I think that people who refer to Hitchcock in attempting to identify a movie's style are stealing a lazy beat from movie industry copywriters, who desperately want readers to think the movie will produce the same kind of satisfaction that Hitchcock himself could generate. Well that's not how it actually works. There are Hitchcock homagers, hard to do and a respectable bunch (in that they acknowledge their debt--Stanley Donen, Brian DePalma), Hitchcock wannabees (too numerous to mention), and Hitchcock. Saying that a director has produced a Hitchcock-like movie is like saying a playwright has produced a Shakespeare-like play. Just resist the temptation.
What Hitchcock had going for him is everything Dream Lover lacks. Hitchcock portrayed ordinary people in extraordinary situations. The question he asked himself and his viewers was (when he was at his best), what would you do? Would you consider an offer to safely bump off your difficult spouse? Would you turn in an appealing but obviously disturbed impostor, or instead try to figure out on your own what the real story is? Would you save your country or your loved ones? Could you (forgive and) love someone who prostituted herself for her country? (Well, this last one was rhetorical: of course the answer's yes if the prostitute is Ingrid Bergman.)
What the writer/director presents us with here is: what changes would you go through if you had so little ability to connect to other human beings that you have no clue that the person you married just wanted all along to rip you off and destroy you? I'm being generous here; the film actually fails to thoroughly set Spader up as an emotional cripple, though it takes a feeble stab at it. Kazan Jr. isn't imitating Hitchcock here, but rather Don Segal (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), and without any compensating anti-McCarthyist political subtext. When you leave a good Hitchcock movie, you think, "That could have been me." When you leave Dream Lover, you think, "eight bucks, and they said it was Hitchcock-like!
p.s. For the commenter who was impressed by the movie's "paranoia is a heightened state of awareness" line: that's the signature statement of the Scottish (anti-)pyschiatrist R.D. Laing from the '70s. Great guy.
What Hitchcock had going for him is everything Dream Lover lacks. Hitchcock portrayed ordinary people in extraordinary situations. The question he asked himself and his viewers was (when he was at his best), what would you do? Would you consider an offer to safely bump off your difficult spouse? Would you turn in an appealing but obviously disturbed impostor, or instead try to figure out on your own what the real story is? Would you save your country or your loved ones? Could you (forgive and) love someone who prostituted herself for her country? (Well, this last one was rhetorical: of course the answer's yes if the prostitute is Ingrid Bergman.)
What the writer/director presents us with here is: what changes would you go through if you had so little ability to connect to other human beings that you have no clue that the person you married just wanted all along to rip you off and destroy you? I'm being generous here; the film actually fails to thoroughly set Spader up as an emotional cripple, though it takes a feeble stab at it. Kazan Jr. isn't imitating Hitchcock here, but rather Don Segal (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), and without any compensating anti-McCarthyist political subtext. When you leave a good Hitchcock movie, you think, "That could have been me." When you leave Dream Lover, you think, "eight bucks, and they said it was Hitchcock-like!
p.s. For the commenter who was impressed by the movie's "paranoia is a heightened state of awareness" line: that's the signature statement of the Scottish (anti-)pyschiatrist R.D. Laing from the '70s. Great guy.