After recommending this episode to numerous friends, boasting Hitchcock's tremendous directing work in it, I finally realized I hadn't even checked whether Hitchcock was truly the director of this episode. So I checked. And thank God he was the director.
You think you just know it when you see such excellent directing work. The director must take most of the credits, because technically the first line didn't come up until about 10 min into the show. It's all image. The plot is so simple and the tension all comes from the director's work.
You listen to the language of film.
The mise-en-scène, oh, how can I praise it enough? Sixty years later, it's still the best artwork in film making. How can anyone forget the shot where the police officer talks to the leading character and turns and sits on the engine cover casually dancing his revolver at his waist into the guilty man's eye sight? God, my Hitchcock!
My days especially enjoying such "line-less" scenes goes way back to middle school when I read Takehiko Inoue's masterpiece comic book SLAM DUNK. The last book of the series was the last part of the toughest basketball game they had. When it was so intense, in that book, there were not many lines. All actions and emotions were delivered through pictures, but what I felt was much stronger than any words can express.
That's also why I'm such a big fan of the Pang brothers. In their first feature film Bangkok Dangerous (1999), they created a deaf-mute protagonist, so they didn't have to focus much on verbal language. They chose the impactful language that has no barriers between different cultures, the language of images.
And here, in One More Mile to Go, I see one of the best poems written in this language.
You think you just know it when you see such excellent directing work. The director must take most of the credits, because technically the first line didn't come up until about 10 min into the show. It's all image. The plot is so simple and the tension all comes from the director's work.
You listen to the language of film.
The mise-en-scène, oh, how can I praise it enough? Sixty years later, it's still the best artwork in film making. How can anyone forget the shot where the police officer talks to the leading character and turns and sits on the engine cover casually dancing his revolver at his waist into the guilty man's eye sight? God, my Hitchcock!
My days especially enjoying such "line-less" scenes goes way back to middle school when I read Takehiko Inoue's masterpiece comic book SLAM DUNK. The last book of the series was the last part of the toughest basketball game they had. When it was so intense, in that book, there were not many lines. All actions and emotions were delivered through pictures, but what I felt was much stronger than any words can express.
That's also why I'm such a big fan of the Pang brothers. In their first feature film Bangkok Dangerous (1999), they created a deaf-mute protagonist, so they didn't have to focus much on verbal language. They chose the impactful language that has no barriers between different cultures, the language of images.
And here, in One More Mile to Go, I see one of the best poems written in this language.