Word: truffauts
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...bids goodbye to a friend. Then she boards the train-and sneaks out on the other side of the platform. A classic Hitchcock opening for a film that is missing only one vital ingredient: Alfred Hitchcock. In the maestro's place, however, is his greatest disciple, Director Francois Truffaut, who considers Hitchcock "an artist of anxiety" to be placed alongside Kafka...
...Bride Wore Black, Truffaut has Gallicized a novel by American Mystery Writer Cornell Woolrich and remade it in his own images. As revealed in a series of shuffled flashbacks, the groom and the bride (Jeanne Moreau) trip happily down the steps of a church and smile at the wedding party's photographer. A shot rings out, and the new husband falls. Five men are responsible for the killing, a group of drinking and hunting cronies who played with a gun until one of them accidentally became the trigger man. The thought of revenge becomes an idée fixe...
Unlike Hitchcock's films, Bride has no overriding buildup of tension leading to a climactic finish. Instead, Truffaut provides a whole series of suspenseful crescendos-and finds voluptuous revelations and eerie beauty in each one of them. Under his low-keyed, meticulous direction, all the murdered men give subtle performances that would do credit to Giraudoux. Out standing is Michel Bouquet, pathetic yet loathsome as a pawky, balding bachelor who cannot believe his good fortune when a mysterious beauty comes to his shabby room with a bottle of strange-tasting liqueur. Scarcely less memorable is Charles Denner, a painter...
...Truffaut, 36, has described this film as his "homage to Hitchcock." It is indeed filled with echoes of the old mas ter's style: long, slow tracking shots, comic functionaries, vibrant, stinging music. But for the most part, Truffaut is, happily, himself. Even Hitchcock could not stretch so many individual scenes to the limit-and still give them the tensile strength of drop-forged steel. Nor has he the almost Proustian ability to recapture the past in a skein of memories and desires. In its avoidance of a major theme, The Bride Wore Black opts for the minor genre...
...looking for Francois?" Roland Truffaut asked the truant officer. "Go look for him where he always is-at the movies." Even as a child, Francois Truffaut made cinema his preferred vocation: the life he led up until his first feature was just so much prologue before the credits. The son of a Parisian architect, he had a history of juvenile delinquency and truancy that ended in a short reformatory stretch-an experience that was to become the basis for his first film. As an adolescent film fanatic, he came to the attention of André Bazin, dean of French movie...