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Fashion & Film Feature

Ruggedly Masculine – Rod Taylor in The Birds

When Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) first meets Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) in the bird shop in San Francisco, his look is impeccably executed. In his charcoal grey suit – fit cut, slim tie and white shirt – he is an urban careerist in San Francisco (a defense lawyer), equally brash and charming, arrogant and worldly. […]

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Feature Music & Film

The Score: Christine (Composers: Alan Howarth & John Carpenter, 1983)

Detroit has produced many mean sounds in its volatile history – The Stooges and the MC5 to name but two bands that pushed the rock and roll sound to new and lurid heights. But surely the meanest of them all comes from the growling purr of a Detroit-made 1957 Plymouth Fury, lovingly named Christine. The […]

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Feature Music & Film

The Score: Psycho (Composer: Bernard Herrmann, 1960)

What more needs to be said about Psycho, other than it has exercised influence over every horror-thriller post 1960. Forgoing the larger budgets of Vertigo and North by Northwest, director Alfred Hitchcock wanted to dabble in the burgeoning independent market, so he stripped back the crew, retained the members from his tv show ‘Alfred Hitchcock […]