Film Nitrate

"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...

F.W. Murnau's penultimate film before his untimely death in a road accident, City Girl follows a similar style to it's more renowned predecessor Sunrise , however, in my opinion it has often been overlooked and should rightly be considered one of Murnau's greatest films, on a scale equal to, if not greater than, Sunrise itself. I think a large part of its lack of appeal has been the fact that it has been a notoriously difficult film to actually get hold of, until earlier in this year when it was released on Blu-ray. The exemplary Blu-ray transfer does the film a lot of favours, as suddenly previously blurred grain fields look amazingly sharp, and people's expressions can be fully appreciated. It's certainly far better than I ever expected a silent film could ever look. But what about the story itself? Murnau makes clear in the first scene that this is no Sunrise clone, by having the male lead, a country farmer named Lem, ignore the advances of a vamp as he tra...

Nosferatu is the first silent film I ever saw, and what an introduction to silent film it is. Nearly 90 years after its premiere it still rates highly in numerous 'Best Film' polls, and it's easy to see why. The most famous of all of director F.W. Murnau's Weimar films, this was one of his first, created 4 years before he left Germany to move to the United States to create films for Fox Studios. Nosferatu was based on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula but due to the studio's unwillingness to licence rights for the novel all of the names of the characters were changed. So instead of Count Dracula, we get Count Orlock (which I actually prefer), and instead of Jonathan Harker we get Thomas Hutter. Amusingly, Murnau appears to have believed that by simply changing the names any potential libel would be avoided, despite the fact that the story itself heavily draws on the novel. So it must have been a surprise to him and the film's ill-fated production com...