Word: vertigo
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...least of Hitchcock's work during his most productive decade (1948-58), the "forbidden five" are once again demonstrating their director's box-office magnetism. Rear Window (1954), the first of the quintet to be rereleased, has earned $6.8 million in just five months, and Vertigo (1958) has taken in more than $3 million since the end of December. The Trouble with Harry (1955) has just opened to good business, and similar grosses are expected for Rope (1948) and The Man Who Knew Too Much...
...older moviegoers, the reappear ance of these films offers a chance to fit half-forgotten pleasures (the flashbulb climax of Rear Window, the clashing of cymbals in The Man Who Knew Too Much, the belltower climb in Vertigo) into familiar patterns. But a gratifyingly large part of the audience consists of young people who may know Hitchcock only as the little fat figure with the funereal air who hosted a TV show back in the black-and-white '50s. Until now, their image of the man and his work was that of a brand name without a product. "Hitchcock...
...average feature) does not quite justify the homoerotic hamminess of John Dall and Farley Granger as the two college psychopaths. That leaves Rear Window, a delicious entertainment mixing romance, voyeurism, homicide and humor with the purring sensuousness and perfect waxed beauty of the young Grace Kelly, and Vertigo, a gorgeously illustrated text-book of Hitchcock's themes that meets just about every criterion for movie greatness...
...five re-released films, screams are at a minimum. Most of the mayhem-the stabbing in The Man Who Knew Too Much, the strangling in Vertigo, the dismembering in Rear Window, the death in The Trouble with Harry-takes place offscreen. Only the gruesome garroting in Rope is shown to the viewer, and that at the film's beginning. But if the viewer's desire for crime is not satisfied, the character's compulsion for punishment is. In Rope, two bright young men kill a classmate, hide his body in a living-room chest, then throw...
...Vertigo takes this Hitchcockian transference of guilt-from criminal to innocent onlooker to movie watcher-one disturbing step further. Scottie Ferguson (Stewart) is another immobilized hero; the former detective's fear of heights had resulted in the death of a policeman. Now an old college chum has put Scottie on the trail of his disturbed wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), who believes herself possessed by the spirit of her suicidal great-great-grandmother. Scottie follows Madeleine up and down the hills of San Francisco, a vertiginous setting where even the streets have lost their balance. At first...