Word: gothically
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...comic Bergman comes as rather an odd twist to those who have been brought up on Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal. It is hard to conceive of the careful perpetrator of Gothic terror making effective use of slapstick--yet this is exactly what he does in the funniest scenes of the film. At one point (in one of many flashbacks) the young gynecologist interrupts his best friend's wedding with the news that he is going to marry his best friend's betrothed. The action begins with a furniture-throwing brawl between the bride elect and her drunken groom...
Psycho. Perhaps overly gruesome, and directed with an unusually heavy hand, this Hitchcock thriller nevertheless adds up to an expertly gothic nightmare...
CEREMONY IN LONE TREE, by Wright Morris (304 pp.; Atheneum; $4), is set in the barren Nebraska plains country, where the author stalks his favorite game -the "Sears Roebuck Gothic" Midwesterners with souls imprisoned like "buzzing flies" in "God's cocoon." Morris has been compared variously to Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, even Mickey Spillane, but in this, his 13th book, he sounds more like a kind of slick-paper Nathanael West, without that gifted writer's savage humor. His story is wired to the tangled nerve ends of the collection of oddballs and misfits who stumbled...
CINEMA Psycho. Perhaps overly gruesome and directed with an unusually heavy hand, this Hitchcock thriller nevertheless adds up to an expertly Gothic nightmare...
...nightmare that follows is expertly gothic, but the nausea never disappears. Little should be said of the plot-Hitchcock enjoins all viewers to be silent-except that Anthony Perkins, who plays an amateur taxidermist, is sickeningly involved, and that a blow is dealt to mother love from which that sentiment may not recover. Director Hitchcock bears down too heavily in this one, and the delicate illusion of reality necessary for a creak-and-shriek movie becomes, instead, a spectacle of stomach-churning horror...