Word: frightfulness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Such things happen, but in this picture they don't happen in a believable way. There is too much hoke in the violence, too much duh-duh in the dialogue. And the hog stompers, when not actually stomping somebody, are played for cheap laughs as a fright-wigged cast of slum-dumb characters. In real life, man, they are something else...
Freud dealt with noise irritation as a symptom of anxiety neurosis "undoubtedly explicable on the basis of the close inborn connection between auditory impressions and fright." But Freud did not live in a modern apartment. People who do are subject to what Columbia University Urban Planner Charles Abrams calls "a new form of trespass, a new invasion of privacy." The Dickensian poor may have had to make a virtue of propinquity, and the Latin races have historically prized it, but the upper middle classes in the U.S. find unwanted intimacy irritating. Unseen, but all too perfectly heard, are domestic strife...
...Office at the Vatican, where, he recalls, Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani and Giuseppe Cardinal Pizzardo counseled him that the best methods for preserving sexual purity are a good diet and fear of sin. As Abbé Oraison wrote in Le Monde: "Twice Cardinal Pizzardo repeated to me, 'For purity-fright, spaghetti and beans.' " Then Cardinal Ottaviani told the French priest that his book had been placed on the Index of Prohibited Books...
...hell of a fright...
...first time since 1950 (with Stage Fright), Hitchcock has filmed a B-picture script. Screenwriter Brian Moore fails to create a well-motivated plot, or even convincing cloak-and-dagger device. Like most of Hitchcock's "adventure" films, as he describes them, Torn Curtain's script is built around set-pieces: climactic scenes like the Mt. Rushmore sequence in North by Northwest or the music-hall finale in The 39 Steps. But with one magnificent exception, a grisly murder scene that borders on the hilarious, Torn Curtain's set-pieces don't work...