Noticias

Alfred Hitchcock silent movies added to Unesco UK Memory of the World Register (photo: Ivor Novello in The Lodger) The nine Alfred Hitchcock-directed silent films recently restored by the British Film Institute have been added to the Unesco UK Memory of the World Register, "a list of documentary heritage which holds cultural significance specific to the UK." The nine Hitchcock movies are the following: The Pleasure Garden (1925), The Ring (1927), Downhill / When Boys Leave Home (1927), The Lodger (1927), Easy Virtue (1928), Champagne (1928), The Farmer’s Wife (1928), The Manxman (1929), and Blackmail (1929) — also released as a talkie, Britain’s first. Only one Hitchcock-directed silent remains lost, The Mountain Eagle / Fear o’ God (1926). Most of those movies have little in common with the suspense thrillers Hitchcock would crank out in Britain and later in Hollywood from the early ’30s on. But a handful of his silents already featured elements and themes that would recur in...

My Best Girl

Directed by Sam Taylor

Written by Allen McNeil & Tim Whelan

USA, 1927

Tsff made its merry way up to Casa Loma on Monday night for a special screening of Mary Pickford’s final silent film on the occasion of the star’s 121st birthday (the organizers even served birthday cake during the intermission). Despite an interminable, bone chilling rain (which looked rather cozy sliding down the other side of the hundred-year old Gothic Revival castle’s windows), there was a packed house on hand to experience an authentic presentation of the film as it would have been shown at a cinema palace of the era, complete with accompaniment by the irrepressible Clark Wilson on the Toronto Theatre Organ Society‘s justly celebrated Wurlitzer organ. This magnificent instrument, which once enlivened screenings at Shea’s Hippodrome on Bay Street, was designed to put the power of an entire orchestra...

The BFI's restoration of Alfred Hitchcock's first film, about the tangled love lives of two chorus girls, introduces us to a Hitchcock we didn't know

Until last night no one had seen more than an approximation of Alfred Hitchcock's first film since it made his name 87 years ago. Unveiled at Wilton's Music Hall with a new score by recent Ram graduate Daniel Patrick Cohen, the BFI's restoration of The Pleasure Garden (1925) makes clear that the 26-year-old Hitchcock, as the Sunday Herald's critic Walter Mycroft wrote on its release, "definitely arrived in one stride". Its themes of voyeurism, manipulation, and delusion are instantly familiar from his better-known later work.

Wilton's, itself appealingly unrestored, provided an apt setting. A Victorian venue in Jack-the-Ripper territory, of the kind that was being displaced by cinemas when Hitchcock was working in nearby Blomfield Street, it is also not unlike the Pleasure Garden of the title,...

Betty Compson, Clive Brook, Woman to Woman Despite some confusion in various reports, the 1923 melodrama The White Shadow, half of which was recently found at the New Zealand Film Archive, is not Alfred Hitchcock's directorial debut. It isn't Hitchcock's first ever credited effort, either. That honor apparently belongs to Woman to Woman, which came out earlier that same year. The White Shadow, in fact, was a Woman to Woman afterthought. Both movies were directed by Graham Cutts, both were produced by future British film industry stalwarts Victor Saville and Michael Balcon, both were based on works by Michael Morton (the earlier film was taken from a Morton play; the later one from a Morton novel), and both starred Clive Brook and Hollywood import Betty Compson. (Compson plays two parts in both films as well; but whereas in The White Shadow she plays two actual characters, in Woman to Woman...