Alfred Hitchcock: The Early Years

Alfred Hitchcock did not simply emerge from the primordial cinematic ooze a fully-formed filmmaker, in the mid-1950s, to create classics like Rear Window, Vertigo, and North by Northwest. Indeed, by that time Hitch had been directing pictures in Europe and the U.S. for nearly thirty years, over the course of which he developed his signature style and formulated his thematic approach to filmmaking.

While this class does not venture all the way back to Hitchcock's German films of the 1920s, it does cover some of the director's better known British work, such as The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938), as well as his initial forays into Hollywood. These include his very first American film, Rebecca (1940), and the underappreciated Spellbound (1945), a tale of psychoanalysis and murder, with sequences designed by Salvador Dal. Both productions were supervised by David O. Selznick, the man who brought Hitchcock over from Englandand then nearly sent him back.

These early pictures (all of which will be screened in the theater) contain some of the elements for which Hitch would later become famous: (blonde) women in trouble, danger in everyday places, Machiavellian matrons, and of course, his iconic cameosdespite being made by the Master of Suspense when he was but a craftsman.