“It’s Only a Movie…”

As mentioned previously, Bernard Herrmann's original score for "Psycho" was recently put up for auction at Bonhams. Unfortunately, it failed to reach the minimum price of £30,000…

Psycho music score fails to sell

The score to Alfred Hitchcock's horror movie Psycho, failed to be sold recently, Bonhams auction house said.

The 20-page work has been withdrawn from a sale after it failed to make its minimum price of £30,000.

The music for the 1960 thriller, starring Anthony Perkins, was composed by Bernard Herrmann.

The manuscript includes the infamous violin sounds used to accompany the scene when actress Janet Leigh is murdered in the shower at Bates Motel.

The scene has become one of the most famous in cinema history and the movie is now considered to be one of Hitchcock's greatest films.

It went on to be nominated for four Oscars, including best director.

Bonhams had hoped the work would sell for up to £40,000 and is now being returned to Herrmann's third wife, Norma.

(BBC News)

If you have £30,000 going spare, you might want to consider putting in a bid for Bernard Herrmann's original score for "Psycho"…

…further details are available on the Bonhams web site.

Here's 36,000 frames from all of the black & white Hitchcock films…

The position of each frame on the circle is determined by two variables:

1) position in the film — frames from the start and end are near the top (12 o'clock) and the frames from halfway through are at the bottom (6 o'clock), etc.

2) the position on the axis — calculated from the average brightness of each frame, with darker frames near the centre, and brighter frames further out.

I've also done the same for individual films. I'm not sure if it's possible to guess the film, but it's interesting to see the differences between them all. They remind me of ink blots and paper chromatography experiments in science lessons

Aficionados of film posters will enjoy Film the Blanks

An ongoing experiment in deconstructing and abstracting film posters. Some famous and some not so famous. Look at the blank, read the clue and take a guess using the comments section.

There's definitely at least 2 Hitchcock film posters on the site… I'm sure you can guess which films they are!

There's something wonderfully surreal and slightly unsettling about many of the Czech and Polish Hitchcock film posters.

(The Birds)

(Psycho)

(Rear Window)

(The Birds & Psycho)

(Frenzy)

(The Birds)

(Rebecca)

(Vertigo)

(Family Plot)

(Hitchcock film festival)

To my mind, they seem to generate the same uneasy feeling that Tom Adams' artwork for his series of Agatha Christie book covers do. As a child, these book covers used to give me the heebie-jeebies!

For Hitchcock fans outside of the UK, here's the (rather scant) coverage of the new Hitchcock documentary "Paul Merton Looks at Alfred Hitchcock" from this week's Radio Times magazine…

Seeing as the documentary was being touted as one of the highlights of the BBC4 Autumn/Winter schedule, I'm surpised the Radio Times didn't do an in-depth feature.

For anyone who's interested, I've just set up an "On This Day in Hitchcoch History" RSS feed:

• http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/rss/onthisday.xml

The feed should give you a list of individual events for the current day.

If you're not seeing the correct day, then you can include an UTC offset to the end of the URL. Just add a comma followed by the number of hours offset you want to add/remove from UTC/GMT – e.g.:

• http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/rss/onthisday.xml,-9
• http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/rss/onthisday.xml,+12

Reading the advert, I'm not 100% sure if the seller is claiming this is the actual car used in the film or not, but the Marreyt Classics web site has a LHD Aston Martin DB 2/4 Convertible up for sale…

Whether or not it was used in the film, it would be the ideal car for a quick weekend jaunt up to Bodega Bay…

The fully retractable hood would come in handy should the local wildlife take a sudden dislike to you

Along with "Paul Merton Looks at Hitchcock", it looks like the BBC is dusting off some other Hitchcock material.

Of particular interest is the 1999 documentary "Reputations". Hopefully BBC4 will also be broadcasting the second episode ("Hitch: Alfred the Auteur") and I'll post details as soon as I get confirmation. This documentary has been broadcast a few times since 1999, but only in an edited version (with about 30 minutes of content removed). By the looks of it, BBC4 will be showing the original 2 hour version!

"Reputations" remains one of my favourite Hitchcock documentaries and it contains a veritable schmorgusboard of interviews with people who worked with him — sadly, many of whom have passed away since 1999.

Title:                Centurions
Broadcast Info:       BBC7, Friday 27 Feb 09, 13:45 (15 mins)
Description:          Alfred Hitchcock - Rear Window: Biographer
                      John Russell Taylor and composer Neil Brand
                      celebrate one of the influential film director's
                      personal favourites.

Title:                The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Broadcast Info:       BBC4, Saturday 28 Feb 09, 19:30 (90 mins)

Title:                Rebecca (1940)
Broadcast Info:       BBC4, Saturday 28 Feb 09, 22:00 (130 mins)

Title:                The Thirty Nine Steps (1935)
Broadcast Info:       BBC4, Sunday 01 Mar 09, 23:00 (85 mins)

Title:                Stage Fright (1950)
Broadcast Info:       BBC4, Monday 02 Mar 09, 23:00 (105 mins)

Title:                Reputations - Hitch: Alfred the Great
Broadcast Info:       BBC4, Monday 02 Mar 09, 00:25 (60 mins)
Description:          Two-part profile of Alfred Hitchcock. This
                      programme traces his life from the streets of
                      suburbia to the boulevards of Hollywood,
                      exploring the childhood influences that turned an
                      overweight loner into the master of suspense and
                      revealing how he came to marry Alma Reville, a
                      tough film professional who was her husband's
                      severest critic and fiercest champion.

More kudos points to Alain for spotting that the new Paul Merton documentary about Hitchcock (which was first mentioned last September) will be broadcast on BBC4 (UK) at the end of this month:

• Saturday 28th February — 21:00 to 22:00
• Sunday 1st March – 22:00 to 23:00

Paul Merton continues his love affair with silent cinema by looking at Alfred Hitchcock's British films – 10 of which were silent.

Paul, who presents and directs the film, regards the master of suspense as a man immersed in the visual language of cinema and who understood how to use camera movement and lighting for dramatic effect.

For Hitchcock, heavily influenced by German Expressionist cinema, the pictures would always be more important than the dialogue.

Combining innovative visual vignettes, stunning clips and archive, Paul weaves together a fascinating narrative of the early career and macabre world of Alfred Hitchcock, revealing a man with a great sense of humour.

Paul talks to those who knew and worked with him, including director Roy Ward Baker (A Night To Remember); Hitchcock's official biographer, John Russell Taylor; and cinematographer Gil Taylor (Dr Strangelove, Star Wars) about working on two Hitchcock films at either end of his career – Number Seventeen in 1932 and Frenzy in 1972.