The Lost Hitchcock

The word 'rare' is overused. 'Rare' photographs, 'rare' outtakes'... whenever people talk about archive material, it seems they love it to be akin to a lightly bruised steak.

There can't surely be such a thing as a rare film by the single more famous film-maker ever, but even the silent ones are at least commercially available. Yet, there's one film that, currently, qualified as rare. Waltzes from Vienna was made by Hitchcock under some duress - it really wasn't his kind of picture at all and he later told Francois Truffaut that he made it during his 'lowest ebb'.

When I was commissioned to co-write a book about Hitch, I wanted to make sure that I'd actually seen the films. This might sound obvious, but I know of a couple of authors who've written extensively about material that they'd not bothered to watch, which is why certain errors get passed on from book to book. One film, The Mountain Eagle, is lost - the last remaining print of it disintegrated decades ago (Hitchcock pragmatically didn't seen too upset by this development, describing the film as 'awful').

A trip to the USA gave me the opportunity to pick up almost all of his silent films and a few early talkies, but after five months one film eluded me. Waltzes from Vienna has, to date, never been released commercially and as far as I'm aware has never been shown on television. The only way I could see it was to rent time with a stack of film reels and a moviola.

It's by no means a great Hitchcock film; there are few of the directorial flourishes we associate with him even in this early period. But it's entertaining enough, telling the story of how Strauss the younger finally won the respect and admiration of his father.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, and thanks to various differences in American copyright law, you can actually watch the film at Archive.Org. But if you've managed to collect all of his other works, you'll find a hole where Waltzes from Vienna should be.

Today, I made the first approach to someone who might be in a position to rectify this. Let's see how far this campaign goes.

The Power of Crisps Compels Me

I recently caught up with Paul Schrader's version of the prequel to The Exorcist, the film that was then remade by Renny Harlin - the version I'd already seen.

Harlin's version was rubbish, but I'm sorry to say the Schrader version was the greater sinner - it was just boring.

Thank the deities for Joe Ahearne, whose Apparitions concluded this week. Intelligent, philosophical, gory and bloody terrifying in places, it's the Exorcist sequel I really wanted.

Bearing in mind I'm a massive fan of the third Exorcist film, and the novel that inspired it, William Peter Blatty's Legion, I was surprised by how well Martin Shaw fell into the role and how universally excellent the supporting cast was. In particular Rick Warden, who was so sympathetic as Michael, and so unsettling as the demonic version.

I won't sleep tonight... It's Exorcist III all over again...

Snakes in a Cinema

I used to go to an art-house cinema in Liverpool city centre. I'd been told it has once been a popular venue for fans of (ahem) 'skin-flicks', and I was never really sure if they'd changed the carpet since the hand-over because it always felt a bit crunchy. For about two years I went to see loads of French, Spanish and Italian films, became pretty familiar with the back catalogues of Daniel Auteil, Gerard Depardieu and Pedro Almodovar and saw loads of older classics (saw Taxi Driver more times than is probably healthy).

Now that I live in London, the equivalent is the NFT. Until very recently I'd only seen about two films there in ten years and almost never used my allocation of freebies that I get as a member of the BFI. But a friend and I have managed to catch a couple of really mixed films there recently and I'm hoping we can continue to frequent the place as it's very friendly, comfortable, and as the films we go to see tend to be a bit obscure there's always room for a good stretch. And my mate's good company too, and loves his films so that's another incentive.

I mention this because there's another art-house cinema near to where I live. The Ritzy in Brixton manages to straddle art-house and popular films so well that last night as I joined a massive queue, I was worried that they were going to sell out of tickets for Snakes on a Plane only to discover that a) there were plenty of available seats and b) everyone was queueing to see Volver, Pedro Almodovar's latest, which was being shown in Screen One.

Snakes on a Plane was on Screen Five.

Now, I want to see Volver too, but I was surprised that the screen wasn't more than half full and that Snakes was in such a tiny screen for a film only on release for a weekend. Okay, it's a dumb B-movie exploitation flick, but by GOD it's effective. Maybe it's the venue, but the audience seemed in just the right mood for it, shrieking in the right places, laughing out loud at the fate of one passenger and giving one line of dialogue an enthusiastic round of applause. I've only seen this kind of reaction at corporate premieres and American cinemas, so this really helped make the film even more enjoyable.

If I get the time, I'd like to see Volver there, but somehow I can't imagine Carmen Maura being quite as cool as Samuel L. Jackson. He's so cool, he can wear a beret and not make you think of Frank Spencer.