Darth by Darthwest

If you have woken up this morning with an almost compulsive need to watch a George Lucas Alfred Hitchcock mashup then look no further.  Director, screenwriter, operator and editor Fabrice Mathieu has come up with this North by Northwest and Star Wars mashup which re-imagines the famous scene where Cary Grant gets fired on by a crop-duster – except it’s not a crop-duster anymore.  Enjoy!

Hitchcock Animated Medley

Are you a fan of the films of Alfred Hitchcock? Then you will no doubt get as much pleasure out of this as I did. This Hitchcock Animated Medley, created by Tim Luecke, features nods to The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Vertigo, The Birds, North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, and Psycho. Plus there’s a great Hitchockian twist at the end…

Hitchcock Assembled

Alfred Hitchcock maintained that cutting, in film editing terms, was something of a misnomer.  In fact, he said that rather than being cut from many different pieces a finished film was in fact assembled.  There is no better example of this than the infamous shower scene in Psycho where Janet Leigh is attacked by a mystery (at that point in the film) assailant.  There were over seventy different pieces of film used in that short sequence, both to heighten the terror of the audience and to box clever with the censors of the day.

This homage to both Hitchcock and Psycho was assembled by Brian Carroll who – appropriately enough – is an editor. He brings together scenes from the movie, excerpts of interviews with the director and Janet Leigh, and combines it with and some pretty nifty editing of the Anthony Hopkins movie Hitchcock to assemble a wonderful impression of how perhaps the greatest pioneer of cinematic suspense got away with it.

The Birds: Hitchcock's Prequel Rediscovered after 47 Years

Alfred Hitchcock was known to experiment with different and new ways of making movies and this is a prime example. When a movie is successful these days there are not only sequels but quite often prequels too. This is just one example - and it looks as if it is going to be just as good as the original. Languising in the vaults for years this could prove to be Alfred Hitchcock's lost masterpiece that the world has been wondering about for so long.

Shot back to back with the original in 1963 Hitchock experimented with this way of making films decades before Peter Jackson did it with The Lord of the Rings trilogy. However, the studio at the time thought that the audience would tire of two films on the same subject and mothballed the project, releasing what they thought would be the more luvrative of the two movies.

Its filming and very existence was clouded in such secrecy that it had almost come to be thought of as simply one of those Hollywood legends until it was recently rediscoverd. Now it has been found again it is hoped that it will gain at least the reputation of the film that was released in its place.