Word: hitchcocked
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...DARK SIDE OF GENIUS: THE LIFE OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK...
...word genius is good for starting arguments but bad for book titles, unless the books are about Mozart. To insist that Film Director Alfred Hitchcock possessed this incandescence is simply to ensure a lot of windy exception taking. Yes, he was devilishly clever, but was there not a crippling contempt for human emotions and possibly for film making in his mechanical manipulation of viewers...
Such grumbling to one side, Donald Spoto's account of Hitchcock's life is a vivid and perceptive portrait of a man whose character was as strange and shadowed as his films. He took a sexual kind of satisfaction in food and managed to pack as much as 365 Ibs. on a 5-ft. 8-in. frame. He had a deep terror, which he transmuted superbly into film, of policemen and jails. Making a good story of it, he said that this fear originated when, at the age of six, "I did something that my father considered worthy...
Lorre complained, on the set of The Man Who Knew Too Much, that a suit had been ruined, Hitchcock had another one sent to him, beautifully tailored in the same material but cut to infant size. Spoto reports that Hitchcock Enjoyed the power that his position as director gave him to control and humble women. When a script required an actress to be dunked in water, as with Kim Novak's fake suicide in Vertigo, he would shoot the take over and over...
...played sentimental men-about-Europe, most notably the Marseille shopkeeper in Broadway's Fanny (1954), for which he won a Tony Award; by his own hand (he shot himself); in Flower Hill, N.Y. His most memorable film role was that of the deceitful U-boat captain in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), but he may be better known today as Ronald Reagan's co-star-with a chimp-in the 1951 Bedtime for Bonzo...