Word: hitchcock
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LAST WEEK Alfred Hitchcock ascended his last staircase at age 80. He defined suspense in the cinema, playing with his audience's expectations, sustaining nearly unbearable levels of tension for reel after reel until everything exploded in one of his legendary roller-coaster "sequences"--the crop-dusting scene in North by Northwest, the shower scene in Psycho, the amusement park in Strangers on a Train, the back of the potato truck in Frenzy--you could go on and on. His films were really comedies, from the sick joke of Psycho to Cary Grant's "Wait a minute, fellas...
Nobody used a subjective camera like Hitchcock, and no one could turn the camera back on us with so much contempt. Hitchcock was a moralist who said, "You like this, don't you?" The biggest joke in Hitchcock's films is that we're all guilty of something, call it "original sin"--we are at very least voyeurs. We all have a Bruno or Norman Bates in us and sooner or later someone's going to find out. Hitchcock's films were ridden with symbols--staircases, mothers, skinny blondes, birds, windows; it was a code that viewers happily followed from...
...always was an authoritarian film director and, on television, an acerbic mystery-show host. But advancing age has banked some of the old fire, and at 80, Sir Alfred Hitchcock is likely to be, as Chaucer put it, "a verray parfit gentil knight." Hitchcock's name as Knight Commander of the British Empire appeared on Queen Elizabeth II's New Year's honors list, the only show-biz personality knighted this year. Fittingly, he received formal notification of the honor at a ceremony in the commissary at Universal City Studios. Why, Hitchcock was asked, had it taken...
...report published in the journal Surgery, Gynecology & Obstetrics, Dr. Harry Goldsmith, a surgeon at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Hanover, N.H., admits his theory is based on hearsay and circumstantial evidence. In 1963, while a resident at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, he attended a lecture by George Pack, a renowned cancer specialist. Pack told the audience that Dr. Frank Lahey, founder of Boston's famed Lahey Clinic, had confided to him that he had seen Roosevelt in early 1944 as a consultant and discovered that the President had a spreading tumor. Lahey had so informed Roosevelt...
...these things; he limits himself to lighter moods. Conscious that his comedy doesn't do justice to the world around him, he won't permit himself to generalize. The airs of Yacowar's flimsy elevated prose exactly betray this caution. Yacowar has written a worthwhile book about Hitchcock's British Films - we need books about Hitchcock, since it's dismally current for people to think of him as 'the master of suspense,' the public property, grand and genial. Most film criticism tends to be dull, especially the kind which tries to give a prose version of the film. This...