Murder! The Movie
Last week I started wondering when the first talking movie came out. I figured that 1930 must be close, and then I started to wonder how many movies came out that year. I went to Wikipedia, and it listed something like 40-50 films, so I thought maybe it would be interesting to watch *all* of the movies from 1930 to get a little idea about film history. 40-50 films didn't really seem like a realistic number, though, and so I went to imdb.com and figured out how to pull up a list of all the films from that year. I was blown away to discover that there are something like 2300+ films for 1930! Ok, so I won't be watching all of the films from that year. Not that I even could. I started poking through the list and came across several entries that had absolutely no information. I read somewhere else that a lot of older films have been lost, which might be the case with the empty listings that I ran across. From a historical perspective, I think that's tragic.
So, I changed my idea from watching all films from 1930 to watching some films, and the first on the list was Murder! by Alfred Hitchcock. I am actually not that familiar with his style, and I am not a film student or anything, but I tried to watch the movie while paying attention to camera angles, scenes, music and anything else. Some of the reviews on the film talk about how it is slow, and I suppose it is, but I was fascinated by how the camera lingered on the actors faces all throughout the movie. I think this was especially effective when the character Fain comes into the movie at the end. The lack of music and the slow camera shots create a sort of sense of foreboding. Then at the end, there is a famous circus scene, which truly was effective and probably particularly horrifying at that time. This film also debuted the technique of allowing the audience to hear a character's thoughts. Since they didn't have the technology to do a voiceover, they ran a tape of the actor reciting his lines in the background while they filmed him looking at himself in the mirror, contemplating the court case that he had been on. We take things like voice overs for granted these days, but little innovations like this were big deals back when this medium got started. Anyway, this was not Hitchcock's first film, so I think I will go back to something even earlier. Maybe I'll do a study of Hitchcock. Now I am wondering why I didn't major in film studies. Eh!
My next film Night Nurse from 1931, featuring Barbara Stanwyck and Clark Gable. Can't wait!! I think Barbara Stanwyck is awesome, and Clark Gable isn't bad either.
So, I changed my idea from watching all films from 1930 to watching some films, and the first on the list was Murder! by Alfred Hitchcock. I am actually not that familiar with his style, and I am not a film student or anything, but I tried to watch the movie while paying attention to camera angles, scenes, music and anything else. Some of the reviews on the film talk about how it is slow, and I suppose it is, but I was fascinated by how the camera lingered on the actors faces all throughout the movie. I think this was especially effective when the character Fain comes into the movie at the end. The lack of music and the slow camera shots create a sort of sense of foreboding. Then at the end, there is a famous circus scene, which truly was effective and probably particularly horrifying at that time. This film also debuted the technique of allowing the audience to hear a character's thoughts. Since they didn't have the technology to do a voiceover, they ran a tape of the actor reciting his lines in the background while they filmed him looking at himself in the mirror, contemplating the court case that he had been on. We take things like voice overs for granted these days, but little innovations like this were big deals back when this medium got started. Anyway, this was not Hitchcock's first film, so I think I will go back to something even earlier. Maybe I'll do a study of Hitchcock. Now I am wondering why I didn't major in film studies. Eh!
My next film Night Nurse from 1931, featuring Barbara Stanwyck and Clark Gable. Can't wait!! I think Barbara Stanwyck is awesome, and Clark Gable isn't bad either.