Two Hitchcock classics screened with live music in San Francisco on Halloween night
It's Halloween, clearly a time for works by the master of suspense (and jump scares), director Alfred Hitchcock.
On Thursday, Hitchcock films come to the big screen in San Francisco with live music accompaniment at separate presentations sponsored by local cultural institutions.
Grace Cathedral will host a screening of Hitchcock's 1927 silent thriller "The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog," presented by SFJAZZ. Considered by many his breakthrough film, the movie stars Marie Ault, Ivor Novello and June Tripp and is based on a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes. The action centers on a strange lodger at a London boarding house who is eerily reminiscent of Jack the Ripper.
Revered organist Dorothy Papadakos will accompany the film on Grace's 7,500-pipe Aeolian-Skinner organ, which was installed in 1934. A member of the Grammy-winning Paul Winter Consort and former Cathedral Organist of New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Papadakos has accompanied the greatest silent films in venues around the world. The screening and performance begins at 8 p.m. at the church. Tickets are $25-$35. More information is available at www.sfjazz.org. The SFJAZZ Center is also hosting a Halloween-themed concert with renowned Bay Area jazz drummer Smith Dobson leading his quintet through two performances of drumming legend Philly Joe Jones's late '50s classics Blues for Dracula and Showcase in the Joe Henderson Lab.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Symphony serves up arguably Hitchcock's best-known and most beloved masterwork, 1960's "Psycho." The groundbreaking and still shocking slasher classic stars Janet Leigh as scream queen Marion Crane and Anthony Perkins as mild-mannered cross-dressing murderer Norman Bates. Conductor Scott Terrell will lead the orchestra as it performs the unnerving Bernard Hermann score live. While Herrmann and Hitchcock would collaborate on numerous films during a partnership that lasted over a decade starting in 1955, the soundtrack for "Psycho" -- especially the music during the infamous shower scene -- remains one of the composer's most indelible works. The screening begins at 7:30 p.m. at Davies Symphony Hall; tickets and additional information are available at sfsymphony.org.