Good morning,
Whitewater’s forecast calls for a sunny day with a high temperature of ninety-one degrees.
On this day in 1899, Alfred Hitchcock was born. Eighty years later, the New York Times recalled his life upon his passing:
In a characteristically incisive remark, Mr. Hitchcock once summed up his approach to moviemaking: “Some films are slices of life, mine are slices of cake.” The director of scores of psychological thrillers for more than half a century was the master manipulator of menace and the macabre, and the leading specialist in suspense and shock.
His best movies were meticulously orchestrated nightmares of peril and pursuit relieved by unexpected comic ironies, absurdities and anomalies. Films made by the portly, cherubic director invariably progressed from deceptively commonplace trifles of life to shattering revelations, and with elegant style and structure, he pervaded mundane events and scenes with a haunting mood of mounting anxiety.
In delicately balancing the commonplace and the bizarre, he was the most noted juggler of emotions in the longest major directorial career in film history. His distinctive style was vigorously visual, always stressing imagery over dialogue and often using silence to increase apprehension. Among his most stunning montages were a harrowing attack by a bullet-firing crop-dusting plane on Cary Grant at a deserted crossroad amid barren cornfields in “North by Northwest,” a brutal shower-slaying in “Psycho” and an avian assault on a sleepy village in “The Birds.”
Here the trailer from North by Northwest. It’s dated, but interesting, and the film is fantastic —
The Friday Comments Forum will be on holiday today, but back next week. Many thanks for your contributions, and the feature will be resume with a new topic on next Friday.
For today, there are more posts on the way.