Word: fright
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Barba Katsikogianni, 89, said: "I was president of this village in 1913. I was president when the Italians came and my old woman got a bad heart from fright. I was president when the Germans came to find the British officers we were hiding; and I was president last year when the goat-thieves [guerrillas] came to drag me up to Helicon . . . [He was saved when the Communists fled before an approaching army unit.] Lots of the young ones who were up there are back in the village now. Two of them-Danos and Georgios -were with...
...Stage Fright (Warner) is a comedy melodrama that most moviemakers could be proud of. For Director Alfred Hitchcock, who must compete with his own overpowering reputation, it is something less. Far superior to his recent, blighted Under Capricorn, it is hardly in the running with such oldtime Hitchcock classics as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes...
Never a man to make things easy for himself, Director Hitchcock has tried in Stage Fright to work within the discipline of a tricky story conceit: his heroine (Jane Wyman) plays romantic nip & tuck simultaneously with a suspected murderer (Richard Todd) and the Scotland Yard man (Michael Wilding) who is tracking him down. Hitchcock exploits the situation as much for chuckles as for chills. The result is an entertaining show, handsomely produced against a London background, studded with effective scenes and enlivened by an excellent cast that includes an uncannily young and beautiful Marlene Dietrich and able British Comedian Alistair...
Even so, coming from the director who once doted on torturing his audiences with suspense, it is a disappointing film. At its best, melodrama should gull the spectator into believing what he sees, if only while he is seeing it. In working out Stage Fright's intriguing premise, Hitchcock tortures his story more than his audience, burdens them both with too obvious a load of improbabilities...
...tries for more laughs than it gets, the comedy is funny enough to give the script its major distinction. But the fun no longer serves the shrewd purpose to which the director put it in The Lady Vanishes, where it lent extra point to the suspense. In Stage Fright the humor is mainly incidental, and pursued at enough length to slacken the story's tension...