Word: unrealism
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Every thriller must, to some extent, be unreal. The more unreal the film, the more it depends on extrinsic elements--an Aston-Martin, an industrial laser--for thrills. We know that James Bond will vanquish the villain and get the girl, but we want to see how he does it. The great thrillers, however, take believable, though not necessarily ordinary, men and women and put them in unusual situations. There should be room for dramatic subtlety and technical invention, as well as for excitement, as in a film like The Third...
...make him a bumbling zero. Brooks recalls, "I was sick of looking at all those nice sensible situation comedies. They were such distortions of life. If a maid ever took over my house like Hazel, I'd set her hair on fire. I wanted to do a crazy, unreal comic-strip kind of thing about something besides a family. No one had ever done a show about an idiot before. I decided to be the first." The idiot is Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, played by reformed Stand-Up Comic Don Adams. Smart has little piggy eyes, a voice that...
...much as that more of them aren't more confused," he says. "The world is simply not the tidy, static place most people believe it to be." The ideal of well-adjustment--parochial psychic stability--is abhorrent to Leary, for he feels that such an orientation is fundamentally unreal. "The custodians of the establishment would prefer that we do almost anything rather than quietly study the energies of our own nervous system, yet right or wrong, we are destined...
Each grey morning, while the laughter of nuns echoes from a nearby courtyard, it becomes clearer that awful deeds are imminent. One day the girl takes a rabbit's severed head to work in her purse. The real and the unreal merge, and soon her human victims appear. The first is a suitor (John Fraser) whose conventional acts of gallantry lead to a gruesome end. Later an indignant landlord (played with mordant, bumbling humor by Patrick Wymark) comes to collect his rent and lingers to try his luck. Right up to the grisly climax, the audience seldom wonders what...
...dazzling white; much of the action takes place in the white living room; Colin and Tolen dream of lines of white-sweatered girls, whom Lester renders in overexposed, high-key photography--and the white makes even the most prosaic actions, the ones that might "actually" occur, seem slightly unreal...