MoMA.org | Interactives | Exhibitions | 1999

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

Saboteur. 1942. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, and Dorothy Parker, based on an original subject by Hitchcock. Cinematography by Joseph Valentine. With Robert Cummings, Priscilla Lane, Otto Kruger, Alan Baxter, and Clem Bevans. A munitions worker is falsely accused of sabotage. On the run in handcuffs he meets a girl, and together, pursued by both the FBI and fascists, they try to stop further sabotage. Circus performers, a crowded dance hall, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the Statue of Liberty are all swiftly thrown into the mix. Hitchcock felt this chase film "too full of ideas." The original idea was his, a little of the dialogue was Parker's, and none of the principals were the filmmaker's first choice. He preferred the villain to have been the neighbor next door but was obliged, much to his disappointment, to use a "conventional heavy." During the making of the film Pearl Harbor was bombed and America entered World War II. 108 min. Sunday, May 16, 2:00; Tuesday, May 18, 6:00

Sabotage. (In U.S.: The Woman Alone). 1936. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Charles Bennett, Alma Reville (adaptation), Ian Hay (dialogue) and Helen Simpson (additional dialogue), based on the novel The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad. Cinematography by Bernard Knowles. With Sylvia Sydney, Oscar Homolka, Desmond Tester, John Loder, and Joyce Barbour. Although Sabotage is freely adapted from Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, it should not be confused either with Hitchcock's previous film The Secret Agent nor his later American work Saboteur. As a vocation, the Verlocs (Homolka and Sydney) run a small cinema, but as a political avocation Mr. Verloc builds bombs. Mrs. Verloc's young brother carries a package across London; he doesn't know what the audience does--that it is timed to explode. He dawdles, he boards a crowded bus... For this extended sequence Hitchcock built London "in a field... True I still had my traffic and pedestrians but I could control them..." 76 min. Friday, May 7, 6:00; Sunday, May 9, 5:00

Secret Agent. 1936. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Charles Bennett, Ian Hay (dialogue) and Jesse Lasky, Jr. (additional dialogue), based on the play by Campbell Dixon, adapted from the novel Ashenden, by W. Somerset Maugham. Cinematography by Bernard Knowles. With Madeleine Carroll, John Gielgud, Peter Lorre, Robert Young, and Percy Marmont. Already a celebrated stage actor, Gielgud, despite misgivings about acting in films, allowed Hitchcock to woo him for the role of John Brodie, a World War I secret agent, who takes the alias Richard Ashenden and is sent to Switzerland to kill a German spy. Loosely based on Maugham's novel, Secret Agent is replete with false and mistaken identities, fatal blunders, and existential crisis. In fact Hitchcock, who loved the theater, appealed to Gielgud by suggesting the actor do his part as a contemporary Hamlet, a man who has difficulty making up his mind between duty and morality. 85 min. Thursday, May 6, 6:00; Saturday, May 8, 1:00

Shadow of a Doubt. 1943. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Thornton Wilder, Alma Reville, and Sally Benson, based on an original story by Gordon McDonnell. Cinematography by Joseph Valentine. With Joseph Cotten, Teresa Wright, MacDonald Carey, Patricia Collinge, and Henry Travers. Wilder worked on the script--along with Hitchcock, Reville (his frequent collaborator), and Benson--about an adoring niece (Wright) who destroys her uncle (Cotten). "She has to," admits Hitchcock. "Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said 'You destroy the thing you love?' [This] was a most satisfying picture for me--one of my favorite films--because for once there was time to get characters into it." Shadow of a Doubt is a meticulous representation of small town life and also portrays the dread flowing beneath the picture postcard surface. 108 min. Saturday, May 15, 6:00; Tuesday, May 18, 2:30

The Skin Game. 1931. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Hitchcock and Alma Reville, based on the play by John\ Galsworthy. Cinematography by John J. Cox and Charles Martin. With Edmund Gwenn, John Longden, Frank Lawton, C. V. France, and Jill Edmond. Galsworthy's play about feuding neighbors had been filmed as a silent in 1921. In Hitchcock's sound remake, Gwenn, who played Hornblower ten years earlier, returns in the same role. A valuable piece of land becomes the focus of a class battle. A woman's reputation becomes the stake between the landed gentry and the newcomer. 88 min. Friday, April 30, 2:30; Sunday, May 2, 5:00

Spellbound. 1945. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Ben Hecht, Angus Machail (adaptation), suggested by The House of Dr. Edwardes, by Francis Beeding (Hilary St. George Saunders and John Palmer). Cinematography by George Barnes. With Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Rhonda Fleming, Leo G. Carroll, and Michael Chekhov. In the original book a lunatic is put in charge of an asylum. The filmmaker wanted something "more sensible" and asked Hecht, "who was in constant touch with prominent pyschoanalysts," to provide some psychological basis for the melodrama. What emerged according to Hitchcock was "just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis." Spellbound is noteworthy for the collaboration between Hitchcock and Salvador Dali, whom Hitchcock asked to design the vivid dream sequences. "I used Dali for his draftsmanship and the infinity which he introduces into his subject." 111 min. Sunday, May 16, 5:00; Saturday, May 22, 1:00

Stage Fright. 1949. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Whitfield Cook and Alma Reville (adaptation), based on a novel by Selwyn Jepson. Cinematography by Wilkie Cooper. With Marlene Dietrich, Jane Wyman, Michael Wilding, Richard Todd, and Alistair Sim. Hitchcock returned to black and white and the London stage for this slight who-done-it. The husband of an actress is murdered and suspicion falls where it shouldn't. Hitchcock tried to get Wyman to look homely, but with Dietrich as co-star, Wyman resisted and kept making herself look glamorous. This subverted the story. However, what really did the film in, according to Hitchcock, was that it broke an unwritten law: "The more successful the villains, the more successful the picture," for in Stage Fright the villains themselves were frightened. 110 min. Saturday, May 22, 2:30; Monday, May 24, 2:30

Strangers on a Train. 1951. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Raymond Chandler, Czenzi Ormonde, and Whitfield Cook (adaptation), based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith. Cinematography by Robert Burks. With Farley Granger, Robert Walker, Ruth Roman, Leo G. Carroll, Patricia Hitchcock, and Laura Elliot. Adapted from a first novel by Highsmith, Strangers on a Train tells of two men, one of whom acts on the mistaken belief that the other agreed to exchange murders. The film marks not only Hitchcock's spectacular return to form, but the beginning of his collaboration with cameraman Burks who, until his accidental death after Marnie, would photograph virtually every Hitchcock film (Psycho excepted). The memorable sequences in this breathlessly paced thriller include a tennis match that Hitchcock said "exploits the dramatic possibilities of movement... The more action, and movement throughout, the better." 101 min. Tuesday, May 25, 2:30; Thursday, May 27, 6:00

Suspicion. 1941. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison, and Alma Reville, based on the novel Before the Fact, by Francis Iles. Cinematography by Harry Stradling. With Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Nigel Bruce, and Dame May Whitty. Fontaine plays the loving wife of a man (Grant) who she grows to suspect is a murderer and whose next victim may be she. Fontaine won an Academy Award for her performance. Hitchcock thought Suspicion to be the second English picture he made in Hollywood because "the actors, the atmosphere, and the novel on which it's based were all British." 99 min. Friday, May 14, 6:00; Monday, May 17, 2:30

The 39 Steps. 1935. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Charles Bennett and Ian Hay (dialogue), based on the novel by John Buchan. Cinematography by Bernard Knowles. With Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Lucie Mannheim, Godfrey Tearle, and Peggy Ashcroft. Peter Bogdanovich asked Hitchcock why he always has the hero fleeing from both the police and the criminals. He replied, "The audience must be in tremendous sympathy with the man on the run. But the basic reason is that the audience will wonder, 'Why doesn't he go to the police?' Well, the police are after him, so he can't go to them, can he?" The 39 Steps is a classic chase film, a fast-moving entertainment that leaps from one incident to another; in many ways it anticipates North by Northwest. John Russell Taylor in The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock observes that the "MacGuffin," the irrelevant but necessary reason for the brouhaha, seemed "to have entered Hitchcock's vocabulary with The 39 Steps." 81 min. Tuesday, May 4, 6:00; Thursday, May 6, 2:30

To Catch a Thief. 1954. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by John Michael Hayes, based on a novel by David Dodge. Cinematography by Robert Burks and Wallace Kelley. With Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, Charles Vanel, Jessie Royce Landis, and Brigitte Auber. Hitchcock's first film shot in France, on the Riviera, is a champagne romance between a retired jewel thief, John Robie (Grant), suspected of recent robberies, and a woman (Kelly) who loves the idea that her man may be the criminal. Hitchcock, Grant, and Kelly so enjoyed making of this film that the director, usually in total control, allowed his cast latitude to improvise dialogue, and playfully pushed the metaphor for sexual congress so outrageously that from this movie on, fireworks have meant only one thrilling thing. 97 min. Tuesday, June 1, 2:30; Saturday, June 5, 5:00

Topaz. 1969. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Samuel Taylor, based on the novel by Leon Uris. Cinematography by Jack Hildyard and Hal Mohr. With Frederick Stafford, John Forsythe, Dany Robin, John Verson, and Karin Dor. In reviewing Topaz for The New York Times at the end of 1969, Vincent Canby wrote: "Topaz is not a conventional Hitchcock film.... [I]t's about espionage as a kind of game, set in Washington, Havana and Paris at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, involving a number of dedicated people in acts of courage, sacrifice and death, after which the survivors find themselves pretty much where they were when they started, except that they are older, tired, and a little less capable of being happy... Topaz is not only most entertaining. It is, like so many Hitchcock films, a cautionary fable by one of the most moral cynics of our time." 127 min. Friday, June 11, 2:00; Sunday, June 13, 5:00

Torn Curtain. 1966. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Brian Moore. Cinematography by John F. Warren. With Paul Newman, Julie Andrews, Lila Kedrova, Wolfgang Kieling, and Hans-Joerg Felmy. In 1951, when British diplomat Donald MacLean defected to Russia, Hitchcock wondered about the wife he left behind. This was the seed for Torn Curtain and the first third of the film is basically from the perspective of the young woman (Andrews), a scientist, who hopes to marry another scientist (Newman). When they get to Copenhagen he begins to behave strangely and she reacts. When he defects, the film ceases to be about her, and records his benighted adventures, including one in which he, an amateur, must kill a man silently with what is available in the kitchen of an isolated farm. "I thought it was time to show that it was very difficult, very painful, and it takes a very long time to kill a man." The last third of the film is an escape. 128 min. Friday, June 11, 6:00; Monday, June 14, 2:30

The Trouble with Harry. 1954. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by John Michael Hayes, based on the novel by John Trevor Story. Cinematography by Robert Burks. With Edmund Gwenn, John Forsythe, Shirley MacLaine, Mildred Natwick, and Mildred Dunnock. In rural Vermont Harry's body keeps turning up in different places and at awkward moments; yet everyone behaves as though this peripatetic corpse is as natural as the autumn leaves. Hitchcock told Peter Bogdanovich that The Trouble with Harry "is very personal to me because it involves my own sense of humor about the macabre." The film's distributors were perplexed and didn't know how to handle the very dark comedy for which Hitchcock cast two unknowns as the romantic leads--MacLaine and Forsythe. 99 min. Saturday, May 29, 2:30; Tuesday, June 1, 6:00

Under Capricorn. 1949. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by James Bridie and Hume Cronyn (adaptation), based on the novel by Helen Simpson. Cinematography by Jack Cardiff. With Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, Michael Wilding, Margaret Leighton, and Jack Watling. Rope was Hitchcock's first film as producer, Under Capricorn his second. He believes it was his "juvenile" behavior that sent his (and his colleagues') company, Transatlantic Pictures, into bankruptcy. Under Capricorn was shot in England (standing in for 1830s Australia), and Hitchcock, seduced by the idea of returning to England with Hollywood's biggest star, arrived in London, flashbulbs popping, with Ingrid Bergman in tow. Her presence proved too costly. Audiences expecting excitement from Hitchcock were frustrated to discover a costume love story. True, it was beautifully photographed, but it was not a thriller. 117 min. Monday, May 24, 6:00; Friday, May 28, 8:00

Vertigo. 1957. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor, based on the novel D'entre les Morts, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Cinematography by Robert Burks. With James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore, and Konstantin Shayns. A film in two parts about a failed San Francisco policeman (Stewart), inhibited by vertigo, obsessed with a woman (Novak) who dies in the first part and is reincarnated in the second. It is a morbid love story, creepy in its intensity, and uninflected in style. The authors of the novel wrote it in hopes that Hitchcock would buy it. Hitchcock insisted on letting the audience in on a revelation early in the film's second part because he felt "one of the fatal things...in all suspense films is to have a mind that is confused. Otherwise the audience won't emote. Clarify, clarify, clarify. Don't let them say, 'I don't know which woman that is...'" 128 min. Sunday, May 30, 5:00; Friday, June 4, 2:30

Waltzes from Vienna (In U.S.: Strauss's Great Waltz). 1933. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Alma Reville and Guy Bolton, based on the play by Dr. A. M. Willner, Heinz Reichert, and Ernst Marischka. Cinematography by Glen McWilliams. With Jessie Matthews, Esmond Knight, Frank Vosper, Edmund Gwenn, and Fay Compton. A musical comedy set in nineteenth-century Vienna about Johann Strauss, Senior and Junior, a countess who wants her poems set to music, and the daughter of a pastry cook whose bakery inspires "The Blue Danube." Although in later interviews Hitchcock uncategorically dismisses this film, in 1934 he wrote that Waltzes from Vienna "gave me many opportunities for working out ideas in the relation of film and music...Every cut in the film was worked out on the script before shooting began. But more than that, the musical cuts were worked out too." The charming film is made effervescent by the presence of Matthews and Gwenn. 81 min. Saturday, May 1, 2:30; Friday, May 7, 2:30

The Wrong Man. 1956. USA. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Maxwell Anderson and Angus McPhail, based on The True Story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, by Maxwell Anderson. Cinematography by Robert Burks. With Henry Fonda, Vera Miles, Anthony Quayle, Harold J. Stone, and Charles Cooper. Hitchcock had read a magazine article about a man who was tried and convicted for a robbery he did not commit. His wife went mad, and only later when a near-double was discovered was the man acquitted. Hitchcock observed: "I enjoyed making this film because, after all, this is my greatest fear--fear of the police... In truth perhaps The Wrong Man should have been done as a documentary..." Hitchcock did try to make the film look as real as possible, shooting on locations where the events took place and using some of those originally involved. Fonda played the Everyman caught in a nightmare and Miles his fragile wife, whose descent into hysteria Hitchcock felt diverted the narrative. 105 min. Sunday, May 30, 2:00; Thursday, June 3, 6:00

Young and Innocent. (In U.S.: The Girl Was Young). 1937. Great Britain. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Charles Bennett, Edwin Greenwood, Anthony Armstrong, and Gerald Savory (dialogue), based on the novel A Shilling for Candles, by Josephine Tey. Cinematography by Bernard Knowles. With Derrick de Marney, Nova Pilbeam, Percy Marmont, Edward Rigby, and Mary Clare. In his book on Hitchcock, John Russell Taylor writes: "Young and Innocent is a sheer delight, a perfect Hitchcockian demonstration that less is more. The featherweight plot...is a simple chase... It is perfectly crisp and clear and pure and to the point..." The police believe Robert (de Marney) is a murderer. While pursued, he gets help from the chief constable's daughter, and together they try to find the killer. And in one of Hitchcock's most memorable tracking shots--a bravura cinematic moment--they do. 82 min. Friday, May 7, 8:00; Sunday, May 9, 2:00