Film Comment (1979) - The Big Hitch
Details
- article: The Big Hitch
- author(s): David Thomson
- journal: Film Comment (30/Apr/1979)
- issue: volume 15, issue 2, page 26
- journal ISSN: 0015-119X
- Sloan's Alfred Hitchcock: A Filmography and Bibliography (1995) — page 434, #528
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Perkins, David Thomson, Farley Granger, François Truffaut, Ingrid Bergman, James Stewart, Janet Leigh, Jessica Tandy, Joan Fontaine, North by Northwest (1959), Notorious (1946), Psycho (1960), Raymond Burr, Rear Window (1954), Rebecca (1940), Robert Walker, Robin Wood, Saboteur (1942), Strangers on a Train (1951), The Birds (1963), The Wrong Man (1956), Under Capricorn (1949), Vertigo (1958)
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Abstract
The purpose of this exasperated mugging of Alfred Hitchcock is not to hurt or abuse a senior professional-he seems constitutionally immune from either-but to show that glittering engineering and morbid perfection do not take up all of film's potential or satisfy our hopes as an audience. Surely we require the impurity of human intransigence to temper the awful sublimity of unhindered formalism? I cannot imagine pure cinema, yet I suppose that Leni Riefenstahl's thunder of style obliterating individualism is our most ominous approximation to it.
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