The Times from Shreveport, Louisiana • Page 9

ghc dimes Tuesday, Feb. 7, 1984 Daily care must be Careful patching gives fih'WIW worth something jeans new life 01 LT UdJIrl LSa I ANN LANDERS, Page 2 I -HELOISE, Page2 FIR TELL THE TIME 5 of his best films being re-released was feeling very creative, the batteries were well charged." The films are among Hitchcock's most superb and are also among the best ever made by actor James Stewart. He stars in four of the five movies and owns a percentage of each. The five films have been withheld from general release and Unavailable for au- diences except in the rarest of circumstances. For example, when Stewart received the George Eastman Award in Rochester, N.Y., in 1978, Vertigo was shown as part of the Stewart retrospective, but only because Hitchcock OK'd the screening for his old friend.

He even sent along his own print of the movie for the festivities. Movie buffs came from all around the country for the chance to see Vertigo. Hitchcock reportedly shelved his favorite films at least those to which he owned the rights to drive up their value, financially and critically. "We want more money," he once told an interviewer. Hitchcock also hoped to curtail other directors from stealing his styles and ideas.

In this wish, at least, Hitchcock failed. Rear Window and Vertigo became the stuff of Hollywood legend the most-talked-about unseen films of the day. They eventually inspired several highly derivative films, especially Brian De Palma's Obsession. 'Rope' year by Universal. The company began reissuing the films in.late 1983 and have found they have critical and box-office successes on their hands all over again.

The films are being re-released starting with the legendary Rear Window. The other four films will follow intermittently. All five movies come from the 10-year period of 1948 to 1958, a time when Hitchcock also created Strangers on a Train, Dial Mfor Murder and To Catch a Thief, and just before launching into his most popular period with North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds and his TV anthology series. At the time he was making the so-called "forbidden five," Hitchcock has said, "I Stories by JOHN GARNER, Alfred Hitchcock, one of the vs- Richard Simmons have been holding off talking about the Richard Simmons Show being taken off, but I'm glad that it's off. He ruined his own program.

He was too silly. It started out as an exercise program and it was so light and fluffy and all these thin women were on it and it didn't make any sense. Then he got into all these recipes and no time for exercises at all. I think these sponsors should realize there's a wide-open market out there. If they could get an exercise program for people 35 and over who aren't wearing raw silk tight exercise clothes and flat stomach, all they need to stay home and get a little firm.

They don't need an exercise program to be on the air. Anybody that's that thin doesnt need any advice. They ought to be able to keep firm by themselves. But the older people do and it's really, nobody has it. They've got three or four shows for all these thin people with long legs and can do things that short-legged people can't do, and I'd like very much for the sponsors to wake up and see that there's other people out there who want exercises.

Carl Rowan This is concerning Carlilowan. After not seeing him in the paper for several days I was just getting ready to call you and thank you for dropping him as being one of your syndicated columns. The first thing I see in Saturday morning's paper is Carl Rowan, blaming Mr. Reagan for the dropping stock market. Way back when the stock was going up, up, every day, Mr.

Rowan never did give Reagan credit for the stock market going up. Just let it fall a little two days in a row and Mr. Rowan comes out blaming Reagan for it. Once again, the only thing Mr. Rowan proves to me is the fact that white people aren't the only ones that don't say very much.

Chili contest What a joke. The Red River Coors Company sponsoring a chili contest for Mothers Against Drugs. I have 100 that says your narrow-minded newspaper won't print this, especially since your narrow-minded readers wouldn't like it. I just read your front page article about the chili festival to raise money for Mothers Against Drugs. What kind of hypocrites are we raising in this country where it's OK to drink alcohol by the way, they were serving it at the chili festival and it's also a drug and it's also one of the most powerful and devastating narcotics in drugs ever to enter the human body.

Personally, I'm disgusted. Gas leak I am not a complainer, but I called in to Arkla Gas to report a gas leak at 4122 Jacob Street. The answer that I got was that I was the only one complaining, and I told him that the whole Jacob Street was going to be blown up. If The Times and the editor can do anything about that, please do. Potholes Well, I hear the TV show Ripley's Believe It Or Not is doing a story on the town with the most potholes per capita, Shreveport, La.

believe it or not. Coffee drinkers I'd like a comment on the person who said he'd just as soon meet a man with a can of beer in his car than a cup of coffee. Well, I have never read or heard anyone running over a bunch of innocent peoplejust because he'd drank too much coffee. Phone bill I finally got around to looking at my phone bill. They got to be kidding.

Sidewalks With the increase in traffic along Dixie Meadow in Dixie Garden Loop, it is long past time for the Caddo Parish Police Jury to put in sidewalks. There are many children that walk to and from school that are in constant danger with the present situation. ALFRED Hitchcock is getting his greatest acclaim as he lies in the grave, four years after his death. The irony would not be lost on the master of suspense he always loved black humor. It was a situation Hitchcock himself guaranteed by stubbornly withholding from release for two decades five of his most interesting films.

They include his two masterpieces, Rear Window and Vertigo, as well as Rope, The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Trouble With Harry After prolonged negotiations with his estate, all five films were purchased last The Trouble With Harry' In The Trouble With Harry, the trouble with Harry is that he's Alfred Hitchcock's 1955 film is constructed on the premise that the guy's corpse causes no end of problems for his neighbors and relatives. Though nearly all Hitchcock films are rich in black humor, The Trouble With Harry is the director's most obvious black comedy. To heighten the macabre problem of a troublesome corpse, Hitchcock set the film amid the splendid foliage of autumn in Vermont. "I've always been interested in establishing a contrast, in going against the traditional and in breaking away from cliches," Hitchcock said. "With Harry I took melodrama out of the pitch-black night and brought it out.

in the sunshine." The Trouble With Harry opens with the sound of three gunshots in the rural countryside, and the discovery of a body that proves to be Harry. Several people in the community have motives for possibly killing him and the body starts to show up at the most inopportune times. The cast of Harry is atypical of Hitchcock films, and includes Edmund Gwen, Mildred Natwick, Royal Dano and John Forsythe. There is also a little boy played by Jerry Mathers, who achieved fame a few years later as TV's "Beaver." Most notable, however, was the debut performance of Shirley MacLaine. 'ThenIan Who Knew Too Much' The Man Who Knew Too Much, a suspenseful 1956 film about kidnapping and political assassination, was the only example in Alfred Hitchcock's canon of an out-and-out remake.

He had filmed the same story in 1934, at the height of his early British period. The first Man Who Knew Too Much helped make a star of Peter Loire, who played the assassin. It solidified the acclaim he had earned earlier in Fritz Lang's M. In each case, the story involves an innocent man who is inadvertently told a terrible secret: An ambassador is to be assassinated during the loud, climactic moment in the performance of a symphonic work in London's Albert Hall. To prevent the man from interfering with the scheme, the terrorists kidnap his child.

Although the first version is highly regarded, most critics believe the 1956 film was an improvement. "Where the first version had an easy wit and a kind of grimy nonchalance, the second uses the irony of the glamorous life and deepens several themes which were merely suggested earlier," writes Donald Spoto, author of The Dark Side of Genius, a biography of Hitchcock. "The second version also takes full advantage of technical resources open to the film maker 20 yearslater. It is certainly one of Hitchcock's dozen best films, impeccably photographed, with a rich score by Bernard Herrmann, and flawless performances." TTie Man Who Knew Too Much stars James Stewart as the innocent father, and Doris Day as his wife. In the original film, the wife was a professional markswoman and her shooting skills come into play at the finale.

In the second film, she's a retired musical star. Her singing of Que Sera Sera becomes an important signaling device late in the film and won the tune the Oscar for the year's best song. The newer Man Who Knew Too Much features a fine script by John Michael Hayes, perhaps the best writer ever to work with Hitchcock. (He also wrote the screenplays for Rear Window, To Catch a Thief and The Trouble with Harry.) The film's finale the Albert Hall concert sequence Is one of the best-edited and most exciting nail-biters among Hitchcock's films. Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut in a series of interviews with the French director "The first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional" lkYH 'r' Vk4 5.

Gannett News Service .1,, kkk.k,.. most prolific of filmmakers an entire film from the viewpoint of one man, and played out in a single, large set Jeffries' voyeurism is cinematically structured by Hitchcock to be shared by the audience, in a situation purposefully designed to implicate the viewer. It's the theme at the heart of Rear Window. To film Rear Windpw, Hitchcock's crew constructed an entire Greenwich Village courtyard on a giant Hollywood soundstage. He and screenwriter Hayes then populated the various apartments with a cross-section of humanity.

"It shows every kind of human behavor a real index of individual behavior," Hitchcock said. "The picture would have been very dull if we hadn't done it." The film tells most of its narrative visually, instead of through dialogue. Typical of the approach is the introduction of Jeffries. The camera pans his apartment, showing his broken leg in a cast, a broken camera on a nearby table, and a photograph of an auto race crash on the wall. Without a line of dialogue, we learn Jef-f ries's occupation, and how he was injured.

But beyond the technical virtuosity, Rear Window is wonderfully entertaining. It overflows with superb imagery, crisp dialogue, a great support performance from the late Thelma Ritter as Stella the nurse, and at least two intense sequences that will ha ve you on the edge of your seat. When Joseph Cotten and his wife joined Hitchcock for an advance screening of Rear Window, Cotten's wife reportedly became so nervous as Grace Kelly sneaked through Raymond Burr's apartment she turned to her husband and blurted out, "Do something!" Alfred Hitchcock was the first to admit that his 1948 film Rope, hinged on a gimmick, the use of the longest continuous camera shots then possible, with no intercutting. "I undertook Rope as a stunt," he told French director Francois Truffaut in a series of interviews, "that's the only way I can describe it." Patrick Hamilton's original stage play employed "real time." In other words, the time of the action on stage coincided with actual time. Hitchcock decided the best way to preserve that effect on film would be to film it with continuous takes.

Since camera magazines could hold only 10 minutes of film, each take is exactly 10 minutes long. At the end of the 10 minutes, the camera focuses on the dark fabric of a sports coat or piece of furniture, the film is imperceptibly stopped and re-started, and the camera pulls back from the fabric or furniture. Rope takes place in one large set a stylish New York penthouse apartment. Rather than the static camera work you might expect, Hitchcock moves the cameras through cleverly mapped-out tracks and pans (which reportedly created unheard-of traffic jams on set, along with moving of furniture and room dividers.) The story is based loosely on the Loeb-Leopold murder case, the thrill-seeking crime of two college intellectuals (John Dall and Farley Granger) who strangle a third student The setting is the students apartment, where they display their cocky arrogance by inviting their favorite college professor (James Stewart), as well as their victim's parents and fiance to a dinner party. 'Vertigo' Vertigo is a complex film an eerie, dream-like tragedy about perverse romantic obsession.

It is also frequently cited as the most personal and self-absorbed of all the Hitchcock films and is usually "exhibit for commentators like Donald Spoto, who recently published his biography of Alfred Hitchcock, The Dark Side of Genius. Though Vertigo surrounds the obsession with a complicated mystery involving clever lookalikes and elaborate setups, the film is about Scottie Ferguson, 1 a retired San Francisco cop who grabs at opportunity to "make over" a strange woman so she looks exactly like his departed lover. As such, Vertigo is an unsettling, demented Pygmalion in the guise of a mystery thriller. Spoto and others have argued that Hitchcock was obsessed with the icy blonde actresses he used in his films, from Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly to Eva Marie Saint and Tippi Hedren. Hitchcock reportedly fashioned one after the other, ordering entire wardrobes and trying to mold them to similar attitudes and personalities.

According to Spoto, what Was simply the mark of an intense director with Bergman and Kelly later became a destructive obsession with Tippi Hedren during the filming of The Birds and Mamie. Screenwriter Samuel Taylor told Spoto, "He was doing Vertigo with Tippi Hedren." James Stewart stars in Vertigo as Scot-tie, and contributes one of his most affecting performances. The film's title refers to Scottie's intense fear of heights, a condition that caused his early retirement and which ultimately affects the outcome of the film. Kim Novak co-stars as Madeleine Elster and her "double," Judy Barton, and is surprisingly effective. Vertigo was originally conceived for another actress, however.

Hitchcock had been working intently with Vera Miles, the star of his previous film The Wrong Man and latest in his series of cool blonde types. She lost the part and incurred Hitchcock's wrath when she became pregnant just as Vertigo was to begin production. Vertigo is a technical marvel. Hitchcock never used color as effectively and pointedly as he does here. There are also several legendary camera tricks, including the track-back, zoom-forward stunt that approximates Scottie's dizzying vertigo.

A 360-degree pan around the kissing Stewart and Novak has also become a film school staple, as has Bernard Herrmann's lovely, bittersweet symphonic musical score. mmmmmmmm 'J- Rear Window1 Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 suspense thriller, is always prominent in the ongoing debate about which is the greatest Hitchcock film. Many fans of the director's work favor Vertigo, but I am among those who feel Rear Window's straightforward narrative, highly cinematic style, dry wit, excellent performances and flawless script are unsurpassable. The film was freely adapted from a short story by Cornell Woolrich. It concerns professional photographer L.B.

Jeffries (James Stewart) who is laid up with a broken leg in his Greenwich Village apartment. He passes his idle Jhours observing the activities of his Greenwich Village neighbors, as viewed across a courtyard from his rear window. Jeffries eventually creates humorous and supposedly harmless fantasies about the day-to-day lives of his neighbors, whom he descriptively labels by occupation or situation. They include Miss Lonely Hearts, The Composer, Miss Torso the dancer, Miss Hearing Aids, and the New-lyweds. Jeffries' fiance, Lisa (Grace Kelly), is repelled by his obsession with window-peeping, but soon shares his suspicions about strange behavior in one of the apartments.

Jeffries believes the spooky, henpecked husband across the courtyard (Raymond Burr) has murdered his wife. Suspense mounts as Jeffries and Lisa try to confirm their suspicions with evidence. Hitchcock told French director Francois Truffaut, in a series of interviews, that Rear Window appealed to him because it represented a technical challenge Tips I find it odd that invariably it's a waitress, not a waiter, who brings up the subject of tips about once'a year. Cauliflower Can anyone tell me how to pick a cauliflower without it turning yellow? Lady Techsters I would like to know why when La. Tech's Lady Techsters win 18 in a row you don't never have it on the front page.

But let them lose one game and you have a section on the front page and on the sports page. When they win you put them in a small write-up on one of the back pages. Bananas Why do all these bananas keep coming around? There are too many. What is the big deal about bananas? Everywhere you look there's bananas. Child abuse Someone just told me that their doctor said that it was child abuse if you let a little baby cry, and I thought all little babies were sup-posed to cry..