Word: moralizing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...chief motivations for blowing up a building is the sheer malignity of, for example, the CFIA. If we may for a moment lapse into a non-rigorous use of moral epithets, we might go so far as to include the CFIA in a category of existential evil. That means that put into any context, what the Center is doing is bad. With the destruction of such evil, you may be able to endow an action with meaning. It may be, in fact, the only way to do so. What is more...
...seven of his later films in terms of guilt and cleansing. For Wood Hitchcock's plots implicate his characters in some immoral action, often a murder, and then let them make restitution. Overcoming a psychological paralysis of spirit and action that characterizes guilty men. Hitchcock's characters increase their moral breadth through their confrontation with their capacity for evil. At the same time Hitchcock involves his audiences in the guilty action or in condemnation of the guilty man, then makes them reconsider this endorsement. Wood's structural analysis explains the end to which Hitchcock manipulates his audiences' responses...
...changes very closely through a film, such an analysis is useful, though still incomplete. For those like me who react to characters intuitively, immediately, and once for all, only a more general analysis of character delincation explains feelings about the characters. One experiences Veytigo not as the series of moral transformations Wood accurately describes, but as an all-out romance whose ravishingly beautiful hero and heroine glide through deep, ideal settings. To understand this experience one must look to the method of the film, considering its content as a consequence of its means of expression...
...more speculative analysis some films reveal the preoccupations of entire periods of his career. Those that do so the most likeably are the east manipulated. Almost all of Hitchcock's films feel excessively structured, designed to make the audience draw the morals he intends. Only in a few does his subject balance his frightening formal control and let the characters seem real individuals. Hitchcock's audience-manipulation, involving an attitude of superiority toward his viewers, generates the unpleasant feeling that his characters merely illustrate a narrow moral design-Hitchcock's. Only in Shadow of a Doubt, Under Capricorn, and Psycho...
...Shadow of a Doubt brings the best of these themes into a very tightly constructed drama, Returning to the original material of melodrama, it uses a family setting for a complex and subtle interplay of moral perceptions. At the same time the plot is constructed on personal progress; it follows the growth of moral and romantic awareness of an adolescent girl. But though it ends in a clear confrontation between good and evil its use of real locations and realistic performances maintains moral complexity and resonance through the film...