Ooh, another Hitchcock day

I like the films of director Alfred Hitchcock, and to be honest he might be my favorite director if you think about movies in terms of directors -- the whole auteur theory and whatnot. At the same time, however, I have to admit that it can feel a bit lazy to me to fill a day of programming by just throwing up a bunch of Hitchcock's films. Perhaps it's the case that Hitchcock programming blocks come up more regularly than other those for other directors since Hitchock probably has more movies that are closer to tentpoles than almost anybody else from the studio era. TCM ran two nights of Hitchcock's earlier work back in January, wrapped around a documentary called Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of Blackmail. They're running another morning and afternoon of Hitchcock tomorrow, and that includes another showing of the documentary, at 6:30 AM.

Blackmail was Alfred Hitchcock's first talking picture, although it wasn't intended to be. Indeed, the first section especially has some lengthy scenes where there's pretty much only ambient sound if you will, or sound effects put in in post-production that are supposed to be what ambient sound would sound like. However, with sound films coming over from Hollywood, the studio realized they needed to start making sound films in the UK as well, and Blackmail got the honor of being made as the first all-talking feature-length British movie, at least according to the promotional material of the era.

In fact, however, both a silent version of Blackmail, with traditional silent film intertitles, and a talking version, were produced. Quite a few of the scenes could be used in both versions, but not all. Part of what the documentary does is explore how Hitchcock handled the new medium by comparing the two versions of Blackmail and showing where sound made a difference. But that's not all of what the documentary does.

Blackmail wasn't Hitchcock's first thriller/suspense picture; that honor would probably go to The Lodger. But Blackmail has a whole bunch of themes that would be reused in later of Hitchcock's films in varying combinations, and a good portion of the documentary looks at how Hitchcock kept putting the same themes into his movies while keeping them looking fresh.

Becoming Hitchcock isn't a bad documentary, although I have to admit to that me it feels sometime like the sort of thing I'd come up with if I were doing one of my old list posts when I had a day where I couldn't think of a movie to blog about so just mentioned several films that had something thematic in common. Having said that, there is some stuff I didn't necessarily think of when grouping Hitchcock's films together. And for people who haven't seen many of his movies, this documentary is definitely not a bad way to bring up some of the titles that aren't quite so well known. Most of Hitchcock's sound films get a shout out at least once; I think Under Capricorn was the one Hollywood film not to be mentioned.

So definitely worth one watch, although not particularly groundbreaking by any means.