alexdeleonfilm The Greatest Story Hitchcock Ever Told HITCHCOCK/Truffaut; Document, UK. 2015. director Kent Jones. 78 minutes. Viewed on Saturday afternoon in the little tent at Sodankylä Midnight Sun Film Festival June 2016. Makes you want to read and devour the celebrated Truffaut book on Hitch ASAP. Fantastic film. Great shots of Hitchcock film posters. Sharply selected excerpts from Hitchcock films. Opens with a stark still shot of actress Sylvia Sidney in "Sabotage", 1936, and takes off from there on a whirlwind tour of the director's career and obliquely some, but not too much, of his personal life.Comments by Scorcese, Schrader, Wes Anderson, Peter Bogdanovitch, Olivier Assayas, Arnaud Desplechin, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, David Fincher and even young Jean-Luc Godard, among others. All indicating how they were influenced by Hitchcock one way or another. Kiyoshi speaks in Japanese, the French directors in French. Subtitles in Finnish (natch)...Many shots of Hitchcock as a young man in London, not yet as rocky-poly as he became later. Actually, not a bad looking if slightly portly young man on a roll. The importance of his wife in the background. Throughout his career he consulted with her regularly on all of his films although she was only credited officially in a few of the early ones. He is invited to Hollywood. Has no interest in Tinseltown but is itching to get into a fully equipped Hollywoid studio.One of the high points of the film is an extensive discussion of the making of PSYCHO, it's social impact in 1960 (people were literally screaming in the theaters!) and a detailed analysis of the construction of the infamously famous shower scene in which ultra sexy Janet Leigh is stabbed to death by ultra-psycho Anthony Perkins. This discussion of the making of that flabbergastingly powerful scene by the master himself could be excerpted and show on its own as a complete independent master class in filmmaking. Mr. Jones's magnificent 78 minute film about the making of a book is, in fact, a Master Class in documentary filmmaking, and on its own justified this trip to the upper reaches of Finland. Hats off -- Bravo! -- I want to own this film so I can watch it over and over endlessly.Among other things it reminds me of my own relationship to Hitchcock over the years. As a youth I saw many of his films routinely when they came out at my neighborhood theater but only thought of them as great entertainment, not as Great Art. It was only when I was a student of linguistics at UCLA that I met many students from the film department who worshiped him as a true artist and a creative genius that my views began to change.At the Pacific Film Archive in 1975 I saw every film in a complete Hitchcock retrospective arranged by Tom Luddy who later founded the Telluride film festival. It was at this time that I truly began to understand the difference between film as entertainment and film as art and how the two can merge without contradiction simultaneously satisfying the intellect as well as the need for fun and distraction.Truffaut himself is, of course, a major character in this film with live and still footage of Hitchcock as well. Many stills are shown from the three day interview in Hitchcock's office at Universal studios in 1962 which served as the basis for the book --with Truffaut, Hitchcock and a woman interpreter -- Truffaut didn't know English nor did Hitchcock know French. Yet the master recognized Truffaut as an upcoming talent and a worthy interviewer. The Point is made that they were of different generations but each was cognizant of film as art and respected the other. Although at the time of the interviews, 1962, Truffaut had only made three films, he was already recognized as a major new director of international importance. In a late ceremonial speech at the Hollywood Oscars Truffaut, underlining the respect in which Hitchcock was held in France as opposed to the cretin like lack of respect in America, Truffaut states a bit bluntly: "In America you call him "Hitch" ~~ in France we call him Monsieur Hitchcock!" --To the very end Monsieur Hitchcock wavered between seeing himself as primarily entertainer or primarily artist but there is no doubt that he was most interested in connecting with and manipulating the emotions of the audience. So, in a sense he was above all a master of mass psychology --another point subtly and effectively made in this exceptional study of an exceptional film career.Hitchcock dies on April 29, 1980 at age 81, and most surprisingly Truffaut less than four years later, on October 21, 1984, at the untimely age of 52 of a brain tumor. Hitch's career was over but Truffaut still had untold amounts of offerings in store. His book on Hitchcock and this film about the book and the man behind the book are now part of his deathless contribution to the history of Cinema.

Red-125 Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015) was written and directed by Kent Jones. The movie is a documentary about the two-week period during which the young French filmmaker Francois Truffaut interviewed the older filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock. Truffaut--who greatly admired Hitchcock's work--was writing a book about Hitchcock. It was published in 1966 with the title "Cinema According to Hitchcock."This long interview was sound recorded, but apparently not entirely filmed. So, often we are watching a still while the words are given as voice-over. We see clips of great Hitchcock and Truffaut movies, but usually I couldn't see the relationship between the words and the film clips.Also, Hitchcock spoke English, and Truffaut spoke French, so each was hearing the other person's words through a interpreter. (Obviously, the interpreter was a professional. Still, unless you know both languages well, you can't tell whether each man is hearing the essence of the other man's words.)Most of the movie consists of comments about Hitchcock, Truffaut, and the book given by famous film directors. These include Peter Bogdanovich, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Paul Schrader, and Martin Scorsese.I'm a movie buff, and I've reviewed over 600 movies for IMDb since 1999. However, I don't understand the intricate technical subtleties that film professors teach, and that were discussed in this movie. I felt as if I were outside, looking inside, watching professionals talk about their magic. I would have preferred less talking and more film clips, but director Jones wanted to give us talking heads instead. Of course, the heads that were talking were highly successful movie directors, so it's hard to complain. However, this is a better movie for highly knowledgeable film people. It was interesting enough for my wife and me, but I won't suggest that you seek it out unless you are really versed in cinema.We saw this film at the wonderful Dryden Theatre in the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY. Naturally, because the movies discussed were meant for the large screen, the film clips work better on a large screen. However, the interviews will work just as well on a small screen.

noir-23489 The only section missing in the film is a discussion of the MUSIC in Hitchcock films especially the work and career of BERNARD HERMANN! Neither director touched on the scores for VERTIGO, PSYCHO, or THE BRIDE WORE BLACK. Others like WAXMAN and TIOMPKIN were also neglected! Soundtracks are an integral part of both director's work! Shame on you! Also there was no discussion of the score for TORN CURTAIN! Why no Hermann score and a substitute for one by by John Barry? You can write an entire book on film noir music or THE SOUNDS OF DARKNESS. Think about PSYCHO and the "shower scene" without music. It loses its chilling effect. What about James Stewart hanging from a roof gutter in VERTIGO? And that haunting "love theme" in VERTIGO, when Stewart is following Kim Novak in his car and the crescendo of waves breaking against the shore when they finally embrace? I can cite many more moments where music was crucial to a scene in Hitchcock's work, too many to enumerate here. I just had wished the directors and filmmakers would have discussed this important phase of both director's work. Dr. Ronald Schwartz at www.noir1937@aol.com Manhattan

Brian Camp HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT (2015) offers a documentary treatment of the relationship between the veteran English-born Hollywood director Alfred Hitchcock and the much younger French filmmaker Francois Truffaut and the ambitious series of interviews conducted by Truffaut in 1962 at the Beverly Hills Hotel that resulted in Truffaut's pioneering book, "Hitchcock/Truffaut." (Truffaut asked questions in French, with Helen Scott supplying the translation.) We hear a number of excerpts from the audio recordings of the interviews, usually accompanied by clips from the Hitchcock films under discussion. To supplement all this, director Kent Jones has added archival footage of both Hitchcock and Truffaut and photos of them at work, as well as other archival interviews, including one with Truffaut where he talks about these interviews. In addition, we get new interviews with a number of other Hollywood directors, some of whom were Young Turks when Hitchcock was in the final stages of his career, e.g. Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich and Paul Schrader, who are all now older than Hitchcock was at the time of the interviews, and some of whom are flourishing today, e.g. David Fincher, Richard Linklater, James Gray and Wes Anderson. There is a lot of rich material here that should engage film students, Hitchcock fans, and film buffs in general.In many ways, the film plays like excerpts from a master class on Hitchcock's career. Often we hear Hitchcock's voice describing how he approached a particular scene as the film shows us the scene he's talking about. For instance, we see the overhead long shot from THE BIRDS showing the burning of the gas station and the spreading of the fire to the rest of the town while Hitchcock explains his decision to shoot it that way. He describes the trouble he had convincing Montgomery Clift to look up from the crowd in a scene in I CONFESS in order to justify a cut to something happening above the crowd. We see the famous shower murder in PSYCHO while he is heard describing in detail his approach to composing the scene. Some of the interviewees devote this kind of attention as well, as when Scorsese describes the components of the scene in THE WRONG MAN when the wrongfully accused Henry Fonda first adjusts to his prison cell and we see the scene unfold. The most screen time is devoted to VERTIGO and PSYCHO. Not only do we get Hitchcock's revelations about his working methods and aesthetic decisions on these films, but we get expert commentators such as Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Fincher and Gray.Of the interviewees, the most screen time is given to Scorsese (Jones's mentor) and Fincher, but they all offer significant insights and clearly speak not only from respect and admiration, but a great love for Hitchcock. We also hear from three foreign filmmakers, the French directors Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin, and, from Japan, Kiyoshi Kurosawa. They speak in their own languages, with English subtitles.Having said all this, I am troubled by certain omissions and questions I had that were never answered in the film. For one thing, we are never told whether Hitchcock knew any French at all. He appears to understand Truffaut's questions at times in the audio recordings and answers in English without waiting for a translation. Numerous letters that he wrote to Truffaut are shown and two of them, including the very first one, are in French. Did he write it in French or did he have someone translate it? I needed this spelled out. Which also begs the question of why there's no discussion of Helen Scott and what her background was and why she undertook this task. Truffaut refers to her in a filmed interview as "my collaborator," but that's the only mention she gets in the entire film.Also, Peter Bogdanovich had a friendship with Hitchcock beginning back then and even interviewed the master himself around the same time. Why was this parallel relationship not mentioned? Bogdanovich is in the film and probably talked about it, but only a hint of it remains in his brief clips. And speaking of young directors who worshiped Hitchcock, why is there no discussion of Hitchcock's influence on these filmmakers? Truffaut himself was influenced by Hitchcock (see THE SOFT SKIN and THE BRIDE WORE BLACK), but this is not explored in any detail. Paul Schrader is interviewed and he even wrote the screenplay for Brian De Palma's OBSESSION (1976), a film that owes a great deal to VERTIGO, yet there's no mention of this film nor of De Palma himself, whose films were frequently cited for the debts they owed to Hitchcock. Scorsese's TAXI DRIVER (also 1976 and also written by Schrader) has more than a few Hitchcockian touches yet neither Scorsese nor Schrader bring it up. And both OBSESSION and TAXI DRIVER featured the very last scores by Hitchcock's frequent composer, Bernard Herrmann. Truffaut used Herrmann for two scores himself (THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and FAHRENHEIT 451).Which brings up the film's most egregious omission. Herrmann scored six of the films excerpted in this documentary, with music playing an especially prominent role in the clips from VERTIGO and PSYCHO, yet no one refers to the music or mentions Herrmann by name. I have to assume that his name came up in the interviews, so I wonder why no mention of him made the final cut.I was also bothered by the fact that film clips went unidentified. I can understand that they didn't want to disrupt the flow of the film by having text constantly pop up, but I can't be the only one who couldn't identify the various silent Hitchcock films excerpted. Also, while varying degrees of attention are paid to numerous Hitchcock films not mentioned in this review so far, e.g. SABOTAGE, SABOTEUR, NOTORIOUS, and MARNIE, I am curious as to why the following masterpieces receive little or no mention: REBECCA, SHADOW OF A DOUBT, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, and REAR WINDOW.