Alfred Hitchcock boxing picture sounds the bell at Film Forum as part of massive festival celebrating the Master of Suspense
THE RING (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Sunday, March 23, 3:00, Monday, March 24, 7:30, and Sunday, May 4, 3:30
The Complete Hitchcock: February 21 – March 27
The Hitchcock 9: February 21 – May 4
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
When one thinks of Alfred Hitchcock, such psychological thrillers as North by Northwest, Psycho, Vertigo, Notorious, and Rear Window come to mind, not The Manxman, Easy Virtue, The Pleasure Garden, and The Farmer’s Wife. But it is these early, British silent films that are the focus of Film Forum’s “The Hitchcock 9,” which is part of the larger series “The Complete Hitchcock,” consisting of every other picture Sir Alfred made, including those abovementioned films. The dual festival features DCP restorations of nine romantic melodramas made by the Master of Suspense, each one with live musical accompaniment by pianist Steve Sterner. The series continues with 1927’s The Ring, a tantalizing tale of a love triangle set in the world of boxing, a favorite sport of Hitchcock’s. When Bob Corby (Ian Hunter) shows up at a county fair and takes a liking to Mabel (Lillian Hall-Davis), who sells tickets to see her fiance, “One-Round” Jack Sander (Carl Brisson), battle all comers for a cash prize, Corby decides to get in the ring with Sander to impress Mabel; little do they know that Corby is a professional. Soon the two men are also fighting outside the ring, to win the heart of their beloved. Comic relief is supplied by Gordon Harker as Jack’s trainer, who makes some very funny faces throughout. One can see Hitchcock’s visual style emerging in The Ring, as he employs little dialogue in favor of dramatic montages, ghostly superimpositions, and shadowy lighting. The intriguing work, produced at Elstree Studios and the first film to be released by Gainsborough Pictures, also deals with issues of class and financial success, themes that will become prevalent in much of Hitchcock’s oeuvre.
Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture is a brilliantly rendered look back at the director’s childhood in Cambodia just as Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge began their reign of terror in the mid-1970s. “I seek my childhood like a lost picture, or rather it seeks me,” narrator Randal Douc says in French, reciting darkly poetic and intimately personal text written by author Christophe Bataille (Annam) based on Panh’s life. Born in Phnom Penh in 1964, Panh, who has made such previous documentaries about his native country as S21, The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell and wrote the 2012 book L’élimination with Bataille, was faced with a major challenge in telling his story; although he found remarkable archival footage of the communist Angkar regime, there are precious few photographs or home movies of his family and the community where he grew up. So he had sculptor Sarith Mang hand-carve and paint wooden figurines that Panh placed in dioramas to detail what happened to his friends, relatives, and neighbors. Panh’s camera hovers over and zooms into the dioramas, bringing these people, who exist primarily only in memory, to vivid life. When people disappear, Panh depicts their carved representatives flying through the sky, as if finally achieving freedom amid all the horrors. He delves into the Angkar’s propaganda movement and sloganeering — the “great leap forward,” spread through film and other methods — as the rulers sent young men and women into forced labor camps. “With film too, the harvests are glorious,” Douc states as women are shown, in black-and-white, working in the fields. “There is grain. There are the calm, determined faces. Like a painting. A poem. At last I see the Revolution they so promised us. It exists only on film.” It’s a stark comparison to cinematographer Prum Mésa’s modern-day shots of the wind blowing through lush green fields, devoid of people.
Loosely based on a Noël Coward play that was recently made into a film starring Colin Firth, Jessica Biel, and Kristin Scott Thomas, Alfred Hitchcock’s Easy Virtue is another of the Master of Suspense’s cleverly told melodramas, a risqué tale of a woman unfairly placed in a lurid situation. Isabel Jeans stars as Larita Filton, a loving wife whose husband, Aubrey (Franklin Dyall), has commissioned her portrait by painter Claude Robson (Eric Bransby Williams). Just as Claude makes a play for Larita, she fights him off and Aubrey walks in. He misinterprets the scene, shots ring out, the artist is dead, and Claude files for a highly publicized divorce case in which Larita is found guilty of misconduct. Trying to put her notorious past behind her, she heads for the Mediterranean, where she meets John Whittaker (Robin Irvine), a wealthy mama’s boy who falls instantly in love with her and brings her back to his parents’ country estate. But once there, Whittaker’s nasty mother (Violet Farebrother) and conniving sisters (Dacia Deane and Dorothy Boyd) do everything they can to ruin the relationship, seeking to uncover Larita’s history while also attempting to put her son back together with longtime family friend Sarah (Enid Stamp Taylor). Easy Virtue, which features yet another Hitchcock blonde, is a gripping film about honesty, reputation, individuality, and character as an innocent woman is forced to face undeserved consequences in the superficial world of high society. Hitchcock, who makes his cameo holding a walking stick, gliding past Larita while she sits by a tennis court, includes several wonderful touches involving circles and ovals, from a close-up of a judge’s wig to a shot through a tennis racket’s strings to a dining room dominated by a group of elongated, haloed saints on one wall. Easy Virtue is also one of Hitchcock’s dourest silent melodramas, lacking any comic relief as a wronged woman desperately tries to right her life. Easy Virtue is screening on March 4 at 6:45 as part of the Film Forum series “The Hitchcock 9,” with live piano music by Steve Sterner. “The Hitchcock 9” continues through May 4 with Blackmail, The Pleasure Garden, Champagne, The Farmer’s Wife, The Ring, Downhill, and The Manxman (all featuring Sterner on piano), in conjunction with “The Complete Hitchcock,” which runs through March 27 and includes all of Sir Alfred’s feature narratives. In addition, the Paley Center will be hosting 
Orson Welles followed up the creepy black-and-white Holocaust thriller,