Actors & Directors
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Madeleine Carroll
- Percy Marmont
- Robert Young
- Peter Lorre
- John Gielgud
Run time: 83 min.
Price: £3.48
Review Alfred Hitchcock's Secret Agent [1936] (REGION 1) (NTSC) / Diamond Entertainment Corp.:One of Alfred Hitchcock's finest pre-Hollywood films, the 1936 Secret Agent stars a young John Gielgud as a British spy whose death is faked by his intelligence superiors. Reinvented with another identity and outfitted with a wife (Madeleine Carroll), Gielgud's character is sent on assignment with a cold-blooded accomplice (Peter Lorre) to assassinate a German agent. En route, the counterfeit couple keeps company with an affable American (Robert Young), who turns out to be more than he seems after the wrong man is murdered by Gielgud and Lorre. Dense with interwoven ideas about false names and real identities, about appearances as lies and the brutality of the hidden, and about the complicity of those who watch the anarchy that others do, Secret Agent declared that Alfred Hitchcock was well along the road to mastery as a filmmaker and, more importantly, knew what it was he wanted to say for the rest of his career. -Tom Keogh One of Alfred Hitchcock's finest pre-Hollywood films, the 1936 Secret Agent stars a young John Gielgud as a British spy whose death is faked by his intelligence superiors. Reinvented with a new identity and outfitted with a wife (Madeleine Carroll), Gielgud's character is sent on assignment with a cold-blooded accomplice (Peter Lorre) to assassinate a German agent. En route, the counterfeit couple keeps company with an affable American (Robert Young), who turns out to be more than he seems after the wrong man is murdered by Gielgud and Lorre. Dense with interwoven ideas about false names and real identities, about appearances as lies and the brutality of the hidden, and about the complicity of those who watch the anarchy that others do, Secret Agent declared that Alfred Hitchcock was well along the road to mastery as a filmmaker and, more importantly, knew what it was he wanted to say for the rest of his career. -Tom Keogh.
Actors & Directors
- Percy Marmont
- Madeleine Carroll
- John Gielgud
- Peter Lorre
- Robert Young
- Alfred Hitchcock
Price: £13.63
Review Secret Agent (1936) (REGION 1) (NTSC) / Platinum Disc Corportation:One of Alfred Hitchcock's finest pre-Hollywood films, the 1936 Secret Agent stars a young John Gielgud as a British spy whose death is faked by his intelligence superiors. Reinvented with another identity and outfitted with a wife (Madeleine Carroll), Gielgud's character is sent on assignment with a cold-blooded accomplice (Peter Lorre) to assassinate a German agent. En route, the counterfeit couple keeps company with an affable American (Robert Young), who turns out to be more than he seems after the wrong man is murdered by Gielgud and Lorre. Dense with interwoven ideas about false names and real identities, about appearances as lies and the brutality of the hidden, and about the complicity of those who watch the anarchy that others do, Secret Agent declared that Alfred Hitchcock was well along the road to mastery as a filmmaker and, more importantly, knew what it was he wanted to say for the rest of his career. -Tom Keogh One of Alfred Hitchcock's finest pre-Hollywood films, the 1936 Secret Agent stars a young John Gielgud as a British spy whose death is faked by his intelligence superiors. Reinvented with a new identity and outfitted with a wife (Madeleine Carroll), Gielgud's character is sent on assignment with a cold-blooded accomplice (Peter Lorre) to assassinate a German agent. En route, the counterfeit couple keeps company with an affable American (Robert Young), who turns out to be more than he seems after the wrong man is murdered by Gielgud and Lorre. Dense with interwoven ideas about false names and real identities, about appearances as lies and the brutality of the hidden, and about the complicity of those who watch the anarchy that others do, Secret Agent declared that Alfred Hitchcock was well along the road to mastery as a filmmaker and, more importantly, knew what it was he wanted to say for the rest of his career. -Tom Keogh.
Release date: 2004-07-23
Price: £27.95
Review Alfred Hitchock (NTSC) / Alfred Hitchcock:
Release date: 2003-05-13
Run time: 526 min.
Price: £602.96
Review Wrong Men & Notorious Women: Five Hitchcock Thrillers 1935-1946 (REGION 1) (NTSC) / Alfred Hitchcock:
![Review St. Clair Entertainment / Classic Hitchcock [2008] (REGION 1) (NTSC)](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51P%2BOaJRSDL._SL160_.jpg)
Release date: 2008-02-19
Run time: 898 min.
Price: £4.09
Review Classic Hitchcock [2008] (REGION 1) (NTSC) / St. Clair Entertainment:
Release date: 2004-02-03
Run time: 350 min.
Price: £13.95
Review Alfred Hitchcock: 4 Tales of Suspense (REGION 1) (NTSC) / Alfred Hitchcock:
Release date: 2004-07-23
Run time: 242 min.
Price: £90.24
Review Alfred Hitchcock: Young and Innocent/The Cheney Vase/Sabotage/The Lodger (NTSC) / Alfred Hitchcock:
![Review Universal Pictures UK / Foreign Correspondent [1940]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41CAYRBAQPL._SL160_.jpg)
Actors & Directors
- George Sanders
- Joel McCrea
- Herbert Marshall
- Albert Bassermann
- Laraine Day
- Alfred Hitchcock
Run time: 115 min.
RRP: £14.99
Price: £3.44
Review Foreign Correspondent [1940] / Universal Pictures UK:The first of Alfred Hitchcock's World War II features, Foreign Correspondent was completed in 1940, as the European war was only beginning to erupt across national borders. Its titular hero, Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea), is an American crime reporter dispatched by his New York publisher to put a fresh spin on the drowsy dispatches emanating from overseas, his nose for a good story (and, of course, some fortuitous timing) promptly leading him to the "crime" of fascism and Nazi Germany's designs on European conquest. In attempting to learn more about a seemingly noble peace effort, Jones (who's been saddled with the dubious nom du plume Hadley Haverstock) walks into the middle of an assassination, uncovers a spy ring, and, not entirely coincidentally, falls in love-a pattern familiar to admirers of Hitchcock's espionage thrillers, of which this is a thoroughly entertaining example. McCrea's hardy Yankee charms are neatly contrasted with the droll English charm of colleague George Sanders; Herbert Marshall provides a plummy variation on the requisite, ambiguous "good-or-is-he-really-bad" guy; Laraine Day affords a lovely heroine; and Robert Benchley (who contributed to the script) pops up, albeit too briefly, for comic relief. As good as the cast is, however, it's Hitchcock's staging of key action sequences that makes Foreign Correspondent a textbook example of the director's visual energy: an assassin's escape through a rain-soaked crowd is registered by rippling umbrellas, a nest of spies is detected by the improbable direction of a windmill's spinning sails, and Jones's nocturnal flight across a pitched city rooftop produces its own contextual comment when broken neon tubes convert the Hotel Europe into "Hot Europe". -Sam Sutherland.
Release date: 2001-11-05
Price: £2.48
Review Man Who Knew Too Much/39 Steps (REGION 1) (NTSC) / Alfred Hitchcock:
Actors & Directors
- Madeleine Carroll
- John Gielgud
- John Stuart
- Jill Esmond
- Peter Lorre
- Alfred Hitchcock
Price: £9.99
Review Alfred Hitchcock Presents Vol.2 / Great Music Co.:
Release date: 1999-11-15
RRP: £49.99
Price: £49.99
Review The Alfred Hitchcock Collection - Psycho / Marnie / The Birds / Rope / Vertigo / Universal Pictures UK:
![Review Madacy / The Man Who Knew Too Much [1934] (REGION 1) (NTSC)](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51eJnrYHB0L._SL160_.jpg)
Actors & Directors
- Leslie Banks
- D.A. Clarke-Smith
- Edna Best
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Pierre Fresnay
- George Curzon
Run time: 84 min.
Creator: Arthur Benjamin
Price: £11.95
Review The Man Who Knew Too Much [1934] (REGION 1) (NTSC) / Madacy:
![Review Universal Pictures UK / Torn Curtain [1966]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/417E9C13MWL._SL160_.jpg)
Actors & Directors
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Paul Newman
- Julie Andrews
- Lila Kedrova
Run time: 122 min.
RRP: £14.99
Price: £4.95
Review Torn Curtain [1966] / Universal Pictures UK:Paul Newman and Julie Andrews star in Torn Curtain, what must unfortunately be called one of Alfred Hitchcock's lesser efforts. Still, sub-par Hitchcock is better than a lot of what's out there, and this one is well worth a look. Newman plays cold-war physicist Michael Armstrong, while Andrews plays his lovely assistant-and-fiancée Sarah Sherman. Armstrong has been working on a missile defence system that will "make nuclear defence obsolete", and naturally both sides are very interested. All Sarah cares about is the fact that Michael has been acting awfully fishy lately. The suspense of Torn Curtain is by nature not as thrilling as that in the average Hitchcock film-much of it involves sitting still and wondering if the bad guys are getting closer. Still, Hitchcock manages to amuse himself: there is some beautifully clever camera work and an excruciating sequence that illustrates the frequent Hitchcock point that death is not a tidy business. -Ali Davis.
![Review ITV DVD / Hitchcock Classics - The Man Who Knew Too Much / The 39 Steps [1934]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41GS325FMCL._SL160_.jpg)
Actors & Directors
- Peter Lorre
- Robert Donat
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Leslie Banks
- Edna Best
- Madeleine Carroll
Run time: 150 min.
RRP: £14.99
Price: £14.99
Review Hitchcock Classics - The Man Who Knew Too Much / The 39 Steps [1934] / ITV DVD:
![Review Warner Home Video / I Confess [1953] (REGION 1) (NTSC)](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51u47b2x83L._SL160_.jpg)
Actors & Directors
- Montgomery Clift
- Charles Andre
- Brian Aherne
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Anne Baxter
- Nan Boardman
Run time: 94 min.
Creator: Dimitri Tiomkin
Price: £4.93
Review I Confess [1953] (REGION 1) (NTSC) / Warner Home Video:As a somewhat tortured Roman Catholic, Alfred Hitchcock jumped at the chance to direct this loose adaptation of Paul Anthelme's 1902 play Nos Deux Consciences, which brings together his twin obsessions of spiritual guilt and murder. The ingenious premise concerns a priest, Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift), who hears a killer's confession, but can't break his vow of silence and report the crime, even when suspicion falls upon himself. The film was partly shot in Quebec City (where the story is set), and the camera lingers lovingly over the sumptuous architecture. Yet it may be that Hitchcock was happier working within the confines of a studio, for he takes a low-key approach that never quite delivers on the anticipated thrills. In his defence, the production appears to have been extremely troubled. The script (credited to George Tabori and William Archibald) went through numerous rewrites, largely because the Catholic Church objected to a sub-plot involving Father Logan's ambiguous relationship with Ruth Grandfort (Ann Baxter), a woman who loved him in his pre-cassock days. This romantic angle was doubtless a concession to the box office, but it merely bogs down the suspense while remaining undeveloped in itself. And according to the gossip, Hitchcock couldn't make head or tail of his star, Clift's improvised Method acting being utterly foreign to a control freak who planned each camera movement in advance with elaborate storyboards (it didn't help that the angst-ridden Monty drank heavily during the entire shoot). For whatever reason, the priest's dilemma comes across as a clever gimmick rather than a genuine moral crisis. Perhaps on some hidden level, the director felt more in sympathy with the murderer (whose wife is named Alma, the same as Hitchcock's own wife). [+]The movie is a failed experiment that belongs in the "interesting" category. Still, it's worth checking out, especially if you've seen the 1995 French Canadian film The Confessional, which incorporates the location shooting of I Confess into its plot. -Peter Matthews.
![Review Alfred Hitchcock / Alfred Hitchcock: The Collection 1 [1939] (NTSC)](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51RTQZ65GZL._SL160_.jpg)
Release date: 1999-07-24
Price: £94.93
Review Alfred Hitchcock: The Collection 1 [1939] (NTSC) / Alfred Hitchcock:
![Review Madacy / Alfred Hitchcock Collection, Vol. 1: Sabotage [1936] (REGION 1) (NTSC)](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/511P5E99WQL._SL160_.jpg)
Actors & Directors
- John Loder
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Joyce Barbour
- Desmond Tester
- Sylvia Sidney
- Oskar Homolka
Run time: 76 min.
Price: £33.83
Review Alfred Hitchcock Collection, Vol. 1: Sabotage [1936] (REGION 1) (NTSC) / Madacy:This classic among Hitchcock's British movies of the 30s draws, unusually for him, on the work of a major writer for its source-Joseph Conrad's tale of seedy London-based espionage, The Secret Agent. Not that Hitch and his screenwriter, Charles Bennett, kept much of Conrad's novel beyond the bare bones of the plot. Verloc, an anarchist (played with appealing melancholy by Oscar Homolka), runs a South London fleapit cinema as a cover for his political activities. (In the original it's a porno bookstore-Hitch clearly thought the cinema was the nearest the censor would pass. ) His young wife (the sad-eyed Sylvia Sidney) knows nothing of his undercover assignments. She's devoted to her naïve younger brother, and when Verloc involves the lad in his schemes the results are catastrophic. The cast also features a young hero, a police detective woodenly played by John Loder, but Homolka and Sidney, as the sadly mismatched couple held together only by need, are unfailingly watchable as the brooding domestic atmosphere darkens towards tragedy. The trademark Hitchcock tension is well in evidence, though Hitch later reckoned he committed a "grave error" in letting one nail-biting scene end with the death of a sympathetic character (and a cute puppy). Though the film was shot almost entirely on studio sets, the director drew on his own Cockney childhood to create a wonderfully shabby, down-at-heel milieu of grubby London backstreets where the reek of gas lamps and rotting vegetables on the cobbles is all but palpable. -Philip Kemp.
![Review BCI, a Navarre Corporation Company / Blackmail [1929] (REGION 1) (NTSC)](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51B20DK3MYL._SL160_.jpg)
Actors & Directors
- Joan Barry
- Donald Calthrop
- Harvey Braban
- Johnny Butt
- Sara Allgood
Run time: 86 min.
Creator: John Hubert Bath
Price: £27.35
Review Blackmail [1929] (REGION 1) (NTSC) / BCI, a Navarre Corporation Company:
Actors & Directors
- John Gielgud
- Peter Lorre
- Robert Young
- Percy Marmont
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Madeleine Carroll
Price: £10.82
Review Laugh Track: Secret Agent [1936] (REGION 1) (NTSC) / York Home Video:One of Alfred Hitchcock's finest pre-Hollywood films, the 1936 Secret Agent stars a young John Gielgud as a British spy whose death is faked by his intelligence superiors. Reinvented with another identity and outfitted with a wife (Madeleine Carroll), Gielgud's character is sent on assignment with a cold-blooded accomplice (Peter Lorre) to assassinate a German agent. En route, the counterfeit couple keeps company with an affable American (Robert Young), who turns out to be more than he seems after the wrong man is murdered by Gielgud and Lorre. Dense with interwoven ideas about false names and real identities, about appearances as lies and the brutality of the hidden, and about the complicity of those who watch the anarchy that others do, Secret Agent declared that Alfred Hitchcock was well along the road to mastery as a filmmaker and, more importantly, knew what it was he wanted to say for the rest of his career. -Tom Keogh One of Alfred Hitchcock's finest pre-Hollywood films, the 1936 Secret Agent stars a young John Gielgud as a British spy whose death is faked by his intelligence superiors. Reinvented with a new identity and outfitted with a wife (Madeleine Carroll), Gielgud's character is sent on assignment with a cold-blooded accomplice (Peter Lorre) to assassinate a German agent. En route, the counterfeit couple keeps company with an affable American (Robert Young), who turns out to be more than he seems after the wrong man is murdered by Gielgud and Lorre. Dense with interwoven ideas about false names and real identities, about appearances as lies and the brutality of the hidden, and about the complicity of those who watch the anarchy that others do, Secret Agent declared that Alfred Hitchcock was well along the road to mastery as a filmmaker and, more importantly, knew what it was he wanted to say for the rest of his career. -Tom Keogh.
Actors & Directors
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Lilian Hall-Davis
- Antonia Brough
- Gordon Harker
- Ruth Maitland
- Maud Gill
Run time: 97 min.
Creator: Alfred Booth
Price: £3.47
Review The Farmer's Wife [1928] (REGION 1) (NTSC) / Westlake Entertainment Group:
| Models & Brands:
Alfred Hitchcock's Secret Agent [1936] (REGION 1) (NTSC), Secret Agent (1936) (REGION 1) (NTSC), Alfred Hitchock (NTSC), Wrong Men & Notorious Women: Five Hitchcock Thrillers 1935-1946 (REGION 1) (NTSC), Classic Hitchcock [2008] (REGION 1) (NTSC), Alfred Hitchcock: 4 Tales of Suspense (REGION 1) (NTSC), Alfred Hitchcock: Young and Innocent/The Cheney Vase/Sabotage/The Lodger (NTSC), Foreign Correspondent [1940], Man Who Knew Too Much/39 Steps (REGION 1) (NTSC), Alfred Hitchcock Presents Vol.2, The Alfred Hitchcock Collection - Psycho / Marnie / The Birds / Rope / Vertigo, The Man Who Knew Too Much [1934] (REGION 1) (NTSC), Torn Curtain [1966], Hitchcock Classics - The Man Who Knew Too Much / The 39 Steps [1934], I Confess [1953] (REGION 1) (NTSC), Alfred Hitchcock: The Collection 1 [1939] (NTSC), Alfred Hitchcock Collection, Vol. 1: Sabotage [1936] (REGION 1) (NTSC), Blackmail [1929] (REGION 1) (NTSC), Laugh Track: Secret Agent [1936] (REGION 1) (NTSC), The Farmer's Wife [1928] (REGION 1) (NTSC) |
