Thursday Minute
Entr’acte | March 3, 2011

Alfred Hitchcock, Never Best Director

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The Lodger, Blackmail, Murder!, The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca*, Foreign Correspondent, Suspicion, Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt, Lifeboat*, Spellbound*, Notorious, The Paradine Case, Rope, Stage Fright, Strangers on a Train, I Confess, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window*, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho*, The Birds, Marnie, Frenzy, Family Plot.

* Hitchcock’s five Oscar nominations for Best Director.  The respective winners:  John Ford, The Grapes of Wrath (1940); Leo McCarey, Going My Way (1944); Billy Wilder, The Lost Weekend (1945); Elia Kazan, On the Waterfront (1954); Billy Wilder, The Apartment (1960).

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Interview with Alfred Hitchcock
“Monitor,” BBC Television
Huw Wheldon, interviewer
Broadcast:  May 5, 1964
Part 1

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Interview with Alfred Hitchcock
“Monitor,” BBC Television
Huw Wheldon, interviewer
Broadcast:  May 5, 1964
Part 2

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…58…59…60.

1. KarmaSartre says:

   March 6, 2011 at 7:20 am

   John,

   I think Rope was the one with the one camera angle, or one camera position. Seems like a brilliant feat. Did it win anything?
2. John Farmer says:

   March 6, 2011 at 10:14 am

   Rope didn’t win anything, at least not at the Oscars, where it didn’t get any nominations. The film is famous for being one of Hitchcock’s experiments. Adapted from a play, the film is a series of long takes, with many of them edited to appear as a single shot (e.g., the camera would pan to a dark shadow / cut / then continue the pan to more action). Film reels are limited to about 10 or 11 minutes, so Hitchcock went about as far as he could. I believe there were fewer than a dozen cuts in the entire movie, and for some you had to pay close attention to even notice.