Restored by HFPA

Director Alfred Hitchcock considered Shadow of a Doubt his finest film and confirmed it many times in interviews with François Truffaut, Mike Douglas and Dick Cavett. In Laurent Bouzereau’s 2000 documentary Beyond Doubt: The Making of Hitchcock's Favorite Film, Hitchcock’s daughter, Patricia, says the reason is that “he loved bringing the menace into a small town, into a family that never had any bad things happen to them.

The poster has a glamorous blonde woman smiling over her bare shoulder, and the caption reads: “It’s for tonight, darling, in Istanbul.

In the 1970s, Italian film Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto), a police chief kills his kinky mistress while they are making love, then leaves clues of his guilt, daring his colleagues to charge him with the crime. Gian Maria Volontè, in his most famous role as the nameless chief of the homicide division of Rome’s police force, is a charismatic sociopath driven to crack down on the anarchists participating in the riots roiling Rome.

Released two years after D. W.

In the pressbook for Born to Be Bad that was sent to exhibitors and theater owners to help them publicize the film, the headline on the first page read “Heartless, Glamorous Huntress of Men, Their Hearts, Their Wealth: Trapped in Her Own Pitfalls, Victim of Greed and Rashness. ” The taglines for the film’s posters were equally bodice-ripping – “Baby-faced Savage in a jungle of intrigue!” and “Man-Bait! Trouble never came in a more desirable package!” featuring a photo of Joan Fontaine posing provocatively in a slinky red strapless gown.

After his stint in the US Armed Forces as a fighter pilot during the last years of WWII where he chalked up more than 50 bombing missions, Robert Altman spent twenty years writing scripts, directing industrials and episodic television, first in Kansas City and then in Hollywood. Success came late in his career – he was 45 when he won the Palme d’Or for M*A*S*H* in 1969, his greatest works still ahead of him.

After he conducted “The Red Shoes Ballet” in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes, renowned conductor Sir Thomas Beecham suggested to the two directors that they do an entire filmed opera for their next project. According to Photoplay magazine from March 1951, he told Pressburger, “If you ever thought of putting opera on the screen as you have ballet, you might well consider Tales of Hoffmann .

“He used me like a Kleenex and then threw me away. ” That was how Jean Seberg described director Otto Preminger’s treatment of her after she starred in two of his movies.

Exactly 60 years ago, an unusual film opened at the Venice film festival. Smog had been filmed entirely in Los Angeles, a somewhat singular distinction for a time in which production mainly flowed in the opposite direction, with big American studios frequently filming sword-and-sandal epics at the famed Cinecittà studio (productions were so common that they came to be nicknamed “Hollywood on the Tiber).

John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley will forever be known as the film that beat Citizen Kane at the 14th Academy Awards on February 26, 1942. Perhaps it was the relentless campaign against Kane by William Randolph Hearst and his newspaper empire, but the film considered the greatest of all time only came away with one win that night – Original Screenplay for Welles and Herman Mankiewicz.