"Director: Alfred Hitchcock"

• Rich And Strange | DVD | (28/02/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £6.99

  Mixing silent film techniques with the new element of sound - only one-fifth of the film offers dialogue - Rich And Strange tells the charming story of Fred Hill (Henry Kendall) and his wife Emily (Joan Barry) a small-town British couple who inherit some money from a rich uncle and suddenly decide to take a world cruise. Both however find themselves out of their element and their attempts at extramarital adventures fail miserably. Their newfound sophistication havin

• 3 Classics Of The Silver Screen - Vol. 3 - Woman In Green / Young And Innocent / Man Who Knew Too Much | DVD | (04/10/2004) from £6.09   |  Saving you £-1.10 (N/A%)   |  RRP £4.99

  The Woman In Green: Based on the Conan Doyle short stories 'Adventures of the Empty House' and 'The Final Problem' this film marks the last screen appearance of Professor Moriarty in the Basil Rathbone series. Holmes and Watson must solve the greatest crime wave since Jack the Ripper. A sequence of strange murders baffles the police. Holmes is called onto the scene and discovers the existence of a blackmail ring that uses a female hypnotist to further their skulduggery. Young And Innocent: Hitchcock's favourite film from his 'British period' is a spine-chilling melodrama centring around the murder of a young actress strangled with a raincoat belt - a clue which sets off a chain of life-threatening events. With its superb visual effects black humour and suspense. This is truly vintage Hitchcock. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934: A husband and wife's holiday in Switzerland goes horribly wrong when their daughter is kidnapped leading them into a web of mystery and intrigue...

• Young & Innocent/The Cheney Vase | DVD | (24/07/1999) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £4.47

• Murder | DVD | (24/07/1999) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £4.30

  This 1930 drama was an early field day for Alfred Hitchcock and his evolving ideas about the blurring of opposites: reality and illusion, guilt and innocence, observing and doing, men and women. A rare whodunit in the director's canon, the story of Murder finds a stage actress (Norah Baring) convicted of murdering a female friend. Herbert Marshall stars as a veteran theatre actor and, coincidentally, member of the jury who has grave doubts about the verdict and decides to investigate the crime on his own. His efforts lead him through a world with which he is sufficiently familiar--that of backstage intrigues--and toward what some critics have charged is an unfortunate link between villainy and a gay stereotype. But that limited critique completely misses the playful overlapping of faulty perceptions invited by this movie, in which Hitchcock deliberately confuses us at times about whether the action we're seeing is real or occurring on a stage. Even when the distinction is obvious, thematic echoes bounce wildly between the two, such as an early scene in which policemen observing a play don't realise the solution to the real murder is weirdly foretold in what they're watching. --Tom Keogh

• James Stewart Boxset | DVD | (09/06/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £99.99

  A box set housing a bevy of brilliant Jimmy Stewart films from the Universal vaults. Films Comprise: 1. It's a Wonderful Life (1946) 2. The Rare Breed (1966) 3. Shenandoah (1965) 4. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) 5. Rear Window (1954) 6. Harvey (1950) 7. Destry Rides Again (1939) 8. Vertigo (1958) 9. Night Passage (1957) 10. The Glenn Miller Story (1953) 11. Thunder Bay (1953) 12. Bend Of The River (1952) 13. Winchester '73 (1950) 14. Rope (1948) 15. The Far Country (1954) 16. You Gotta Stay Happy (1948) 17. Vivacious Lady (1938) 18. Airport '77 (1977) 19. Next Time We Love (1936)

• Lifeboat | DVD | (27/03/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £17.99

  Six men and three women. Against the sea. Against each other. Nine survivors of a torpedoed ship awaiting a rescue that may never arrive find themselves in the same boat with one of the perpetrators... Alfred Hitchock's nail-biting guessing game thriller was nominated for 3 Oscars.

• The Skin Game | DVD | (28/03/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £13.99

  An old traditional family and a modern family battle over land in a small English village and destroy eachother. A rich family the Hillcrests are fighting against the spectacular Hornblower who sends away poor farmers to build factories on their land. When mrs. Hillcrest finds out that Chloe Hornclower was a prostitute she uses the secret to blackmail the spectacular and force him to stop his business....

• Jamaica Inn | DVD | (27/06/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £4.30

  It's generally acknowledged that the Master of Suspense disliked costume dramas, and Jamaica Inn--a rip-roaring melodrama drawn from a Daphne du Maurier pot-boiler, set in 1820s Cornwall--is about as costumed as they come. So what was he doing directing it? Killing time, essentially. In 1939 Hitchcock was due to quit Britain for Hollywood, but delays Stateside left him with time on his hands. Never one to sit idle, he agreed to make one picture for Mayflower Productions, a new outfit formed by actor Charles Laughton and émigré German producer Erich Pommer. An innocent young orphan (the 19-year-old Maureen O'Hara in her first starring role) arrives at her uncle's remote Cornish inn to find it a den of reprobates given to smuggling, wrecking and gross overacting. They're all out-hammed, though, by Laughton at his most corseted and outrageously self-indulgent as the local squire to whom Maureen runs for help. Since his star was also the co-producer, Hitch couldn't do much with the temperamental actor. He contented himself with adding a few characteristic touches--including a spot of bondage (always a Hitchcock favourite), and the chief villain's final spectacular plunge from a high place--and slyly sending up the melodramatic absurdities of the plot. Jamaica Inn hardly stands high in the Master's canon, but it trundles along divertingly enough. Hitchcock fanatics will have fun comparing it with his two subsequent--and far more accomplished--du Maurier adaptations, Rebecca and The Birds.--Philip Kemp

• The Man Who Knew Too Much | DVD | (24/05/2004) from £8.38   |  Saving you £-2.39 (-39.90%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Alfred Hitchcock himself called this 1934 British edition of his famous kidnapping story "the work of a talented amateur", while his 1956 Hollywood remake was the consummate act of a professional director. Be that as it may, this earlier movie still has its intense admirers who prefer it over the Jimmy Stewart--Doris Day version, and for some sound reasons. Tighter, wittier, more visually outrageous (back-screen projections of Swiss mountains, a whirly-facsimile of a fainting spell), the film even has a female protagonist (Edna Best in the mom part) unafraid to go after the bad guys herself with a gun. (Did Doris Day do that that? Uh-uh.) While the 1956 film has an intriguing undercurrent of unspoken tensions in nuclear family politics, the 1934 original has a crisp air of British optimism glummed up a bit when a married couple (Best and Leslie Banks) witness the murder of a spy and discover their daughter stolen away by the culprits. The chase leads to London and ultimately to the site of one of Hitch's most extraordinary pieces of suspense (though on this count, it must be said, the later version is superior). Take away distracting comparisons to the remake, and this Man Who Knew Too Much is a milestone in Hitchcock's early career. Peter Lorre makes his British debut as a scarred, scary villain. --Tom Keogh