Word: hitchcockian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sulky siren that Pfeiffer made her first mark, as a punkette in Grease 2, as Al Pacino's coked-out wife in Scarface, as a Hitchcockian heroine with a Los Angeles '80s twist in Into the Night. Then, switching on the Cinderella smile, she became a princess in the medieval adventure Ladyhawke and the sweetest witch in Eastwick. She has played movie stars in Sweet Liberty and PBS's Natica Jackson, two fables about creatures of illusion manipulating the reality of voyeurs who dare mistake the actress for the role...
What is not forgivable is the end to which Michele is maneuvered. It is a glaring, blaring atonality, the only conceivable purpose of which is to help , Polanski prove that he is not a Hitchcockian after all -- more serious, don't you know. But why spoil a perfectly enjoyable, often quite imaginative imitation by insisting on that dubious point...
...critics -- and not a single teenager among its cast of characters -- luck into the national bloodstream? By tapping the current mood of sexual malaise with a cautionary -- indeed, reactionary -- tale about an errant husband, a faithful wife and a career woman unlucky in love. And by skewing a Hitchcockian domestic thriller into a rousing horror show. Fatal Attraction starts as Vertigo and ends as Psycho. For all its flaws, the picture deftly scares and excites people with fun-house-mirror reflections of themselves. As Director John Carpenter (Halloween) notes, "The strongest human emotion is fear. It's the essence...
Last spring Paramount sneaked Fatal Attraction to preview audiences. Their response was positive except for the ending. In that version, Alex committed suicide to the strains of Madame Butterfly and left Dan's fingerprints on the knife, thus framing him as her murderer. Ironic, Hitchcockian, certainly fatalistic and pretty darned Japanese -- but not satisfying. Says Lyne: "It was like having two hours of foreplay and no orgasm...
...murder. All three trade in multiple female identities and tease the viewer into hoping the heroine will take one more step in the dark. Now for the differences. Winter is a dud in a handsome shell. Window has a cunning plot but not much craft. Widow rides smoothly on Hitchcockian tracks until it finds its own detours of style and psychology...