I saw the silent version recently with an expertly played piano accompaniment that added loads to an, admittedly rather too long, drama. "Alice" (Anny Ondra) has a silly spat with policeman boyfriend "Frank" (John Longden) and then rather foolishly hooks up with an odious artist (Cyril Ritchard) who attempts to push his luck too far and whom she accidentally, rather brutally, despatches. Terrified that nobody would believe her, and rather than call the authorities, she flees the scene - but not before she is spotted and subsequently has to deal with the venal aspirations of her blackmailer (a perfectly cast Donald Calthrop). Meantime, the police get the wrong end of the stick during their investigation and another tragedy ensues - leaving poor old "Alice" riddled with even more guilt! The one thing that takes a bit of getting used to is the really rather static nature of the photography, but once you adopt a perspective that you are in the same seat (in the cinema) as the cameraman then that actually starts to work quite well as we become more immersed in a solid story of fickleness and deceit. The inter-titles are sparing but do all that is necessary to augment Hitchcock's innate ability to tell us a story using the limited technology available in 1929, that capitalises on light, shade, and the environment around the characters. Somehow, I reckon that the talkie version that followed almost immediately would be anywhere near as effective.
A rich woman and a calculating insurance agent plot to kill her unsuspecting husband after he signs a double indemnity policy.
A successful mod photographer in London whose world is bounded by fashion, pop music, marijuana, and easy sex, feels his life is boring and despairing. But in the course of a single day he unknowingly captures a death on film.
A mysterious story of two magicians whose intense rivalry leads them on a life-long battle for supremacy - full of obsession, deceit and jealousy with dangerous and deadly consequences.
A rule-bound head butler's world of manners and decorum in the household he maintains is tested by the arrival of a housekeeper who falls in love with him in post-WWI Britain. The possibility of romance and his master's cultivation of ties with the Nazi cause challenge his carefully maintained veneer of servitude.
Edward Wilson, the only witness to his father's suicide and member of the Skull and Bones Society while a student at Yale, is a morally upright young man who values honor and discretion, qualities that help him to be recruited for a career in the newly founded OSS. His dedication to his work does not come without a price though, leading him to sacrifice his ideals and eventually his family.
Set in a blighted, inner-city neighbourhood of London, Breaking and Entering examines an affair which unfolds between a successful British landscape architect and Amira, a Bosnian woman – the mother of a troubled teen son – who was widowed by the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
A veteran high school teacher befriends a younger art teacher, who is having an affair with one of her 15-year-old students. However, her intentions with this new "friend" also go well beyond platonic friendship.
Scotland Yard investigators have to prevent the murder of Victoria Dickman when her name is found on a death list.
Budapest in the thirties. The restaurant owner Laszlo hires the pianist András to play in his restaurant. Both men fall in love with the beautiful waitress Ilona who inspires András to his only composition. His song of Gloomy Sunday is, at first, loved and then feared, for its melancholic melody triggers off a chain of suicides. The fragile balance of the erotic ménage à trois is sent off kilter when the German Hans goes and falls in love with Ilona as well.
In the 1970s, a young transgender woman called “Kitten” leaves her small Irish town for London in search of love, acceptance, and her long-lost mother.
When a car bomb explodes on the American side of the U.S./Mexico border, Mexican drug enforcement agent Miguel Vargas begins his investigation, along with American police captain Hank Quinlan. When Vargas begins to suspect that Quinlan and his shady partner, Menzies, are planting evidence to frame an innocent man, his investigations into their possible corruption quickly put himself and his new bride, Susie, in jeopardy.