Word: hitchcock
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...injured, and MacLaine went out a chorus girl and came back a star. Producer Hal Walk's was in the audience the night MacLaine first stepped in and soon signed her to a multiyear movie contract. Within months she had been cast in her first picture, Alfred Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry (now playing around the country in re-release). By 1969 she was one of Hollywood's highest paid stars, commanding a salary of $800,000 or more a picture...
...risky for a viewer to sweep too many thematic generalizations into this dusty pile of celluloid. Indeed, a cynic would declare that the only thing this quintet has in common is Hitchcock's greed. The film maker always had an acute eye for commerce. He worked in an economically reliable genre with the industry's biggest stars. He would agree to dump a longtime collaborator like Composer Bernard Herrmann (who worked on eight Hitchcock films from 1955 to 1964) if the studio applied pressure. And when asked why he withheld these five films from theaters...
There is no contradiction between Hitchcock' canny conservatism and his directorial eminence profit and honor went hand in glove. Even his brief cameo appearances (silhouetted in the neon skyline of Rope, for example) are a playful cue to the viewer to watch every frame for tricks and revelations. The qualities that made him the world's best-known moviemaker were precisely the ones that made him one of the best film artists...
...only a movie," he could fulfill his ambition to create "pure cinema": the manipulation of universal emotions by camera placement, shot duration, the dramatic use of color, sound and editing. As two future film makers, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, wrote of the director in 1957, "In Hitchcock's work, form does not embellish content, it creates it." Hitchcock, less interested in universal theories than in the international box office, put his artistic aims more matter of factly: "The Japanese audience should scream at the same time as the Indian audience...
Where there is an exhibitionist there must also be a voyeur; in Hitchcock's world they make a perfect sadomasochistic pair. In Rear Window it is a salesman-killer (Raymond Burr) and a photographer with a broken leg (Stewart) who ives across the courtyard. This roving lensman may be immobile for the moment, but he knows how to extract meaning from pictures-and there is something wrong with this one. He turns amateur detective and puts his "leg man" (Kelly) at risk digging holes in a mysterious garden, clambering into second-story windows, even confronting Mr. Bad. Early...