Weekly Standard (2013) - Feathered Fiends
Details
- magazine article: Feathered Fiends
- author(s): Peter Tonquette
- journal: Weekly Standard (08/Jul/2013)
- issue: volume 18, issue 41, page 45
- journal ISSN: 1083-3013
- publisher: Weekly Standard
- keywords: "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho" - by Stephen Rebello, "The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock" - by Donald Spoto, Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Perkins, Bodega Bay, California, Daphne du Maurier, Donald Spoto, Edith Head, Evan Hunter, Grace Kelly, Howard Smit, James Stewart, Jessica Tandy, Motion picture directors & producers, New York City, New York, North by Northwest (1959), Peter Bogdanovich, Psycho (1960), Rear Window (1954), Remakes & sequels, Rod Taylor, San Francisco, California, Stephen Rebello, Terry Teachout, The 39 Steps (1935), The Birds (1963), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Tippi Hedren, Vertigo (1958)
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Abstract
Screenwriter Evan Hunter has said he wanted the film to have a screwball comedy flavor. Headline-making society girl Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and successful, unattached attorney Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) parry one-liners in a San Francisco pet shop as they are shopping for lovebirds. [...]in conversation with Bogdanovich, Hitchcock described Melanie as "a fly-by-night" and "a playgirl," who "represents complacency." Because she wears a fur coat and flirtily extracts favors from her father's employees?
Article
At the height of his career, in 1963, Alfred Hitchcock spoke of playing the audience like an organ: “I’m using their natural instincts to help them enjoy fear,” he said to an interviewer, adding, “I know exactly when to stop, to relieve them at the right moment, otherwise they’ll laugh in the wrong places.” Speaking on the occasion of the much-ballyhooed release of The Birds — the director’s third consecutive hit, following North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960) — Hitchcock was right to feel sanguine about his bond with moviegoers.
Alas, times change. Hitchcock died in 1980, and by 1998 Gus van Sant had decided to remake Psycho because, as he put it, there was “a whole generation of moviegoers who probably hadn’t seen” the first version. If they had, they would have found that much of Hitchcock’s original handiwork had dated miserably. Among film scholars, Hitchcock is still revered — Vertigo (1958) bested Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest movie ever made in a recent poll of critics — but, to adopt his own terms, the general public began literally laughing in the wrong places quite some time ago. In Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990), Anthony Perkins said he was doubtful that the Master of Suspense had been “prepared for the amount and intensity of the on-the-spot laughs that he got from first-run audiences around the world. He was confused, at first, in...
