Hitch, 9/3.

"The 39 Steps, revived this week in a new print at the BAMCinématek, was the most successful and remains the most celebrated of Alfred Hitchcock's British movies - twice remade and currently staged on Broadway," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "It is also the movie with which Hitchcock became Hitchcock."

Updated through 9/8.

"In addition to familiar devices of Hitch's early years (awkward train car interactions, potential murder weapons brandished casually during civil conversations, staged and stageless performances, uneasy urbanite-farmer exchanges, ineffectual cops) we see embryonic signs of his Hollywood iconography," notes Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine. "The opening play of footsteps is like a thesis proposal for the frenzied cross-cutting that would open Strangers on a Train 16 years later."

Glenn Kenny's "Monday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report" in the Auteurs' Notebook: "Of all of the rare and rarely seen early Hitchcock films, Waltzes From Vienna has long excited the least curiousity among the widest spectrum of the master's fans." But: "The picture's profile underwent a change with the 2006 publication of Jack Sullivan's revelatory study Hitchcock's Music."

Update, 9/4: Via Movie City News, the London Times lists "Hitchcock's 50 most memorable moments."

Updates, 9/8: "Perhaps the most important thing Hitchcock and Disney had in common... was their virulent streak of sadism," argues novelist Jonathan Coe in the London Times. "After all, they were both great filmmakers, and therefore, almost by definition, they were both committed sadists of the first order."

Meanwhile, that "microsite" is hardly micro anymore.

The Film Experience offers some "Pointless Hitchcock Trivia."

"The appeal of Hitchcock to the theorist and historian of film is impossible to overstate. To study him is to find an economical way of studying the entire history of cinema." For the TLS, Paula Marantz Cohen reviews Richard Allen's Hitchcock's Romantic Irony, Quentin Falk's Mr Hitchcock and Donald Spoto's Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies.

Posted by dwhudson at September 3, 2008 2:52 AM