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Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Lamb to the Slaughter (Review)

As part of the “For the Love of Film” blogathon, I’ll be taking a look at Alfred Hitchcock’s contributions to his celebrated anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I’ll be looking at some of the episodes of the classic show that he directed. The “For the Love of Film” blogathon this year is raising money to keep one of Hitchcock’s earlier works, The White Shadow (which he wrote, edited, designed and assistant-directed), available on-line and streaming for free. It’s a very worthwhile cause and you can donate here.

It’s amazing to think of the talent involved in some of these Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes. Obviously the director himself was the host and directed seventeen episodes, but he also had a star-studded cast on hand for a great many installments. That said, there was just much talent behind the camera. Robert Altman, Sydney Pollack and William Friedkin were among the other directors to work on the series, and author Roald Dahl contributed some episodes as well. Dahl contributed the much-loved Man From The South, featuring Peter Lorre and Steve McQueen, but he also offered this wonderful little murder tale about an especially inventive killing.

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Non-Review Review: W.

Oliver Stone famously rushed just about every aspect of this production in order to get it into cinemas before last year’s November election. Does that affect the movie? It does and it doesn’t. It doesn’t in that Stone seems to have a clear image of the President in his head and it’s perfectly captured on screen. It does affect the movie in that Stone has to choose an arbitrary cutoff point for his movie, since he can’t end it with the end of Bush’s presidency. So he chooses the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 to serve as the film’s ending. That point arguably suits the central thesis of Stone’s psychological profile of the man, butit also serves to make that thesis seem heavy-handed or forced. The other side of that coin is that I doubt the Stone would have been able to market and sell the film for a few years after the end of the Bush administration, and the fact that so vintage a diretcor as Stone can still make such a raw and energetic film is a testament to his abilities (that some of us may have doubted after World Trade Centre and Alexander).

bush

Misunderestimate at your peril...

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