Actors in Movies

The Birds (1963)

In The Birds, right after stopping in the street to respond to a boy’s wolf whistle, Tippi Hedren goes into a pet store. As she enters, out comes Alfred Hitchcock, along with two dogs.

The dogs were apparently Hitchcock’s own, although for director’s pets, they weren’t particularly well trained. Despite their fleeting screen time, one of the dogs still finds time to stop and look right at the camera:

The Ladykillers (1955)

The original 1955 Ealing film of The Ladykillers featured Alec Guinness as the leader of a band of robbers who find their plans scuppered by Mrs Wilberforce, an elderly widow. Alec Guinness also appears in a second, minor role in the film.

There’s a photograph on Mrs Wilberforce’s wall of her late husband, a captain who went down with his ship 29 years before. The picture is actually of Alec Guinness in his role as The Admiral in the earlier film Kind Hearts and Coronets (see below)—although you’ll notice that they must have doctored the portrait in order to reduce his rank.

Zelig (1983)

There isn’t much film footage of author F. Scott Fitzgerald around, so it’s always a treat to see him crop up in Woody Allen’s 1983 faux-documentary comedy Zelig.

He appears near the beginning, as one of the first people to take notice of Zelig’s mysterious personality alterations. There doesn’t seem to be much information available about where the footage is originally from, but according to a page on the University of South Carolina’s website (which also includes some streaming audio of Fitzgerald reading), what he’s actually writing in the clip is:

Everybody has been predicting a bad end for the flapper, but I don’t think there is anything to worry about.

There’s another brief clip of F Scott Fitzgerald here:

Arrivée des Congressistes à Neuville-sur-Saône (1895)

In 1895, the Lumière brothers took their camera to a meeting of the Congress of Photographic Societies. They filmed the members’ arrival at the conference, and then developed the footage and showed it to them that afternoon.

Although these were the very early days of film, the reaction of the subjects to the camera doesn’t seem all that different to the way people react today: some stare, some studiously ignore the camera’s presence, some pause to wave and show off, while others hurry past, head down.

As Arrivée des Congressistes à Neuville-sur-Saône is now in the public domain, you can watch it for yourself below.

(These early films tend to have a variety of names; this site uses the ones suggested by the British Film Institute.)

If.... (1968)

When Malcolm McDowell was preparing for his role in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, he wasn’t sure how to play the character. He turned for advice to Lindsay Anderson, the director of If…., which had launched McDowell’s film career a couple of years earlier.

Anderson reminded him of a close-up from If…., in which McDowell’s character Mick Travis walks into a gym where he’s due to be beaten. It’s a great shot, perfectly capturing the combination of defiance and vulnerability that make up Travis.

“That’s how you play Alex,” Lindsay Anderson told McDowell. And so he did.

(According to McDowell’s comments on the dommentary track for If…., he never told Kubrick that he’d taken the character direction from another director…)