Film Nitrate

There can't be many films that have had such a negative reaction that they have more or less destroyed a popular filmmaker's reputation overnight. Peeping Tom is one such film, and famed British director Michael Powell became so vilified in the press after its release that he was never again able to make a film in his native country. Even more unusual is that Peeping Tom has grown in popularity over the years and is now at the point where it is rightly considered a masterpiece, so why was the film so widely condemned on its initial release? By 1960 Michael Powell was rightfully standing as one of the greatest living British filmmakers, possibly second only to Alfred Hitchcock himself. Though he had been making films since the early 30s, and had even assisted Hitchcock on some of his early films, it was in 1937 that he had his breakthrough with The Edge of the World . By the time World War II flared up, Powell was working with Emeric Pressburger, and the two forged one of t...

Though Billy Wilder would become well-known for his 1950s comedies such as The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959), his two earliest directing efforts have arguably aged better than these later comedies. Of the two, 1944's melodrama  Double Indemnity is rightly revered as a masterpiece, and The Lost Weekend , released the following year, has unfairly found itself slightly in the shadow of the former film. That's not to say it has been overlooked. Indeed, at the time of its release, The Lost Weekend earned Wilder his first Academy Awards - one for Best Director, and one for Best Writer (Adapted Screenplay). Made at the height of what would later be known as the 'film-noir' genre, the whole film is expertly directed by Wilder, and now stands as one of the very best examples of that genre. The film itself was based on a popular novel released in 1944 by American author Charles R. Jackson, though Billy Wilder was drawn towards the story after working ...

"We changed our course today." Leo McCarey made two genres of films, and make them very, very well. The first, and the one that he is most know for today, is comedy films. This is due to his most famous film, the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1933) being one of the best comedy films of the 1930s. Other comedies, such as Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) also stand up well today, as do the timeless Laurel & Hardy films he directed. But McCarey is also known for his strong moralistic views, reinforced by his Catholicism. In 1937 he made the heartbreaking (and criminally under-rated) Make Way for Tomorrow , and in the 40s he had some of his greatest commercial successes with the dramatic films Going My Way (1944) and The Bells of St. Mary's (1945). After his 1952 anti-Communist film My Son John was a failure at the box-office, McCarey retired from filmmaking for 5 years. He returned in 1957 with An Affair to Remember , at a time when it had been over a decade since hi...

"Be careful, I'll get you yet." Alfred Hitchcock made nine silent films from 1925 to 1929 (ten if you count Blackmail , which was made simultaneously in both sound and silent), and fortunately all of these except one ( The Mountain Eagle , his second film) still survive today. The vast majority of British silent films have been lost, but because of Hitchcock's rising fame in the 30s and 40s, it was thought prudent to ensure that these early silents were preserved. Without that later fame, it is almost certain that most, if not all, of these films would have suffered the same tragic fate of countless others. The great thing about having access now to 54 of the 55 films Hitchcock produced is we can look at how his techniques developed over 50 years, and also look at themes that he was to later revisit. After serving his filmmaking apprenticeship in Germany, as well as time spent on the set of such legendary films as F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh , and making tw...

Frances: "I'm in love with you." John Robie: "Now that's a ridiculous thing to say." Though To Catch a Thief is notable in that it is as Hitchcock film with little of his trademark suspense, it is nevertheless unmistakably a Hitchcock film. Indeed, much of it seems like a blueprint for 1959's masterpiece North by Northwest . Cary Grant plays John Robie, an ex-cat burglar, retired to the French Riviera. A number of recent robberies that mirror his style leads the police to his home where they attempt to arrest him, however he escapes from them and decides that the best way to prove his innocence is to try and catch the copycat burglar in the act. Through his old contacts, Robie finds out where all of the most valuable privately-owned jewels in the Riviera are currently located. Then then leads him to make acquaintance with the owners of the most expensive jewels - Jessie Stevens (played by Jessie Royce Landis), and her beautiful daughter Frances (...

Of all the film polls conducted, there is generally no argument that the most respected poll is Sight & Sound magazine's once-in-a-decade survey of critics' top ten films. The first of these polls was published in 1952, and of the seven polls that have been conducted, only three films have come on top. Since 1962, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane has reigned supreme, untouchable until 2012 when Hitchcock's Vertigo finally dethroned it. However, in that very first poll it was a film that was still only four years old that came out above all others. The film was made in Italy by Vittorio De Sica - Bicycle Thieves . By 1962, the film had dropped to 7th in the top 10, before falling out out completely by the 70s, and has never returned since (though as recently as 2012 in the magazine's parallel 'Director's Poll' Bicycle Thieves slipped in at number 10, suggesting a resurgence, at least among directors.). It's easy to over-analyse these polls, but it ...

There are very few films from the silent period that have imagery so vivid that even people with a casual interest in films are aware of them. Fritz Lang's Maria robot from Metropolis is one. I'd argue that the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's  Battleship Potemkin is one also. But probably the most shocking and arresting scene of all silent cinema is to be found in 1929's Un Chien Andalou  ( An Andalusian Dog ), which was the first of two Surrealist films to come from the collaboration between director Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. The scene itself is the first scene in the 16-minute film. A man (played by Buñuel) is seen sharpening a cutthroat razor on leather. He walks out onto a balcony, his face surrounded by Gauloise smoke. He looks up to the night sky moon and sees the bright moon about to be pierced by a thin cloud. We then cut to a closeup of a woman, her left eye being held open by the man. The scene goes back to the moon as the cloud cuts into i...

Often the way we watch a film can shape our opinion of it. If you watch a hugely epic, powerful film like Lawrence of Arabia serialised half-an-hour at a time over a week, it will lose a lot of its impact as it's not meant to be digested in that way. To experience a film the way the director would prefer, you would usually need to watch it in a busy cinema where the collection of people will add to the atmosphere in a way that you could never recreate at home, despite large flat-screen TVs and Blu-rays allowing most people to come far closer to a true 'home cinema' than they've ever been able to before. You're also free of distractions in the cinema (apart from the crunching of popcorn or a turf war with the stranger to your left over who has the right to use the armrest) - nowadays it's too easy to get distracted in quieter parts of a film due to the ubiquity of smartphones, Twitter, Facebook etc. And don't even get me started on watching films on your iPh...