Word: hitchcockian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...members of the Jaws supporting cast (Murray Hamilton, Lorraine Gary, Jeffrey Kramer). But the crucial elements of the original have vanished: there is no wit, no genuine terror and no cinematic dazzle. The first Jaws was made by Steven Spielberg, a virtuoso director with a Hitchcockian ability to whip an audience into a frenzy of simultaneous delight and horror. Jaws 2 seems to be the work of a computer that has been programmed by the same drones who used to manufacture Universal Pictures' disaster movies...
...theme is Hitchcockian: a demonstration of the way private sexual obsession has a way of spilling over into public, with murderous consequences (Vertigo). There are innocent bystanders drawn dangerously into a closely woven criminal web (The Man Who Knew Too Much). Even the murder that is the film's central incident-a perhaps too ghastly knifing-reminds us of the famous shower-bath murder in Psycho, as does a splendid, spooky score by that film's masterful composer, Bernard Herrmann. More important than these specific references to glories past, however, is the Hitchcockian discipline De Palma brings...
...takes a lot of gumption these days to make a film that does not pander to youthful passion, express the abysmal views of a gloomy philosopher-director or explore assorted perversions in nude, sweaty detail. Particularly risky is the idea of filming an old-fashioned Hitchcockian murder mystery in all its creaking intricacy. That is precisely what French Director Rene Clement (Forbidden Games, Gervaise) has done in Rider on the Rain...