Word: spellbound
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...architect's widow perceived Stalin's daughter as a mystical representative, possibly even the reincarnation, of her own daughter, who had died in an auto accident in 1946. Mrs. Wright, a disciple of the Russian-born mystic Georgi Gurdjieff, was spellbound by some coincidences between the living and the dead. Her daughter, by an earlier marriage in Russia, had also been named Svetlana; moreover, she had been born in Georgia, the region from which Svetlana Alliluyeva's father hailed. Somehow it followed in Mrs. Wright's mind that Stalin's daughter should marry the first Svetlana's widower, William Wesley...
Afterwards, Forbes said, "They were spellbound" by the music. He spoke about what he termed his "three loves": Beethoven the edited Thayer's Life of Beethoven, published in 1964), choral music, and harmony and counterpoint. He said he enjoyed teaching because it "combines my love of music with a love of people...
...actresses in jeopardy, and his pattern of filming became a matter of smothering the goddess of the moment with an incestuous sort of fatherly attention, and of laboring to control every detail of her life. He raged when he was deserted, as he saw it, by Ingrid Bergman after Spellbound and Notorious and by Grace Kelly after Dial "M" for Murder, Rear Window and To Catch a Thief. By 1962, when he filmed The Birds, he was treating Actress Tippi Hedren as a doll to dress, cosset and terrorize...
...artist is the sum of his quirks. Hitchcock's brilliance was entangled with his personal grotesqueries, but it was real brilliance. He grew up with the film industry, and at his best gave movies a dazzling visual impudence: the single flash of color in the black-and-white Spellbound, as the pistol of the suicidal villain flares red; the wicked eroticism of Janet Leigh's shower scene in Psycho, a film that, as Spoto points out, takes pains to make the viewer queasily aware of being a voyeur. Hitchcock's final obsession was secretiveness...
Still, there is something distant and unemotional about the way Benton presents her mysterious case. As the movie proceeds, one finds oneself examining its references (Vertigo, North by Northwest, Rear Window, Psycho, Spellbound) rather than getting truly involved with the story. Soon a longing for the rat-tat-tattiness of sleazier Hitchcock knockoffs like Dressed to Kill steals over the viewer...