Word: hitchcocked
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...influence of the magnificent Alfred Hitchcock is easily discernible in countless films, and impossible to avoid in those of Francois Truffaut. Soft Skin, Truffaut's best film, integrates into its exhausting spontaneity setups from North by Northwest, and Farenheit 451, Truffaut's worst film, slavishly duplicates shot sequences from all Hitchcock's late work, climaxing in a dreadful track-in/zoom-out shot recreating Hitchcock's Vertigo distortion effect. God knows we can all learn from the Master. Nonetheless, Hitchcock-imitation is not one of Truffaut's more endearing stylistic traits and, light years behind his idol in quality, Truffaut...
...Bride Wore Black would appear a step in the wrong direction, Truffaut having subtitled it unofficially his "hommage a Hitchcock," the film directly after publications of the huge Le Cinema Selon Hitchcock now on everybody's coffee table. But the film pleasantly reveals Truffaut as having learnt more and imitating less. Only the music (by Bernard Herrman, composer of Vertigo and five other Hitchcocks), and a few shots (for example, the early close-up of the suitcase, from Marnie) recall specific Hitchcock films, and Truffaut provides instead a carefully crafted film molded around stylistic devices Truffaut reveres as a result...
...BRIDE WORE BLACK. François Truffaut pays a loving and witty tribute to Alfred Hitchcock as he spins the sardonic story of a widow (Jeanne Moreau) bent on wreaking bloody vengeance on her husband's killers...
Truffaut, 36, has described this film as his "homage to Hitchcock." It is indeed filled with echoes of the old mas ter's style: long, slow tracking shots, comic functionaries, vibrant, stinging music. But for the most part, Truffaut is, happily, himself. Even Hitchcock could not stretch so many individual scenes to the limit-and still give them the tensile strength of drop-forged steel. Nor has he the almost Proustian ability to recapture the past in a skein of memories and desires. In its avoidance of a major theme, The Bride Wore Black opts for the minor genre...
...Michelangelo Antonioni. "That is the one director whose sensibilities I cannot get inside," he says, possibly because the aridity of Antonioni's films is diametrically opposite to Truffaut's abiding humanism. Perhaps his favorite cinematic hero became the subject last year of a classic appreciation: Hitchcock, published by Simon & Schuster. A series of interviews by Truffaut, the dialogue is an insightful exchange that says as much about the sensitive disciple as about the witty, deprecating master...