A French creative firm called Gump has crafted a four-minute video that every cinephile always wanted but never knew it: a pastiche of the legendary work of directors Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock, featuring actor Jimmy Stewart (from Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo) stumbling into the dark, dizzying universe of Kubrick’s oeuvre.
There’s nothing original about these sorts of tributes, which are often indulgent and awkward. But “The Red Drum Getaway” somehow works almost seamlessly. It begins with the voyeuristic Stewart from Rear Window, spying on his buxom neighbor from across the alley, only to find that she has become The Shining‘s leering psychotic Jack Torrance. Stewart then wanders out onto the streets of San Francisco, where he encounters Kubrick’s motley crew: Torrance again; the droogs from A Clockwork Orange; Dave Bowman in a spacesuit, from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
From there, he’s sucked into the Kubrickian rabbit hole, which becomes more and more surreal and meta as the video nears its climax. (Spoiler warning: it was all just a dream.)
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