The Lodger, the silent film that Hitchcock directed in 1927, is generally acknowledged to be the one where he properly found his "voice": that distinctive combination of death and fetishism, trick shots and music-hall humour, intense menace and elegant camerawork that assured his place among cinema's giants.
But it lacks the humour, the intense humanity and quite simply the brilliance of early Shameless.
He has also repeatedly returned to the subject of Jewish identity, turning over themes of religious and social persecution, group mentality and assimilation and exclusion with intense and often painful humour.
And yet, with the first series, creator, writer and producer Noah Hawley managed the fearsome task of replicating the film's distinct mix of folksy humour and intense menace while finding his own compelling story, this time based in 2006 to the film's 1987.
The intense realism and black humour in this film are themes found across the new wave.Bogdan Dumitrache (pictured below), a 35-year-old actor who plays the role of the son, experienced both communism during his childhood and also the freedom and the economic development that followed after the revolution.
Its subject matter was his rural childhood, full of magic and intense suffering, but also dark humour.
The characters' detachment from reality is clearly an ironic commentary, but the actors play it with such intense conviction that any potential humour or societal message is lost.
There are the faithful, committed to the choreographer's weirdly intense inner journey, with its droll humour and excoriating self-interrogation, and there are those who number him among a cabal of over-entitled, over-indulged male celebrity dance-makers.
Raw, cryptic, much bootlegged, by turns intense and throwaway, shot through with surreal humour, Dylan's home studio sessions with the Band in 1967 have a justly fabled place in rock mythology.
As 30-year-old fan Jennifer Norling of San Francisco put it: "There's humour, there's love, it's intense.
