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Other authors named Alfred:
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Author's popularity: 3
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If you like or dislike this author in general or one or more of their quotes in particular, please give us your feedback by clicking on the icon to vote for, or the icon to vote against them.
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Popularity: 1
Vote: | A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | A lot of movies are about life, mine are like a slice of cake. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Actors are cattle. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Always make the audience suffer as much as possible. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Disney has the best casting. If he doesn't like an actor he just tears him up. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Drama is life with the dull bits cut out. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Give them pleasure - the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I am scared easily, here is a list of my adrenaline - production: 1: small children, 2: policemen, 3: high places, 4: that my next movie will not be as good as the last one. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I am to provide the public with beneficial shocks. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I have prepared one of my own timecapsules. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the manmade sound never equaled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig. |
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Vote: | I'm frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me. That white round thing without any holes have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I've never tasted it. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I'm full of fears and I do my best to avoid difficulties and any kind of complications. I like everything around me to be clear as crystal and completely calm. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I'm not against the police; I'm just afraid of them. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | In reference to the murder scene in 'Dial M for murder': As you have seen on the screen; the best way to do it is with a scissor. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | In the old days villains had moustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don't want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedlly, as in life. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Seeing a murder on television can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Self-plagiarism is style. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Someone once told me that every minute a murder occurs, so I don't want to waste your time, I know you want to go back to work. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Television has brought back murder into the home - where it belongs. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Television is like the American toaster, you push the button and the same thing pops up everytime. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn't change people's habits. It just kept them inside the house. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | There is nothing quite so good as burial at sea. It is simple, tidy, and not very incriminating. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | There is nothing to winning, really. That is, if you happen to be blessed with a keen eye, an agile mind, and no scruples whatsoever. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | These are bagpipes. I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equalled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | This award is meaningful because it comes from my fellow dealers in celluloid. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, 'It's in the script.' If he says, 'But what's my motivation?, ' I say, 'Your salary.' |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | You reach a point where you say you're not going to do juveniles any longer. |
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Biography
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Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, (13 August 1899 – 29 April, 1980) was a British film director closely associated with the suspense genre. Influenced by expressionism in Germany, he began directing in England and worked in the United States from 1939. With more than fifty feature films to his credit, in a career spanning six decades, he remains one of the best known and most popular directors of all time. His innovations and vision have influenced a great number of filmmakers, producers, and actors.
Hitchcock's films draw heavily on both fear and fantasy, and are known for their droll humour. They often portray innocent people caught up in circumstances beyond their control or understanding. This often involves a transference of guilt in which the "innocent" character's failings are transferred to another character and magnified. Another common theme is the exploration of the compatibility of men and women; Hitchcock's films often take a cynical view of traditional romantic relationships.
Although Hitchcock was an enormous star during his lifetime, he was not usually ranked highly by contemporary film critics. Rebecca was the only one of his films to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, although four others were nominated. He was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in 1967, but never personally received an Academy Award of Merit.
The French new wave critics, especially François Truffaut, were among the first to promote his films as having artistic merit beyond entertainment. Hitchcock was one of the first directors to whom they applied their auteur theory, which stresses the centrality of the director in the movie-making process. Indeed, through his fame, public persona, and degree of creative control, Hitchcock transformed the role of the director into that of a celebrity personality in its own right.
Biography
Early life
Alfred Hitchcock was born 13 August 1899 in Leytonstone, London, the second son and youngest of the three children of William Hitchcock, a greengrocer, and his wife, Emma Jane Hitchcock (nee Whelan). His family was mostly Irish Catholic. Hitchcock was sent to Catholic boarding schools in London. He has said his childhood was very lonely and protected.
At 14, Hitchcock lost his father and left St Ignatius' College, his school at the time, to study at the School for Engineering and Navigation. After graduating, he became a draftsman and advertising designer with a cable company.
About that time, Hitchcock became intrigued by photography and started working in film in London. In 1920, he obtained a full-time job at Islington Studios under its American owners, Players-Lasky, and their British successors, Gainsborough Pictures, designing the titles for silent movies. In 1925, Michael Balcon of Gainsborough Pictures gave him a chance to direct his first film, "The Pleasure Garden."
Pre-war British career
As a major talent in a new industry with plenty of opportunity, he rose quickly. His third film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog was released in 1927. In it, attractive blondes are strangled and the new lodger (Ivor Novello) in the Bunting family's upstairs apartment falls under heavy suspicion. This is the first truly "Hitchcockian" film, incorporating such themes as the "wrong man."
In 1926, Hitchcock married his assistant director Alma Reville. The two had a daughter Patricia in 1928. Alma was Hitchcock's closest collaborator. She wrote some of his screenplays and was by his side for every one of his films.
In 1929, he began work on Blackmail, his tenth film. While the film was in production, the studio decided to make it one of Britain's first sound pictures.
In 1933, Hitchcock was once again working for Michael Balcon at Gaumont-British Picture Corporation. His first film for the company, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), was a success. His second, The 39 Steps (1935), is often considered the best film from his early period.
His next major success was in 1938, The Lady Vanishes, a clever and fast-paced film about the search for a kindly old Englishwoman (Dame May Whitty), who disappears while on board a train in the fictional country of Vandrika (a thinly-veiled reference to Nazi Germany).
By this time, he had caught the attention of Hollywood and was invited to make films in America by David O. Selznick.
Hollywood
With Rebecca in 1940, Hitchcock made his first American film, although it was set in England and based on a novel by English author Daphne du Maurier. The film evokes the fears of a naïve young bride who enters a great English country home and must grapple with the legacy of the dead woman who was her husband's first wife. It has also subsequently been noted for potential lesbian motifs. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1940.
Hitchcock's humour continues in his American work, together with the suspense that became his trademark. Due to Selznick's perennial money problems and Hitchcock's unhappiness with the amount of creative control demanded by Selznick over his films, Hitchcock was subsequently loaned to the larger studios more often than producing Hitchcock films himself.
Hitchcock's work during the early 1940's was very diverse, ranging from the romantic comedy, "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" (1941), to the dark and disturbing "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943).
Shadow of a Doubt, his personal favorite, was about young Charlotte "Charlie" Newton (Teresa Wright), who suspects her beloved uncle Charlie Spencer (Joseph Cotten) of murder. In its use of overlapping characters, dialogue, and closeups it has provided a generation of film theorists with psychoanaltic potential, including Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek. The film also harkens to one of Cotten's better known film, Citizen Kane.
Spellbound explored the then very fashionable subject of psychoanalysis and featured a dream sequence which was designed by Salvador Dali. The actual dream sequence in the film was considerably cut from the original planned scene that was to run for some minutes but proved too disturbing for the finished film.
Notorious (1946), with Ingrid Bergman, linked her to another of his most prominently recurring stars, Cary Grant. Featuring plot of Nazis, radium and South America, Notorious is considered by many critics as Hitchcock's masterpiece. Its inventive use of suspense and props briefly led to Hitchcock being under surveillance by the CIA due to his use of uranium as a plot device.
Rope (his first colour film) came next in 1948. Here Hitchcock experimented with the so-called ten-minute take (see Themes and devices). Rope introduces Farley Granger as a Hitchcock lead. Based on the Leopold and Leob case of the 1920s, Rope is considered one of the first gay films to emerge from the Hollywood studio system.
Under Capricorn, set in nineteenth-century Australia, also used this short-lived technique, but to a more limited extent. For these two films he formed a production company with Sidney Bernstein, called Transatlantic Pictures, which folded after these two unsuccessful pictures.
With Strangers on a Train (1951), Hitchcock combined many of the best elements from his preceding British and American films. Two men casually meet and speculate on removing people who are causing them difficulty. One of the men, though, takes this banter entirely seriously. With Granger returning to Hitchcock's work, Strangers continues the director's concern with the possiblities of homosexual blackmail and murder.
Three very popular films, all starring Grace Kelly, followed. Dial M for Murder was adapted from the popular stage play by Frederick Knott. This was originally another experimental film, with Hitchcock using the technique of 3D cinematography, although the film was never released in the 3D format. Rear Window, starred James Stewart. Here the wheelchair-bound Stewart observes the movements of his neighbours across the courtyard. He becomes convinced that the wife of a near neighbour has been murdered. To Catch a Thief, set in the French Riviera, starred Kelly and Cary Grant.
In 1958, Hitchcock released Vertigo, a film many consider to be his masterpiece. Three more recognised classics followed: North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963). The latter two were particularly notable for their unconventional soundtracks, both by Bernard Herrmann: the screeching strings in the murder scene in Psycho pushed the limits of the time, and The Birds dispensed completely with conventional instruments, using the first electronically produced soundtrack in a commercial film. These were his last great films, after which his career slowly wound down. In 1972 Hitchcock returned to London to film Frenzy, his last major success. For the first time, Hitchcock allowed nudity and profane language, which had before been taboo, in one of his films. Failing health slowed down his output over the last two decades of his life.
Family Plot (1976) was his last film. It related the escapades of "Madam" Blanche Tyler Barbara Harris, a fradulent spiritualist, and her taxi driver lover Bruce Dern making a living from her phony powers.
Hitchcock was made a Knight Commander of the British Empire on January 3, 1980 by Queen Elizabeth II just four months before his death. Hitchcock died of renal failure in Los Angeles. His body was cremated.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Alfred Hitchcock".
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