Word: hitchcocked
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...Under Capricorn realizes the best romantic trends of late forties and early fifties Hitchcock. It's an example of the change to dramas with few characters, and to a style which makes their relations almost tangible. The love-relations between Under Capricorn's characters become sweeping camera movements attached mainly to Ingrid Bergman...
...Under Capricorn rises above most previous Hitchcock largely because it deals with neurosis and obsession. The advent of these themes in Hollywood during the late forties and fifties led to masterpieces from most of America's greatest directors: Hawks's Red River. Sirk's Written on the Wind. Ford's The Searchers, most of Ray. Frank Borzage is especially illuminating. His extremely strong, even deterministic way of shooting people's actions had always outweighed the romantic and sentimental conception of personality beneath his plots. The addition of an obsession with murder to a desperate love in Moonrise...
...Hitchcock's character delincations had always been sick, so for him Freudian notions were no great breakthrough. He merely began to construct his films like popularized case histories. His characters became illustrations of abstract psychological types: his plots became schemes of sexual interrelations. Observation of characters became an unimportant meanse of description; chance mannerisms and incidents disappeared. His formal control increased, but his tendency to neat plotting gave this advance the feeling of excessive design...
...Psycho may be the ultimate in Hitchcock's fewcharacter dramas: it starts with one character, leses her in finding another, and follows him to the picture's end. But this character is observed, not determined. Perkin's magnificent performance, not Hitchcock's camera motions and edtting, shapes our feeling about him. An extraordinary mobile camera follows the characters isto their natural settings, their homes, instead of isolating them in unfamiliar places...
...Hitchcock's usual superiority to his characters gives way to a character study. Despite Perkins's supposed psychological complexity, we know him through his charming mannerisms, his strong moral opinions, his reactions to other people. Hitchcock abandons a manipulative shooting style for one that is simply assured. From the opening sequence, a series of pans over Phoenix succeeded by a track into a dark hotel window, one feels a solid engagement with the character's personal situations. The people of the film exist in the world, not in relation to some abstract scheme intended for moral edification...