Alfred Hitchcock

[EddieLarkin]

There's a quirk with some 4K players and 4K TVs that forces any 4x3 SD content to 16x9. What devices are you using?

[Tom Amolad]

That might be it. I believe I read that it’s encoded on the disc as SD.

It’s a Sony Blu-ray player. Is there a fix? (Or do I just have to use a computer?)

[EddieLarkin]

Try hitting Option during playback and switching to Direct. Or there may be an Output Video Resolution in the main settings menu, try changing that to SD if you can, or Source Direct if there is one.

[DeprongMori]

That might be it. I believe I read that it’s encoded on the disc as SD.

It’s a Sony Blu-ray player. Is there a fix? (Or do I just have to use a computer?)

We had a Sony Blu-ray player that we were never able to keep from stretching the “Thin Man” DVD images no matter what settings we tried adjusting. (Most other discs worked fine for 4:3 display.) Not sure whether it’s aSony incompatibility with settings on WarnerBros. SD content.

[Tom Amolad]

Thanks -- I got it fixed.

[Stefan Andersson]

Essay on the class struggle in Hitchcock´s films:
https://monthlyreview.org/2011/12/01/al ... -struggle/

[Stefan Andersson]

Post moved to Recent Film Restorations thread.

[Tom Amolad]

In an interview (I think on the Kino release of Under Capricorn), Chabrol remarks that when he and Rohmer were writing their Hitchcock book, he handled all the British films except one, and Rohmer handled all the Hollywood films except one. (Or am I remembering backwards?) Has it ever been revealed which the "except one" was for each?

[nowhereisaplace]

That's correct - but it was revealed in Antoine's de Baecque's book on Chabrol that Rohmer wrote about The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Lady Vanishes and Chabrol did Rebecca and Spellbound.

[Tom Amolad]

Thanks. Also, should I assume the British/Jolywood divide is taken to be a hard one in 1939? That is, Under Capricorn and Stage Fright fall onto the Hollywood side, despite having been made in Britain, and are therefore Rohmer?

[The Curious Sofa]

While there are books that concentrate only on the British films, which include Stage Fright, Under Capricorn and Frenzy, his work is generally divided into the British and Hollywood periods. Even though the post-1939 films were made in Britain, the style and themes were much more in line with his Hollywood films of the time.

Here is a PDF of the book if you fancy a gander: https://www.studocu.com/it/document/uni ... df/7506416

[Tom Amolad]

That’s how I’d interpret it too. I’m not asking philosophically, I’m just confirming authorship, i.e. that the Under Capricorn section of the book is by Rohmer.

[nowhereisaplace]

Yes, your interpretation is correct. And is backed up by the second half of the book being far more engaging, with (in my opinion) Rohmer being the much better critic of the two. I actually found this book to be among my favorite pieces of Rohmer’s criticism.

[nowhereisaplace]

I also will add, this book was written in 1957, so Frenzy is not part of it. But Capricorn and Stage Fright are both Rohmer. In fact, if I recall, the British period feels more like an overview than a strict film by film analysis, but I could be wrong.

[Tom Amolad]

Thanks. I basically agree, though Chabrol is good on the films he likes, like The Ring. (He also has some pretty ludicrously homophobic comments about Murder, a film where, even bracketing that point, I fail to follow his intense enthusiasm.)

[Beloved Aunt]

I've always hated Frenzy so what the heck, I think I'll just dump my negative thoughts on it here. Frenzy is, along with The Last of Sheila (a film that if anything I revile even more than the Hitchcock) and maybe a film or two more, one of the few genuinely morally offensive films from the 1970s that I've had the displeasure of watching. Hitchcock being kind of a bad guy just makes his films (except this one) more fun when you're a kid, but as an adult I've found these aspects of his films a bit more off-putting and chilling, although never fatally so except with Frenzy (and there's only a couple of his other films that I've watched which I think are at least largely failures, namely Spellbound and sorry, I Confess, which is the mostly powerfully and unbearably boring film I've ever seen, but I digress). There is something even about the manner in which the film's plot itself slowly, viscously and smugly uncoils and displays itself, with a cold, repulsive self-satisfaction, like an obese, ancient, smugly smiling housecat with big, sagging nipples (okay, maybe the housecat is turning into Hitchcock himself with this metaphor) who has just eaten a baby, that I find gloatingly evil and genuinely revolting. The murder scenes are unusually cruel and unpleasant, not so much because of any gratuitous cruelty (I don't remember any) but because of the feeling they are imbued with. You don't reprehend the murderer while you're watching these murders, you reprehend the director. The enormously and ludicrously deck-stacked misogynistic depictions of almost all of the film's women (there is something about the infantile misogyny of Hitchcock and at least one other relatively old-timey British artist, Rudyard Kipling, that I find kind of hilarious and laughable as well as objectionable), combine with the laughably out-of-date and hokey tone of most if not all of the characterizations, and the resulting lousy performances from pretty much every cast member IIRC, with the exception of Barry Foster as the murderer, who is not far short of superb and whose perf was the only thing I enjoyed about this, to create a tone that is at once morally objectionable, aesthetically laughable and preposterous, and not actually entertaining at all. I suppose I'm a bit of a hypocrite as I write this; I greatly and mostly unabashedly enjoy some sick items, like Killer Joe for example; but even there I think there are considerable aesthetic and even moral distinctions to be made, between something like that, which is basically just good sick fun and not thoroughly imbued and soaked in evil and harmful beliefs, and something like Frenzy, and I still can't help wondering if there must be something a bit wrong with someone who just gobbles up this viscous, gloating film. There is a gloating, no-holds-barred hideousness to the film's tone and outlook, as well as its evil, yellowed cinematography, that is just not my idea of a good time. It's certainly not my idea of escapism, except maybe of escaping into a world that is (much) worse, as well as stupider, than reality. Some somewhat-better-than-decent nippy dialogue by whichever Shaffer brother wrote this crap film as well as some i suppose kind of impressive camera movements here and there make this a more eye-catching late Hitchcock than, I don't know, Family Plot or something, but blech.

[DRW.mov]

What the hell is so "morally offensive" about Last of Sheila??

[Beloved Aunt]

Really? Is that really surprising at all? It's been quite a while, I can't really get into details, but its one of the smuggest and nastiest films I've ever seen. I mean every relationship in it between the characters is basically bondage. It's just generally steeped in a kind of schadenfreud-y-ness that I found pretty objectionable.

[Beloved Aunt]

Okay, The Last of Sheila is the most wonderful, fun, good time of a film I've ever seen! You're talking nonsense Randall Maysin! Shut up! Get over yourself! Haha. (do not take offense, dear reader; I was speaking, clearly, to myself).

[Tom Amolad]

Hmm. I just saw Frenzy again myself, and while I'm not exactly prepared to champion it and am far from comfortable with certain things about it, I'm somewhat surprised with the certaintly of your characterization of it. It left me profoundly unsre of how to read it.

Above all, I remain deeply impressed with the potato truck scene. One might read it in different ways, but on at least one reading, the recalcitrance of that dead body mocks everything about Bob's imagination of and relation to female bodies.

A lot of the film strikes me as having that sort of ambiguity of tone -- I can sympathize with feeling discomfort with the film's relation to sex and gender, but it's harder for me to imagine feeling so certain about what that relation is.

In some ways, the place I'd point to for sexism is the (admittedly very funny) French cuisine scenes with the inspector and his wife. But even there, it gets complicated, since, by the end,

Spoiler

she makes it clear she's perfectly clear she's aware he hates this food, which forces us to rather reread what's been going on in these scenes, the nature of their relationship, and her level of intelligence/awareness.

(By the way, give Family Plot another chance! But I'm afraid I'll agree on Spellbound and I Confess...)

[Beloved Aunt]

Well Tom Amolad, maybe I should ease off on posting about films I saw like 15 years ago or something, but these impressions are pretty much seared into my memory FWIW, though not so much an enormously specific grasp of all that much of the film itself. I don't deny that there are a fair amount of accomplished things about Frenzy, and even that there may well be more complexity to Hitchcock's, in my mind unmistakeable, misogyny, but to me watching his films casually its always seemed pretty straightforward: Hitchcock loathes basically, quite probably literally, all women, to the point where I don't think there's even an external cause of it I would guess, his misogyny (to me) has an almost supernatural, timeless quality to it, and wants to imprison and torment or torture them. I feel this even when I watch Rebecca, just in terms of the feeling I remember a few scenes kind of being imbued with, althbough there it certainly doesn't overshadow or subsume the films other virtues, for me.

[Tom Amolad]

I sense a great deal more sympathy and empathy than you seem to, including for the women in Frenzy. But I'll concede to never being quite certain.

[Beloved Aunt]

Well yeah, I mean there are a goodly number of quite appealing women in the Hitchcock films I've watched, but also for me at least, an at least somewhat comparable amount of unmistakable spidery designs on them that just impresses itself on my memory. And for me, even though yes there is material dealing with women in his films that isn't just the unreserved hatred and deck-stacking against them that I remember in Frenzy, (i don't remember any sympathy for women in that film, other than maybe the Anna Massey character, and at least in my memory, how could much sympathy for women coexist anything but ludicrously and incongruously in a film that also expresses so much loathing for them? Maybe I should try to answer this question by watching the film again) there isn't much clear, unmistakable sympathy for female characters that I can remember, unlike say in most if not all of De Palma's women-centred films. But De Palma is definitely quite different emotionally from Hitchcock, who is in some ways kind of inscrutable.

[beamish14]

I’ve always thought that Frenzy was Hitchcock’s “fuck you” to Britain and the film industry he left behind there. The balance of gallows humor and somber horror is just dazzling. I’ve always found it to be the unquestionably finest work that he made post-Psycho

[Beloved Aunt]

Sure, it's definitely not a value-free film, except perhaps morally. There is such a sourness and coldness to late Hitchcock (the last four films, I've seen at least parts of all of them) though, which is very different from all of his other films I've watched, even the few that I think suck! Which makes me find them pretty dislikable.