British films
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Still working for Michael Balcon at Gainsborough, Alfred Hitchcock followed his immensely successful 1927 film The Lodger with this inspired adaptation of the stage play Down Hill, written by Ivor Novello and Constance Collier under the pseudonym David L'Estrange. Novello had previously starred in The Lodger and was an obvious casting choice for the lead character in this adaptation of his...
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The best known and most popular of Hitchcock’s silent films is The Lodger, a skilfully woven concoction of suspense thriller and romance which presages many of the director’s subsequent great works. The 39 Steps, North By Northwest, Psycho, and many others all have their roots clearly visible in this groundbreaking masterpiece of early British cinema...
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The Ring marked the beginning of a new phase in the career of Alfred Hitchcock. It was his first film for British International Pictures, the studio that successfully lured him away from Michael Balcon’s company Gainsborough. Having scored an early success with The Lodger (1927), Hitchcock was disappointed with his next two Gainsborough films...
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Heartened by the success of The Ring, Alfred Hitchcock was somewhat taken aback when his employers at British Internation Pictures requested him to adapt a stage play – in this case Eden Phillpotts’ hit The Farmer’s Wife. One of the reasons why the director had left Gainsborough to work for BIP was because he had resented being saddled with the direction of two play adaptations...
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Blackmail, Alfred Hitchcock’s second great crime thriller (after The Lodger), has the distinction of being the first all-sound film to be released in Great Britain. The film was originally shot as a silent film but during its initial post-production the studio (British International Pictures) requested Hitchcock to convert it into a partial sound film...
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Alfred Hitchcock’s last silent film, The Manxman, is widely regarded as one of his best, and it was certainly one of his most successful films of this era, although Hitchcock himself was disappointed with the film. Whilst the subject is atypical for the director – a predictable melodrama involving the familiar ill-fated love triangle...
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Murder! has the distinction of being Alfred Hitchcock’s one and only true whodunit, in the mould of the classic English murder mystery popularised by such writers as Agatha Christie. Hitchcock’s preference for suspense over surprise is evident in this film which, whilst competently directed and entertaining...
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Rich and Strange is the film that brought an end to Alfred Hitchcock’s mixed association with British International Pictures and also marks the end of a period of artistic and critical decline for the director. His subsequent cycle of British films, beginning with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) would see a marked improvement in Hitchcock’s fortunes and would...
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The Man Who Knew Too Much was the film which earned Alfred Hitchcock international recognition and effectively assured his prolific film making career after a faltering start in the early 1930s. His subsequent British films and his later Hollywood offerings established him as the absolute master of the suspense thriller genre...
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One of the earliest and most entertaining screen adaptations of the hugely popular historical novel The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy is this lavish 1934 production starring Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon. In contrast with many later versions of the story, this one is more concerned with the dual personality of its main character than with his heroic exploits...
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The absolute best of Alfred Hitchcock’s British films is this exciting, highly entertaining adaptation of John Buchan’s novel The Thirty-Nine Steps. It was the culmination of everything that Hitchcock had achieved in his preceding twenty or so films and a template for much of what was to follow. Along with the subsequent The Lady Vanishes (1938) ...
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The Ghost Goes West was the first English language film to be directed by the great French filmmaker René Clair, who had previously scored several notable successes in France with films such as Le Million (1931) and À nous la liberté (1931). The subject and style of Clair’s films both showed a strong American influence...
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The fourth of the politically slanted thrillers that Alfred Hitchcock directed in the 1930s is among the director’s most chilling and suspenseful films, its bleak mood being a stark reflection of the worsening political situation in Europe at the time. There can be no doubt that the enemy power alluded to in the film is Nazi Germany...
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Secret Agent is the third, and least known, of five politically themed suspense thrillers which Alfred Hitchcock made in the mid-1930s, towards the end of the British half of his filmmaking career. With its mix of adventure, romance and sardonic humour, it presages the big action thrillers that Hitchcock would later make during his time in Hollywood...
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In 1933, the renowned English writer H.G. Wells published a book entitled The Shape of Things to Come in which he made some startling predictions about the future of mankind. Although dismayed by the prospect of another unavoidable world war, Wells had an unshaken belief that ultimately science would redeem mankind, effectively replacing religion...
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Young and Innocent shows a lighter, more human side to Hitchcock than many of his films, and it can just as easily be classified as a romantic comedy as a suspense thriller. Interestingly, this was the only one of the thrillers that Hitchcock made in the 1930s which did not have a political back story, and it has often been described as a remake of his earlier The...
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Considered to be the best of Alfred Hitchcock’s British films (or, at the very least, a close second to his The Thirty Nine Steps), The Lady Vanishes was the last film but one he made before his move to Hollywood. The film skilfully combines suspense thriller and black comedy, making this one of Hitchcock’s most entertaining...
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This atmospheric wartime thriller marked the first collaboration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, a duo who would have an enormous impact on British cinema in the 1940s, with films such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and The Red Shoes...
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Night Train to Munich is another sterling effort from the great writing team Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, evoking memories of their earlier train-based thriller, The Lady Vanishes (1938), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Carol Reed may have directed this later film, but it is the mischievous Gilliat-Launder imprint that is more noticeable...
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Quite possibly the greatest fantasy film ever made, this inspired take on The Arabian Nights still evokes a sense of wonder and delight in the spectator and is simply a piece of pure cinematic magic. It is a film that evokes perfectly the exotic and mystical world of Scheherazade and Aladdin, a world of genies, villainous sorcerers...
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