Word: hitchcocks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sequence reveals the tenor of the girl's growth. She has gone to the town library just at closing time to check on her uncle's possibly criminal past. As she finds the relevant newspaper, Hitchcock cuts to a shot from the ceiling of the dark deserted room, showing her surrounded by space seventy feet below. Unlike the usual Hitchcock high-angle, this shot expresses with a sort of warm detachment the romantic dimension of her personal anguish. The same attitude follows her and her uncle through the darkening stages of a deep love-attachment. Throughout they are true personalities...
...Under Capricorn realizes the best romantic trends of late forties and early fifties Hitchcock. It's an example of the change to dramas with few characters, and to a style which makes their relations almost tangible. The love-relations between Under Capricorn's characters become sweeping camera movements attached mainly to Ingrid Bergman...
...more speculative analysis some films reveal the preoccupations of entire periods of his career. Those that do so the most likeably are the east manipulated. Almost all of Hitchcock's films feel excessively structured, designed to make the audience draw the morals he intends. Only in a few does his subject balance his frightening formal control and let the characters seem real individuals. Hitchcock's audience-manipulation, involving an attitude of superiority toward his viewers, generates the unpleasant feeling that his characters merely illustrate a narrow moral design-Hitchcock's. Only in Shadow of a Doubt, Under Capricorn, and Psycho...
...HITCHCOCK'S British and early American films seem well-made and not very personal. Their thematic preoccupations-guilt or accusation of guilt, sexual re??rsesion, voyeurism-are roughly those of his later films, but they never take over these films. One sees a dreary succession of slickly put together films relieved by such brilliant sequences as the kitchen-knife killing in Sabota?e, and by that minor romantic masterpiece The Lodger...
...Under Capricorn rises above most previous Hitchcock largely because it deals with neurosis and obsession. The advent of these themes in Hollywood during the late forties and fifties led to masterpieces from most of America's greatest directors: Hawks's Red River. Sirk's Written on the Wind. Ford's The Searchers, most of Ray. Frank Borzage is especially illuminating. His extremely strong, even deterministic way of shooting people's actions had always outweighed the romantic and sentimental conception of personality beneath his plots. The addition of an obsession with murder to a desperate love in Moonrise...