Derek Malcolm recommends: Hitchcock 9

This month, the BFI Southbank will show the silent films which made Alfred Hitchcock into the most popular director in the UK, including The Lodger, The Ring and Blackmail
9 August 2013

The only time I interviewed Alfred Hitchcock was in the back of his Rolls-Royce outside the set of Frenzy, his last and by no means his best film. I knew the shoot was in progress and, after about 40 minutes of question and answer, politely asked if I was disturbing things. “Oh no,” he said, “I’ve given them all my instructions. If anything goes wrong, they’ll come out and tell me.”

This was direction by osmosis, as Don Siegel used to say of his Clint Eastwood films. By that time in his life, Hitch knew so exactly what he was doing that he didn’t even have to be there to oversee matters.

The silents Hitch made early in his career have always proved popular, and deservedly so since they are not only highly entertaining but a vital part of the artistic development of the director whom many now regard as the UK’s greatest film-maker.

Films such as The Lodger, The Ring and Blackmail are included in the nine Hitchcock Silents shown at the BFI Southbank this month, are among the very best of British silent movies, and by the end of the Twenties had made Hitch into the most popular director in the UK.

But the fact that they now look so good, freed at last from 80 years of wear and tear and also the scissors of careless distributors, is as major an achievement as the films themselves.

Supported by an international fundraising campaign, the project was by far the largest and most complex to be undertaken by the British Film Archive, an inadequately funded but resilient body responsible for the preservation of hundreds if not thousands of British and foreign films.

Also transforming the films are newly commissioned scores and, in some cases, live piano accompaniments.

Hitchcock 9 is at the BFI, SE1 (bfi.org.uk, 020 7928 3232) until August 31.

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