Tag: hitchcock

  • Walk of Fame Movie Adventures: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and Edna Best

    Leslie Banks and Peter Lorre in The Man Who Knew Too Much.
    Edna Best in The Man Who Knew Too Much.

    I haven’t seen Hitchcock’s 1956 self-remake of this, but I sure hope it’s better than this. The best thing in the movie is Peter Lorre; he’s an oily ball of creepy charm.

    Composite picture. On the left, a mockup of Edna Best's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. On the Right, a black and white portrait photo of Edna Best.

    This movie has Edna Best’s best-known part as a mother/clay pigeon sharpshooter. Her last movie was 1948’s The Iron Curtain, but she was on radio and television through most of the 1950s.

    Fun Fact: Edna Best’s star is the first one I’ve been able to identify on google maps! And someone is stepping on it- how rude!

    I almost used the poster for the 1956 version for the model of this one, but I thought this was funnier. Certainly harder to lay out!

    A fake poster for THe Man Who Knew Too Much mimicking the poster for The Man Who Fell to Earth.
    Yes, this poster (and the original version) use the same font that Iron Maiden uses.
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  • Classic Movie Pass Adventures – The Birds (1963)

    Stylized image of Tippi Hedren getting attacked by a bird in The Birds. She is shades of green- the bird is shades if red. The background is a negative image of birds on a schoolyard playset.
    Suzanne Pleshette as Annie in The Birds.

    This was playing as part of Alamo Drafthouse’s Queer Theory 101 series. I hadn’t seen it for at least thirty years so I had completely forgotten (or missed) the Melanie/Annie subtext. Watching now, it’s amazing how much more chemistry they have than Melanie and Mitch. If they ever manage to get the remake off the ground, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mitch dies and Melanie & Annie end up together.

    Also: Suzanne Pleshette was a smokeshow, and Rod Taylor looked like a heroic cartoon.

    Today’s fake poster is a lazy pun.

    A fake poster for The Birds mimicking the poster for The 'Burbs.
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  • Retro Movie Pass Adventures: Lost Highway (1997)

    Patricia Arquette and Balthazar Getty in Lost Highway
    Robert Blake as Mystery Man in Lost Highway

    Somehow, David Lynch’s Lost Highway is both more and less realistic than Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Body doubles, body switches, a Mystery Man who appears in multiple places at once, and a linear story told in non-linear time, but it’s still not as weird as a guy dressing up a woman to look like the woman who thought she was possessed by her ancestor and killed herself but then two or three other layers of unlikely weirdness happen.

    Also: it was fun to see Robert Loggia beat up a guy on the closed road I use to ride my bike to Griffith Observatory.

    Today’s poster was such an clear choice that I almost avoided it for being too obvious. Fun fact: The original poster featured an early example of computer graphics. Vertigo was actually the first movie to use computer graphics; Saul Bass used them in the title sequence and on the original version of this poster. They probably took days to render. I made my low resolution substitute in about five minutes with an online programming language for kids called Scratch. The part that took the longest was all the hand drawn lettering. There are Saul Bass homage fonts out there, but I wanted all the letters to be unique.

    A poster for Lost Highway in the style of the poster for Vertigo.
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