Word: hitchcocked
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Five "new"Hitchcock films reaffirm his box-office magnetism...
...keep a good man down. Like the corpse in The Trouble with Harry who just won't stay buried, Alfred Hitchcock keeps popping out of his grave to terrify and delight new audiences. The puckish shockmaster died in 1980, but his ghost is everywhere. In the bookstores: Donald Spoto's fulsome biography, The Dark Side of Genius, has racked up healthy sales as the latest of a dozen Hitchcock studies. In the news: a Hitchcock documentary on Nazi Germany's extermination of the Jews was aired last December on a national news program in Britain. In museums...
This would merely be the latest spasm of cannibal chic-the recycling of pop-culture artifacts that produces Top 40 homages to the Three Stooges and drag queens in Marilyn Monroe sequins-if it were not for a more significant revival. Five Hitchcock films are back where they belong, in the movie theaters, after 20 years in distribution limbo. Constituting the best and the least of Hitchcock's work during his most productive decade (1948-58), the "forbidden five" are once again demonstrating their director's box-office magnetism. Rear Window (1954), the first of the quintet...
...films offers a chance to fit half-forgotten pleasures (the flashbulb climax of Rear Window, the clashing of cymbals in The Man Who Knew Too Much, the belltower climb in Vertigo) into familiar patterns. But a gratifyingly large part of the audience consists of young people who may know Hitchcock only as the little fat figure with the funereal air who hosted a TV show back in the black-and-white '50s. Until now, their image of the man and his work was that of a brand name without a product. "Hitchcock" might suggest a certain kind of movie...
There are thrills, wit, cinematic legerdemain here. But anyone who expects to find a string of masterpieces will be disappointed. The Trouble with Harry is a desultory exercise in macabre whimsy and naturalistic acting at its most mannered. The Man Who Knew Too Much, a remake (of Hitchcock's 1934 British thriller) that is 45 minutes longer than the original, languishes in travelogue for its first half, then indulges in frissons that for this director are routine. The technical bravado of Rope (the entire 80-min. film comprises just twelve shots, as opposed to several hundred for the average...