Word: hitchcock
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Directed by ALFRED HITCHCOCK...
...Alfred Hitchcock is 76 now, and the bemused, nightmarish thrillers he has concocted over the years have accomplished more than the director ever intended, perhaps even imagined. Hitchcock will admit to no loftier ambition than entertainment. Nonetheless, his best movies-The Wrong Man, Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds-reach into deep pockets of psychic guilt, creating not only a pleasant, fleeting rush of terror in an audience but also a lingering, fixed anxiety. He is a technical master. But the tense economy of his best scenes, the closely calibrated dynamics of his editing, have also shaped...
Family Plot. (at the Sack Savoy, Boston). Hitchcock at 78 is still better than anyone else, anytime. This film combines dextrous suspense with a broad humor uncharacteristic of Hitchcock's usual perverse sensibilities. Bruce Dern seems to finally ascending to the position as a major American star that has been predicted for him for years. Dern has cornered the market on self-conscious, self-deluding characters; the locus classicus of such types is California which Hitchcock has portrayed as a land of fast-food joints, endless highways and depraved small towns--in other words, accurately...
Frenzy. After a stretch of bombs (Marnie, Topaz, Torn Curtain, it hurts to even list them) Hitchcock came up with this solid, funny, return to the theme which has obsessed him since the beginning of his 53 film career. Blackmail (1929) the first British talkie, dealt with the problem of an innocent man suspected of a murder he, of course, did not commit. Frenzy too, has a nabbed innocent--only by 1973 the crimes shown had grown more lurid and gruesome: rape and strangling (with neckties). Hitchcock seems to be leaning more and more to overt comedy in his second...
Marnie. Since we don't have anything good to say about Marnie we'll let noted Hitchcock authority Robin Wood speak for it. He calls this dismal work "one of Hitchcock's richest, most full achieved and mature masterpieces." There is, it seems, no accounting for taste--after all, Stanley Cavell believes that L'Atalante is one of the greatest films ever made and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences thinks that Milos Forman is a better director than Robert Altman. So go know...