Alfred Hitchcock Changed My Life
I was born in ’75 so I’m the tail end of Gen X. Growing up in the UK in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s was very different to life today: no internet, no mobiles, no streaming, no cable TV. There were three TV channels (four, after the unoriginally-titled Channel 4 launched in 1982) and films were regularly shown in black and white.
Black and white was boring. Black and white was old. I wanted colour. I wanted new films.
And then, one evening in the summer holidays of 1990 (7th August, to be precise), we had popped in to see my grandparents. As my mother chatted to them I channel hopped looking for something my fifteen-year old self wanted to watch. A film was starting at six on BBC2, and because channel hopping doesn't take long when you only have four options, I started to watch The Lady Vanishes.
After ten minutes I wasn’t bored. I was laughing at the genuinely witty dialogue. Ten minutes after that I was intrigued by the two blatant attempts to kill Miss Froy. And then she vanished. As Robert Donat and Margaret Lockwood searched that train for the missing governess I was utterly hooked.
I could write at length about The Lady Vanishes – it’s my favourite film of all time. It’s witty, it’s clever, it’s exceptionally well-plotted and it changes genre completely every half hour. Without you even noticing. It’s a film designed entirely to appeal to an audience, and it works – even now. Despite being made and set in 1938 almost nothing about the film has dated: it feels modern even now, and the fifteen-year-old me found that compelling.
I have never looked back. My interest in cinema exploded from that point on and I was open to everything: every genre, every style, every era, with a particular fascination for the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
Hitchcock directed two WWII French shorts and, being a completist, I wanted to see those. I bought them on VHS and they were the first subtitled foreign films I ever saw. At around the same time I caught a late-night showing of the Spanish short film La Cabina. I won’t spoil the film in case you ever get the chance to see it (Radiance are releasing it on Blu-ray very shortly), but it starts off as amusing and gradually becomes less and less amusing before descending into outright horror. I enjoyed it so much (once I got over the ending) that suddenly, the thought of watching a whole film with subtitles wasn’t as daunting as it had been.
All of which is a lengthy way of explaining why my unusually big collection has such a large number of films and TV not in the English language, and why I had a head start on the Terrible Idea. It also begins to explain (well, it offers a vague origin story) why I would find the idea of a film from every country around the world so intriguing in the first place.
I linked to my full collection listed with the handy Invelos database in the last post. From that, I have produced a list of the 47 countries I can already check off (here) which leaves an outstanding 166.
I started with 213 and am already down to 166. This is going to be easier than I think, isn’t it.