Word: hitchcocked
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Amazing Stories takes prime-time TV not so much back to the future as forward to the '50s, when series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone invited viewers on a different adventure of the imagination each week. Because Spielberg has enlisted such directors as Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Clint Eastwood, Paul Bartel and Peter Hyams (Mr. E.T. will direct two of his own the first season), each of the Stories promises a distinctive style. Hyams' episode boasts sepulchral lighting and tension as taut as piano * wire; Bartel's is a slapstick black comedy; Spielberg's two shows...
Amazing Stories may not be an instant hit; with the exception of the Walt Disney series, no anthology show has finished in the Nielsen Top 25 since Alfred Hitchcock Presents a quarter-century ago. But it could blaze trails, or at least reopen them. With this show Spielberg is attempting to transform the weekly series from a comfortable habit to an event worth anticipating and savoring. Each Sunday night at 8, a new baby movie, with a spooky story, feature-film production values and, often as not, a distinctive visual style. One of Spielberg's own episodes, an hourlong drama...
...same, the drama we would miss would no doubt be riveting. Evil is riveting. From watching Hitchcock we know of the perverse, and fully human, enjoyment that comes from looking evil dead in the eye. But when the evil is real and the suffering actual, that enjoyment is tinged with shame, the kind of shame one experiences when exposed to pornography...
...produced by the Hungarian George Pal) or grandiose melodramas like Written on the Wind (directed by the Dane Douglas Sirk) or effervescent comedies like Some Like It Hot and The Apartment (both directed and co-written by the Austrian Billy Wilder) or the sleek thrillers of London-born Alfred Hitchcock. Audrey Hepburn, from Belgium, was crowned princess of the box office; Cary Grant, from Bristol, was still the monarch of masculinity. Everyone was so assimilated that you couldn't spot the immigrants without a security check. American films, once an obsession, were now an agreeable habit, as the rest...
...bets until three special investigators it had hired had checked the authenticity of all the material at hand. Norbert Sakowski, Bunte's deputy editor in chief, said that he was convinced the documents were genuine, "but I can't rule out the possibility that it might be a Hitchcock plot...