Becoming Hitchcock Festival on TCM Jan. 15 & 22

By Sean Axmaker

January 15 and 22 at 8pm | 11 Movies

BECOMING HITCHCOCK, PART 1 (Times ET)
8:00 PM Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of
Blackmail (2024)
9:15 PM Blackmail (1929) (silent version)
11:00 PM Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of
Blackmail (2024)
12:15 AM Blackmail (1929) (sound version)
2:00 AM Murder! (1930)
4:00 AM The Skin Game (1931)

Before Alfred Hitchcock became a worldwide sensation for directing some of the greatest and most recognizable thrillers ever made in Hollywood, he honed his craft and his cinematic obsessions in England. He rose from the ranks of set designer and graphic artist to the director's chair, eventually making his mark as Britain's most celebrated director with such classics as The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). While these films are hardly unknown to American audiences—they have been revived in retrospectives and released on excellent home video editions—they are only the tip of the iceberg of his British output. The dozen features he made between Blackmail (1929), his first sound feature, and Jamaica Inn (1939), his final British production before heading to Hollywood, reveal a filmmaker constantly innovating, challenging himself, searching for new and different ways of cinematic expression in every arena, from revealing character to creating suspense to crafting haunting images that suggest terrors left offscreen.


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BECOMING HITCHCOCK, PART 2 (Times ET)
8:00 PM The Man Who Knew
Too Much (1934)
9:30 PM The 39 Steps (1935)
11:00 PM Sabotage (1936)
12:30 AM Young and Innocent (1937)
2:00 AM The Lady Vanishes (1938)
3:45 AM Becoming Hitchcock:
The Legend of Blackmail (2024)
5:00 AM Foreign Correspondent (1940)

Wednesday, January 15: Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of Blackmail (2024) delves into this fecund, and often unexplored, period to examine and identify the origins of the style and themes that defined such films as Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958) and North By Northwest (1959), to cite just a few.

Filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau spent decades documenting film and filmmakers both on screen and in print, from some of the most illuminating behind-the-scenes documentaries and featurettes produced for TV and special edition discs to the limited series documentary Five Came Back (2017) and feature documentaries Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind (2020) and Faye (2024), with Oscar-winning actress Faye Dunaway. But he has always held a special interest in Hitchcock. His feature-length documentary The Making of 'Psycho' (1997) was the first of dozens of projects that explored the films by the Master of Suspense, and Bouzereau’s 2010 book "Hitchcock, Piece by Piece" is guided by the themes and ideas that recur through his long career.

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Wednesday, January 22: The second night of the series opens with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), the film Hitchcock once called "the real start of my career." The story of a British family tangled up in an assassination plot was Hitchcock's first international thriller featuring innocents caught up in the intrigue of spies and killers. He delivers two magnificent set pieces—an assassination attempt in London's Royal Albert Hall (which Hitchcock managed to create without ever taking the company into the venue) and a stand-off that snowballs into a massive shout-out on the streets of London. It's also the English language debut of Peter Lorre, who was newly arrived in England and hardly spoke a word of English when he was cast. You'd never know from his performance and Hitchcock was so taken with Lorre that he kept expanding the role during production. Not only was it a hit in England, it was Hitchcock's first sound film to find success in America, and he remade it 20 years later with a bigger budget, a larger canvas and two of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood: James Stewart and Doris Day.

Read more: https://www.tcm.com/articles/Programming%20Article/021960/becoming-hitchcock-and-early-hitchcock-festival