Word: hitchcocks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...educate his audience as much as confirm their existent prejudices. A Jesus Saves sign looms briefly out poor Rod Taylor's window. Here I air a prejudice of my own. I would rather have my symbols built openly into a-film's structure (like Hitchcock's Tonight Golden Carls sign in The Lodger, or Hawks's The World is Yours-Cook's Tours sign in Scarface ), than hold or pan-away from lurid urban graphics as Antonioni too often does...
...Alfred Hitchcock...
...would call them Topaz. It would seem difficult to make a zombie from Leon Uris' tense bestseller, based on diplomatic crescendos leading up to the Cuban missile crisis. Yet Alfred Hitchcock has done so without any discernible effort, spiritlessly following the events to their evitable inconclusion...
...Almost all of Hitchcock's films deal with moral dilemmas. In Topaz he attempts to demonstrate that in international politics one cannot move his arm without striking another's face, and that for every national action there is an equal and opposite reaction...
...master has made such points in films from Foreign Correspondent to Torn Curtain. But at 70, Hitchcock seems suddenly to have forgotten his own recipe. Topaz contains no chills, no fever-and most disappointing, no entertainment. By the finale, the predictability of every turn and the grossness of the heroes and villains recall the old gag about the espionage agent who whispered a code message to a locked door. "Wrong apartment," came the reply. "I'm Ginsberg the tailor. You want Ginsberg the spy, upstairs...