it may have even changed the way audiences reacted to film. It certainly turned the familiar world topsy-turvy and it did so with a salutary wink. Hitchcock, aware that the maverick film company American-International was turning out profit-making, inexpensive horror films aimed at a youth market, decided he too would give the public what it wanted. He made his horror film inexpensively, deftly, and superlatively, keeping the narrative secret not only from the press, but for the first half hour of the film from his audiences, who had no idea what would happen to them once Leigh stepped into the shower. 109 min.Friday, June 4, 6:00; Sunday, June 6, 2:00

Rear Window. 1954. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by John Michael Hayes, based on the short story by Cornell Woolrich. Cinematography by Robert Burks. With James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey, Thelma Ritter, and Raymond Burr. Confined to a wheelchair, a press photographer (Stewart) with a broken leg and an active telephoto lens looks out his rear window across a Greenwich Village courtyard and into his neighbors' windows. He does not like what he sees. Kelly aids and abets. Hitchcock explains that Rear Window, one of Truffaut's favorite Hitchcock films, presented "the possibility of doing an absolutely cinematic film. You have an immobilized man looking out. That's one part of the film. The second part shows what he sees and the third part shows how he reacts." 112 min. Showing late 1999.

Rebecca. 1940. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood, Joan Harrison, Philip MacDonald (adaptation), and Michael Hogan (adaptation), based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier. Cinematography by George Barnes. With Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders, Judith Anderson, and Gladys Cooper. In his first year in America, Hitchcock made two films, Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent, both of which were nominated by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best Picture Oscar. Rebecca won, and Hitchcock immediately became one of Hollywood's leading filmmakers. Hitchcock did not consider Rebecca, a lush David O. Selznick production, really his, but thought it "a Brontë thing really, a romantic Victorian novel in modern dress." The film was a tremendous success with the American public and critics alike. 130 min. Tuesday, May 11, 2:30; Saturday, May 15, 3:30

Rich and Strange (In U.S.: East of Shanghai). 1932. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Val Valentine, Alma Reville, and Hitchcock, based on the novel by Dale Collins. Cinematography by Jack Cox and Charles Martin. With Henry Kendall, Joan Barry, Percy Marmont, Betty Amann, and Elsie Randolph. Hitchcock noted, "It wasn't a thriller. It was just an adventure story. A young couple (Barry and Kendall) take a trip around the world. I actually sent a crew around the world to cover everything. There is an amusing sequence at the end. The cargo ship is wrecked... Then, after it's all over, they meet me in the lounge. This is my most devastating appearance in a picture. They tell me their story and I say, 'No, I don't think it will make a movie.' And it didn't." 92 min. Friday, April 30, 6:00; Sunday, May 2, 2:30

The Ring. 1927. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Hitchcock. Cinematography by John J. Cox. With Car Brisson, Lillian Hall Davis, Ian Hunter, Harry Terry and Gordon Harker. This tale of two boxers in love with the same girl includes an elaborate montage sequence that was greeted with applause at its first screenings. Hitchcock told Peter Bogdanovich, "I used to go to the Albert Hall. I think the thing, strangely enough, that fascinated me about boxing in those days was that the English audience would go all dressed up in black tie to sit around the ring. It wasn't the boxing.I was interested in...all the details connected with it. Like pouring champagne over the head of the boxer at the thirteenth round..." Silent film with piano accompaniment by Stuart Oderman. 100 min. Saturday, April 17, 5:00; Thursday, April 22, 2:30

Rope. 1948. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Arthur Laurents and Hume Cronyn (adaptation), based on the play by Patrick Hamilton. Cinematography by Joseph Valentine and Willliam V. Skall. With James Stewart, John Dall, Farley Granger, Joan Chandler, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke. In a 1948 interview for Popular Photography magazine, Hitchcock called Rope his most exciting picture to make. "A long time ago I said I would like to film in two hours a fictional story that actually happens in two hours with no time lapses...in which the camera never stops.... In Rope I got my wish...the entire action takes place [in a Sutton Place apartment] between the setting of the sun and the hour of darkness. There are a murder, a party, mounting tension, detailed psychological characterizations, the gradual discovery of the crime and the solution." Rope was Hitchcock's first Technicolor feature and the first film he made from a screenplay--written by Broadway veteran Laurents--that was not divided into scenes. The film appears to be made in one continuous take. 80 min. Friday, May 21, 6:00; Sunday, May 23, 2:30