Word: hitchcocked
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...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...
...French railway station a woman bids goodbye to a friend. Then she boards the train-and sneaks out on the other side of the platform. A classic Hitchcock opening for a film that is missing only one vital ingredient: Alfred Hitchcock. In the maestro's place, however, is his greatest disciple, Director Francois Truffaut, who considers Hitchcock "an artist of anxiety" to be placed alongside Kafka...
...Unlike Hitchcock's films, Bride has no overriding buildup of tension leading to a climactic finish. Instead, Truffaut provides a whole series of suspenseful crescendos-and finds voluptuous revelations and eerie beauty in each one of them. Under his low-keyed, meticulous direction, all the murdered men give subtle performances that would do credit to Giraudoux. Out standing is Michel Bouquet, pathetic yet loathsome as a pawky, balding bachelor who cannot believe his good fortune when a mysterious beauty comes to his shabby room with a bottle of strange-tasting liqueur. Scarcely less memorable is Charles Denner, a painter...
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...