Alfred HItchcock: The Early Years of the Master of Suspense
Lions Gate and StudioCanal have beaten Criterion to the punch with this intriguing if uneven collection
Reviewed by Marc Savlov, Fri., Feb. 23, 2007
Alfred HItchcock: The Early Years of the Master of Suspense
Lions Gate, $39.99
Lions Gate and StudioCanal have beaten Criterion to the punch with this intriguing if uneven collection of five of Hitchcock's pre-Selznick B&W Brits, including two silents. Long available in public domain sell-through versions made borderline unwatchable by soupy source prints, dodgy artifacting, and overall grim condition, 1927's squared-circle melodrama The Ring and 1929's The Manxman, 1930's Murder! (which sports one of the earliest Hitchcock cameos), and a pair from 1931, the veddy English class-war kerfluffle The Skin Game and the creakily superior Rich and Strange don't reach the wild, foggy heights of 1927's Jack the Ripper creepfest The Lodger or the atmospheric dread of the later Number Seventeen, but, taken together, they're clearly indicative of what was to come.A case in point is Rich and Strange, which opens with the British Board of Film Censors' wavering approval title fading into one of Hitchcock's least-known moments of visual genius. A bustling, metronomic, and lengthy 180-degree pan across a Chaplinesque workplace ends up going out the door into the bumbershoot-bedazzled streetside drizzle and down into the London Underground. (It's Brian De Palma's entire oeuvre distilled to its Hitchcockian essence, minus Margot Kidder.) Ultimately the sordid tale of a yawny, middle-class couple (Henry Kendall and Joan Barry) who strike it rich in a family way and end up on an ocean voyage fraught with the sort of perilous romantic duplicities that would later make North by Northwest such a whopping entertainment, this is the template for cinematic suspensers yet undreamed. It's Jack E. Cox (a frequent early Hitchcock collaborator) and Charles Martin's crisply evocative cinematography that renders the director's wild, chiaroscuric vision so arresting, though, filled as it is with snappy nighttime panoramas, Londontown miniatures, and enough scandalous Parisian rendezvous to make the bergère folies. It and the four other films are taken from the original 35mm masters.
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Hellboy: Sword of Storms (Anchor Bay, $19.98): Pancakes and kitties and Big Red, animated to Mike Mignola's starkly outré specifications. Go, Team Hell!
