Word: hitchcock
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...stranger next to you in a bear hug. In this regard, The Shining is strangely flawed. Kubrick's film contains more than two hours of intellectual horror, too much suggestive fear for those audiences hoping for a bood and guts creature form the black lagoon/omen/jaws/prophecy, or even those expecting Hitchcock-like suspense. It demands patience, a susceptibility to delicate suspense, a relish for the ounce of boredom that wafts through a hallway before all hell breaks loose. And even with these allowances, The Shining still lacks a telepathic logic that might make it perfect...
...conscious all this was it is impossible to say. What is clear, looking back over the 53 films Hitchcock made, is that central to his accomplishment was his utterly unforgettable imagery. The boy unknowingly carrying a bomb on the bus in Sabotage; the chases that bring pursuer and pursued to final grips in such unlikely places as the British Museum (Blackmail), the Statue of Liberty (Saboteur), Mount Rushmore (North by Northwest) and on a runaway carrousel (Strangers on a Train). Recall the crows gathering menacingly in a playground behind the unseeing Tippi Hedren in The Birds, or Jimmy Stewart wrestling...
These enduring vignettes all reflect Hitchcock's central preoccupation: the intrusion of the anarchical, the evil, on great symbols of order (such as a society's revered monuments) or on the pleasantly quotidian (amusment park, playground, church, home). Born the son of a lower-middle-class London shopkeeper and reared as a Catholic, Hitchcock discovered early on that original sin was very likely an immutable concept, that bourgeois security was perhaps all too mutable. He never quite got over the shock...
...pages and have every cut and angle planned). His subject might be the desperate improvisations of people whose world had collapsed, but there would be no improvisations on his sets. Surely the director's reverence for order explains the great sighing relief that attended the ending of every Hitchcock film. In his art, at least, he would resolve all ambiguity, banish the encircling darkness...
...idea of happiness, Hitchcock once said, was "a clear horizon, no clouds, no shadows. Nothing." Given a choice, it seems possible that he would have cho sen to live in a blank world rather than a chance universe, where the evil and the unexpected? perhaps they were the same thing to him ? could suddenly crowd in upon one, where everyone knew he was guilty of something, if not necessarily what he was being punished for. It is a measure of his achievement that he lit erally made light of these dark feelings, miraculously transforming them into deft and graceful popular...