Besides making people forever afraid of motel-room showers, Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" continues to have an incalculable impact on popular culture. Though it was released 55 years ago this week (on June 16, 1960), it continues to inspire filmmakers and TV producers. In just the last three years, we've seen the 2012 film "Hitchcock" (based on Stephen Rebello's book "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of 'Psycho,'" and starring Anthony Hopkins as the director and Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh) and the ongoing A&E TV prequel drama series, "Bates Motel."
Still, for all of the "Psycho" trivia revealed in "Hitchcock," the biopic barely scratches the surface of how the film got made, from the men who inspired the invention of Norman Bates, to the trickery Hitchcock used to tease the press while keeping the film's convention-shredding narrative twists a secret, to the film's unlikely connection to "Leave It to Beaver." Here,...
Still, for all of the "Psycho" trivia revealed in "Hitchcock," the biopic barely scratches the surface of how the film got made, from the men who inspired the invention of Norman Bates, to the trickery Hitchcock used to tease the press while keeping the film's convention-shredding narrative twists a secret, to the film's unlikely connection to "Leave It to Beaver." Here,...
- 6/16/2015
- by Gary Susman
- Moviefone
Australia is already the most parochial film environment in the developed world. No surprise there. Look at the horror stories that litter the national cinema time line.
Think burning Amalgamated's library and the holdings of the ethnic distributors, freighting the lending collection to Melbourne and back at they say a million a time, cancelling the Lillian Gish tour, flogging Cinema Papers to a team unable to get past three shonky issues, the aborted Sydney Quay Cinematheque. The dismantling of the National Film Theater must be most alarming. It's no accident that that organization's establishment coincided with the development of an Australian feature production industry acknowledged world wide and it's disappearance marked the end of consistently plausible product - and that is just a side issue. The money spent on ill informed production alone could have made this country a world leader in cinema savvy. We're only on the third paragraph...
Think burning Amalgamated's library and the holdings of the ethnic distributors, freighting the lending collection to Melbourne and back at they say a million a time, cancelling the Lillian Gish tour, flogging Cinema Papers to a team unable to get past three shonky issues, the aborted Sydney Quay Cinematheque. The dismantling of the National Film Theater must be most alarming. It's no accident that that organization's establishment coincided with the development of an Australian feature production industry acknowledged world wide and it's disappearance marked the end of consistently plausible product - and that is just a side issue. The money spent on ill informed production alone could have made this country a world leader in cinema savvy. We're only on the third paragraph...
- 5/19/2014
- by Barrie Pattison*
- IF.com.au
“Why should P.K.Nair not be a recipient of the Dadasaheb Phalke Award? After all, whatever we have of Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra, meaning just the first and last reels of the film, are there due to Nair’s unwavering vision and his endless efforts. Again, the only complete Phalke film available to us, namely, Kaliya Mardan (1919), is there because of Nair. If someone like him is not deserving of the Phalke Award, one wonders, who is?”
In mid-November, when the Calcutta air is cooler than in the preceding several months, I had the delightful experience of watching a 150-minute documentary film in a small auditorium in the company of no more than a dozen other people. What added to the delight was the fact that those who were there for the film’s first shot were in his or her seat till the last. This is not a small thing,...
In mid-November, when the Calcutta air is cooler than in the preceding several months, I had the delightful experience of watching a 150-minute documentary film in a small auditorium in the company of no more than a dozen other people. What added to the delight was the fact that those who were there for the film’s first shot were in his or her seat till the last. This is not a small thing,...
- 12/12/2012
- by Vidyarthy Chatterjee
- DearCinema.com
Nine of the 10 films Hitchcock directed in the 1920s are getting a full restoration. Henry K Miller enters the dusty world of the archivists and learns about the race to save the silents
The audience at the Capitol cinema in London during the middle week of April 1926 witnessed an unusually bold declaration of authorship. The opening moments of The Pleasure Garden, touted in the fan magazines as the debut of "the youngest director in the world", contained, under the "directed by" credit, the slanted and underlined signature of the 26-year-old Alfred J Hitchcock. What followed was also – as it would become clear over the decades – signature Hitchcock film-making. The film's first scene gives us a voyeur's-eye-view of a dancer's legs; and then makes us share the voyeur's unease as the look is returned. The Spectator's influential critic Iris Barry scented the "new blood" desperately needed by the ailing British film industry,...
The audience at the Capitol cinema in London during the middle week of April 1926 witnessed an unusually bold declaration of authorship. The opening moments of The Pleasure Garden, touted in the fan magazines as the debut of "the youngest director in the world", contained, under the "directed by" credit, the slanted and underlined signature of the 26-year-old Alfred J Hitchcock. What followed was also – as it would become clear over the decades – signature Hitchcock film-making. The film's first scene gives us a voyeur's-eye-view of a dancer's legs; and then makes us share the voyeur's unease as the look is returned. The Spectator's influential critic Iris Barry scented the "new blood" desperately needed by the ailing British film industry,...
- 8/18/2011
- The Guardian - Film News
A study of the pioneering French film magazine documents its vast influence
Cahiers du Cinéma, the world's best-known film magazine, is, according to Emilie Bickerton in her admirable history, "limping on today as another banal mouthpiece of the spectacle". It will be 60 next year, provided it survives its latest change in ownership from Le Monde to the British publishing house Phaidon. It was founded in 1951 by a trio of writers, chief among them France's most respected critic and theorist, the 33-year-old André Bazin, a liberal Catholic of wide and generous sympathies. He attracted a group of young men of passionate views frequently expressed in extreme, sometimes mystical terms. They attacked respectable literary cinema ("la qualité française") and the tastes of an older generation ("le cinéma du papa") and exalted the director as individual creator ("la politique des auteurs"), most especially old Hollywood masters like Hawks, Hitchcock, Preminger and Walsh. These young Turks,...
Cahiers du Cinéma, the world's best-known film magazine, is, according to Emilie Bickerton in her admirable history, "limping on today as another banal mouthpiece of the spectacle". It will be 60 next year, provided it survives its latest change in ownership from Le Monde to the British publishing house Phaidon. It was founded in 1951 by a trio of writers, chief among them France's most respected critic and theorist, the 33-year-old André Bazin, a liberal Catholic of wide and generous sympathies. He attracted a group of young men of passionate views frequently expressed in extreme, sometimes mystical terms. They attacked respectable literary cinema ("la qualité française") and the tastes of an older generation ("le cinéma du papa") and exalted the director as individual creator ("la politique des auteurs"), most especially old Hollywood masters like Hawks, Hitchcock, Preminger and Walsh. These young Turks,...
- 3/14/2010
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
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