Word: hitchcocked
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. Simon Oakland, 61, husky, gravel-voiced character actor; of cancer; in Cathedral City, Calif. Best known as the abrasive psychiatrist who provided tidy Freudian explanations for the murders in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Oakland also starred in three TV series (Toma, The Night Stalker, The Black Sheep Squadron) and portrayed a terminally ill cancer patient in the 1977 Pulitzer-prizewinning Broadway play The Shadow...
Until that point, veterans of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) may entertain some hope for Norman, a wan faith in the restorative powers of a 22-year course of state-sponsored psychotherapy from which he has just graduated. Thereafter one knows it is only a matter of time before he reverts to the sharp practices of his youth...
...explain it self. On the other hand, that ending is genuinely surprising and, like much of the rest of Psycho II, it has a certain sly wit about it. Indeed, there is a rather good-na tured air about this not overly scary pic ture, which pays homage to Hitchcock's most famous (but not best) work without trying either to rip it off or knock...
...Hitchcock was a cockney, born in London in 1899, and he had a Victorian fascination with sin and with the delicious precariousness of female virtue. His best films placed a succession of cool, blond actresses in jeopardy, and his pattern of filming became a matter of smothering the goddess of the moment with an incestuous sort of fatherly attention, and of laboring to control every detail of her life. He raged when he was deserted, as he saw it, by Ingrid Bergman after Spellbound and Notorious and by Grace Kelly after Dial "M" for Murder, Rear Window and To Catch...
Author Spoto is too shrewd to imagine, however, that an artist is the sum of his quirks. Hitchcock's brilliance was entangled with his personal grotesqueries, but it was real brilliance. He grew up with the film industry, and at his best gave movies a dazzling visual impudence: the single flash of color in the black-and-white Spellbound, as the pistol of the suicidal villain flares red; the wicked eroticism of Janet Leigh's shower scene in Psycho, a film that, as Spoto points out, takes pains to make the viewer queasily aware of being a voyeur...