Celebrate Hitchcock’s 125th Anniversary with Hitchcock: The Beginning, a new Special Edition 11 Disc Blu-ray Box Set from Studiocanal Vintage Classics.
Born in London in 1899 and Jesuit-educated, Alfred Hitchcock’s first job was with an electrical company, where art school training enabled him to draw technical advertisements. He subsequently designed title cards for silent films after joining the fledgling industry in the early twenties. Hitchcock rapidly acquired a thorough grounding in all aspects of early filmmaking, including writing, design and direction. From the age of sixteen, he had taken a serious interest in cinema and found himself most influenced, both technically and visually, by the early masters of silent film: Griffiths, Murnau and Fritz Lang.
Hitchcock directed his first feature film, The Pleasure Garden, in Germany in 1925 and received immediate critical acclaim. By the age of twenty-seven, with several successes behind him, he was regarded as one of the most promising young film directors in Europe, with a reputation for being a patient, polished, highly intelligent director who showed more subtlety and imagination in his work than most of his contemporaries.
His wife, Alma Reville, born in the same year as Alfred, had been working in the film industry for 5 years when they met in 1920 at Gainsborough Studios, and she made a significant contribution to his early films, working on-screen adaptations, casting, scouting locations, plotting camera angles and checking rushes. Apparently, Hitchcock required every film in his oeuvre to have Alma’s final seal of approval before being finished.
Celebrating the 125th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s birth, Studiocanal’s new Hitchcock: The Beginning Special Edition 11 Disc Blu-ray Box Set explores his early works. For the first time on Blu-ray in the UK, featuring new restorations and scores, viewers can experience 10 of the cinematic legend’s early masterworks. From the silent film era to the first talkies, the 11-disc Blu-ray box set also contains a newly commissioned documentary, BECOMING HITCHCOCK, exploring the director’s first sound picture, BLACKMAIL, plus a 64-page booklet and poster.
Hitchcock’s silent films, including THE RING (1928), THE FARMER’S WIFE (1929) and CHAMPAGNE (1928), were greeted with great enthusiasm by critics and were heralded as evidence that British films had reached an international standard of artistry. Hitchcock’s final silent film, THE MANXMAN (1930), was also a considerable commercial success. In 1929, Hitchcock directed BLACKMAIL, the first British sound feature, hailed as a film which “used sound and dialogue with more flair and imagination than any Hollywood or European film of the time.” Hitchcock’s inventive, expressionist use of sound demonstrated that the new technology opened a realm of possibilities.
In the wake of BLACKMAIL, he searched for new challenges. These included adaptations of two high-profile plays, JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK (1930) and THE SKIN GAME (1931), plus two more thrillers, MURDER! (1930) and NUMBER SEVENTEEN (1932), and an intriguingly odd marital drama, the appropriately titled RICH AND STRANGE (1932). A must-own collectors set for film enthusiasts everywhere, Hitchcock: The Beginning is available to pre-order now.
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