At the end of the war, I made a film to show the reality of the concentration camps, you know. Horrible. It was more horrible than any fantasy horror. Then, nobody wanted to see it. It was too unbearable. But it has stayed in my mind all of these years. —Alfred Hitchcock As searing […]
Tag Archives: Hitchcock
Stanley Donen’s best film by far, the scintillating mystery-comedy-thriller-romance Charade, has often been described as “the best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock didn’t direct.” Not so—not by a long shot. A stylish, purely superficial entertainment that is not really about anything, Charade is dwarfed by the achievement of North by Northwest (1959), the “Hitchcock movie” with […]
A delightful thriller, enhanced by humor and the most tender romance, and ending with an ambiguous shot that deflates complacency as a girl in her late teens naïvely contemplates sublime friendship between her boyfriend—he is in his late twenties or early thirties—and her (likely) widowed father, Young and Innocent is a tantalizing film by Alfred […]
Criminal attorney Mitch Brenner lives a divided existence between urban and rural California: in San Francisco, where he practices law; in Bodega Bay, where his widowed mother, Lydia, feeling “abandoned” by her spouse, is ever fearful of Mitch’s “abandonment” as well. Therefore, she does her best to tighten the tie between them, even if this […]
It’s the wee hours and for the first time in decades I revisited Marnie. Absolutely stunning as mother-daughter drama. Indeed, this is one of the most powerful films I’ve seen about parenting. It’s so ironic, this: in Rebecca (1940) and Vertigo (1958), the thematic refrain is “Too late, too late.” This film reverses that refrain, […]
Dennis Grunes 