They had faces then. Scary, creepy faces.

Every July I've been blogging about the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, one of the reliable highlights of my year. This year they've given us a lagniappe in the form of an additional three-day festival in June, this one a celebration of Alfred Hitchcock.

Yes, Hitch was young once, not very fat and with a full head of hair. He was also, at the age of 24, directing movies for Gainsborough Pictures. At the age of 27, after the release of The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog, he was pretty generally recognized as Britain's most brilliant director. He made ten movies in the 1920s, before recorded sound took over. Fortunately for us, nine have survived, a remarkable number given that the vast majority of silent movies are gone forever. Starting Friday the 14th, all nine of them will be showing at the splendid, battered, indestructible Castro Theater.

       I've seen only two of the movies previously—or really one and a half, because the version of Blackmail I saw was the talkie, with muffled dialogue sequences jammed in during production (and I have faith that it will be even better with the gorgeous Mont Alto Orchestra accompanying it in its original conception). Both were dazzling and clever and chilling. If the other seven are only half as good as those, they will be fun and rewarding. And if they're not even that good, I know there will be at least those few moments of Hitchcockian ingenuity to make it all worthwhile.
       These movies were quickly made, a few a year, and without Hollywood budgets (which even then were vast in comparison to London budgets). There will be no dangling off the face of Mt. Rushmore or assaults by crop dusters or murderous flocks of birds. Which is a good thing, if you ask me. In this tighter, more intimate frame, he had to exercise his genius for finding the single, riveting, unnerving image. With the dreamlike, almost hallucinatory, quality of silent films, he could bring out that most visceral disquiet stirred by the human face. As I found when I pulled a few images from the movies in the festival:

 

So there will be great images, clever plots, beautiful music, the old magic of the Castro, and that fiercely enthusiastic crowd the festival always brings out. There will also be the presence of the British Film Institute, who saved and restored these movies, raising lots of pleasant memories for me of warm, breezy summer evenings on the South Bank of the Thames. It'll be a good weekend. And then just a month later comes the regular Silent Film Festival. Life is abundant.