Hitchcock actually began his film career working for an American firm, Famous Players–Lasky, which would later become PARAMOUNT PICTURES. Not long after, however, the company was taken over by a British concern and Hitchcock was given greater responsibilities. Soon he was involved in all aspects of production, from art direction to screenwriting. Eventually, he was promoted from assistant director to director, making his official debut in that capacity with The Pleasure Garden (1925).
The director's first thriller was The Lodger (1926), but he would not become known for his work in the genre for nearly another decade, although he made a splash with the suspenseful Blackmail (1929), Britain's first all-talking picture. Hitchcock made everything from musicals to romances, finally finding his niche and sticking to it when he made The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). It was an international hit, and he followed it with other thrillers, among them The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), Sabotage (1937), and The Lady Vanishes (1938). By the second half of the 1930s he had become England's leading director, and that meant that Hollywood had to have him.
DAVID O. SELZNICK signed Hitchcock to a contract and brought him to America. During the next 36 years, almost all of which were spent making movies in America, Hitchcock built and enhanced his reputation as an immensely talented storyteller, provoking a lively debate as to whether his English or his Hollywood period was best. To most observers, though, there can be no doubt as to the answer; Hitchcock reached the height of his powers in Hollywood, especially during the 1950s.
For the most part, the 1940s was a period of experimentation for Hitchcock. Many of the films he made during the decade were brilliant, and others were flops, but all were interesting. Suspicion's (1941) depiction of paranoia pushed the audience to new limits; Shadow of a Doubt (1943) uncovered evil in small-town America like no other film before; Lifeboat (1944), a cinematic tour de force of montage, rhythm, and pacing - the camera was confined to a small lifeboat for virtually the entire length of the film - brought him a second Oscar nomination; Spellbound (1945) allowed him to experiment with dream sequences and gave him his third Academy Award nomination; Notorious (1946), a sexually charged tale of masochism, was daring even for the FILM NOIR era; and Rope (1948), filmed in such a way as to make it appear as if there were no cuts in the action at all, was a fascinating novelty then as now.
Rich and provocative as Hitchcock's work was in the 1940s, he surpassed himself in the 1950s, directing many of his greatest films, including Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954, for which he garnered his fourth Oscar nomination), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956, a remake of his own earlier film), Vertigo (1958), and North by Northwest (1959). In these films he refined his earlier themes, crystallizing the sense of corruption that is part and parcel of the human condition. In 1960 Hitchcock won his fifth and last Oscar nomination for the classic suspense thriller Psycho, a film that influenced the showering habits of a whole generation.
The two actors who are most associated with Hitchcock are JAMES STEWART and CARY GRANT, both of whom appeared quite often in the master's films during the 1940s and 1950s. But despite their excellent performances in Hitchcock's films, he was not an actor's director. He thought of actors as "cattle" who were merely to be manipulated on the set just as the audience's emotions were to be manipulated in the movie theater. Actors merely had to do what they were told; he wasn't interested in their interpretations of their roles. Before filming even began, Hitchcock already knew who his characters were.
There has never been a director whose image was more well known than that of Hitchcock. That familiarity was due in part to his two long-running TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–61) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962–65), both of which featured the rotund director as the on-camera host. (He did, in fact, direct as much as 12 hours worth of shows.) But Hitchcock had already been introduced to viewers thanks to cameo appearances in his own films, a tradition that began with The Lodger in 1926 when he helped fill out an insufficiently peopled crowd scene. When the film was a hit, superstition took hold, and he appeared in subsequent films until he became a steady feature - audiences seeking him out and he finding amusing ways to enter and exit scenes. The director died in 1980.
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