
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 27, 1992                   TAG: 9203270280
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Chris Gladden
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IMITATIONS OF HITCHCOCK ARE A CRIME

Remember when Alfred Hitchcock would step into his sketched outline on the TV screen and fill it with his rotund silhouette? Little did he guess that the same silhouette would loom over filmmakers for decades.

Hitchcock certainly is one of the most imitated, most revered and most parodied directors in the art form's history.

And this was the director who advised a nervous actress to relax by saying "it's only a movie."

A-team directors in their homages have expanded their references to Hitchcock movies from the obligatory "Psycho" shower scene to other classics.

But what once seemed like admiration for a master filmmaker now is beginning to look suspiciously like enslavement. Instead of fresh perspectives, we're getting Hitchcock devices. Directors are showing off their knowledge of film history and taking short cuts.

Three recent thrillers have Hitchcock written all over them - "Shattered," "Final Analysis" and "Basic Instinct."

All are set in San Francisco and Northern California, Hitchcock's favorite stomping grounds, a dead giveaway in itself. "Shattered" has the breeziest style and looks in terms of lighting and color composition like a movie from Hitchcock's '60s period.

"Final Analysis" can't get away from "Vertigo." And "Basic Instinct" refers to several Hitchcock pictures. The hot-blooded, cool looking Sharon Stone recalls the kind of blondes Hitchcock loved to cast as his leading ladies - Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, Grace Kelly.

All three movies have convoluted plots and the requisite McGuffin, the plot device that Hitchcock named that serves as the fulcrum for the suspenseful goings-on.

In varying degrees, these thrillers are diverting. "Basic Instinct" is so low-down and dirty that those of us with high guilt thresholds sat spellbound at the uninhibited spectacles director Paul Verhoeven threw on the screen.

But what these movies lack is the total visual wit and sophistication that distinguished the best of Hitchcock's work. It is doubtful that Hitchcock would have taken advantage of the sexual explicitness and gory special-effects wizardry of today's films. He wouldn't need to.

Grace Kelly's flirtatious playfulness in "Rear Window" creates a subtle, erotic tension without the kind of nudity and thrashing around that brought so much controversy to "Basic Instinct."

Hitchcock was an artist of suggestion. And that's a quality that his show-and-tell imitators have missed.

by CNB