Word: hitchcocks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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North By Northwest. Clever. One could say as much for any Hitchcock film. But this one has to be his most ingenious, the plot is devilish--and, although Hitchcock never really wrings the full terror out of it, terrifying. Cary Grant plays a Madison Avenue smoothie with a doting mother and a life of business luncheons who gets taken (figuratively, and literally) for a spy. "Nice play-acting, but it won't wash,' his abductor, a chillingly villainous James Mason tells Grant when he tries to clear up this misunderstanding. Grant breaks free, then does some romantic interluding with...
Brooks freaks who love to see people farting or punching out horses and those who expect outrageously funny dialogue will be equally disappointed by High Anxiety. The movie, dedicated to Alfred Hitchcock and filled with little imitations of the master, just isn't very funny, except in a few spots. Once again, the film is a Brooks extravaganza--he wrote, produced, directed, starred and out-did himself this by writing the words and music to the title song. You'll never guess who sings...
...MARQUIS DE SADE should be alive today. DePalma and DeSade would make a brilliant director-screenwriter team. In Brian DePalma's latest thriller, The Fury, Fiona Lewis plays a high-class, whorish British bitch-doctor whose titillating, condescending blue eyes make you want to punch her in the nose. Hitchcock would have let Cary Grant do just that--assuming that we in the audience are all voyeurs--and in his later days would have sent her to his legendary shower. DePalma, characteristically, goes further. In one of many representative sequences in The Fury, Robin (Andrew Stevens), Lewis's jealous lover...
Still, The Fury is fine popular entertainment. Kirk Douglas, as the father, mobilizes a kind of crazy energy he has not displayed since he was a much younger actor; John Cassavetes is deliciously evil as the bureaucrat-villain. De Palma, like Alfred Hitchcock, is a superb technician, sure and subtle in such matters as camera placement and editing. These are skills that are often overlooked when they are not employed in the service of "serious" themes...
There is another analogy to Hitchcock. In entertainment after entertainment he has shown, through his spies and criminals, how pervasive evil is in the world, how it can reach out and touch the most innocent places and people and make real the paranoia that so many people seem to feel. The Fury invites the audience to take pleasure in the revenge of those who are exceptional, in their final, violent turning against the straight world. One suspects that telepathic characters are artist-figures to De Palma, that conceivably, in his dealings with Hollywood producers, he has wished on occasion...