Word: hitchcocks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Knew Too Much. Because Hitchcock also directed a Technicolor remake of this classic (in Hollywood in 1955), the original is too seldom shown. This marvelous suspense tale, starring Peter Lorre, will be shown at the Welles, Sat. and Sun. at 2:00 only...
...humor throughout are very funny: this is De Palma being himself), but these moments are also evasive. The only reason they are so essential in the first place is that the violence in the film is not set in a context of characterization. The acts of characters in a Hitchcock film are at least as ghastly as in Sisters, but the portrayal runs deeper. In Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951, written by Raymond Chandler) Robert Walker plays a strange, unbalanced character who is frightening because he seems so real. Yet he seems so real partly because Hitchcock...
...this film De Palma is nothing if not an imitator. Despite the talk of homage, Sisters is not a film that serves Hitchcock, except in that a comparison of his better films (and there have not been any of those in recent years) with Sisters reveals once again what a master he is of his specialized form. Too many directors try to bestow cinematic homage these days -- by borrowing of personalized shots, glimpses of old movie posters, imitation of scenes or whatever. This is esoterica which film does not need...
Promoting for Sisters last week, De Palma told me he thought Truffaut's worst film making resulted from his admitted efforts to imitate Hitchcock. We both agreed that Truffaut's greatest homage was his book of conversations with Hitchcock. I hadn't seen Sisters then; now I think De Palma, too, should have put his homage into a book...
Shadow of a Doubt. One of the films Hitchcock thinks his best, with Joseph Cotton playing a psychotic murderer hiding in a small town behind his mild-mannered exterior. Technically, this is one of Hitchcock's subtlest films. This lack of ostentation is what makes it so effective...