Word: psycho
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Undeniably Hitchcock was the greatest handler of film who ever lived. He was not an innovator. Nothing he did called attention to his technique. But it was always there, if virtually invisible. His most famous scene, the shower-murder episode in Psycho, contains 78 separate shots in 45 seconds of screen time. Though a grisly homicide is portrayed, moviegoers never actually see the knife touch Janet Leigh's naked flesh; they just think they...
...North by Northwest (1959). It was in the middle of that last group that, in two superb, underrated films, The Wrong Man (1957) and Vertigo (1958), he directly, quite humorlessly, confronted his belief that injustice will be done and that nothing is what it seems to be. Psycho, in 1960, has no moral center at all, and The Birds (1963) shows the natural world itself in revolt against the laws that supposedly govern it. Even so, the public was pleased to take Hitchcock's word for what he was?a merry prankster?almost willfully ignoring the signs on film...
...staircase at age 80. He defined suspense in the cinema, playing with his audience's expectations, sustaining nearly unbearable levels of tension for reel after reel until everything exploded in one of his legendary roller-coaster "sequences"--the crop-dusting scene in North by Northwest, the shower scene in Psycho, the amusement park in Strangers on a Train, the back of the potato truck in Frenzy--you could go on and on. His films were really comedies, from the sick joke of Psycho to Cary Grant's "Wait a minute, fellas, you're making a big mistake" in North...
...what he might call meta-cepts. He divides history into three waves: the agricultural, the industrial and a rising Third Wave, driven by computer technology that threatens to transform the way most of the world lives and thinks. It is a world of "info-spheres," "techno-spheres," "biospheres" and "psycho-spheres." A Third Wave society would be "de-massified" by computer-controlled factories that retool easily and make standardization obsolete. The traditional financial ties between producers and consumers would be altered to create "prosumers" who could make and maintain goods for their...
Roche, whose total revenues of about $3 billion include a big business in vitamins, is only the fourth largest prescription drugmaker. But it is tops in psycho-pharmaceuticals, or mind drugs, thanks chiefly to Valium and its predecessor Librium. Yet today Roche is suffering its own headaches. Valium's success, says a Roche spokesman, "was too good to last. The reaction was bound to come...