Reviews

Freud had only recently passed from the scene when this film was made, and the plot is evidence of the rather simplistic popular understanding of the early psychoanalysis. It now seems hopelessly naive to assume that merely uncovering the demons of one's past will effectively erase the emotional pain they have produced and thereby "cure" the patient. Yet this is the premiss of the film.

The plot looks both backward and forward in Hitchcock's development as a director. Backward: to his favourite 1930s plotline, as found in "The 39 Steps" and "Young and Innocent", of a man fleeing the law and attempting to clear his name of a crime he did not commit. Forward: to the likes of "Psycho" and "Marnie" in the 1960s, where the mystery revolves around uncovering the psychological motivations of a person's actions. Was this the first of Hitch's psychological thrillers? It may well have been.

In this case Peck plays the recently arrived director of a hospital for the mentally ill, who doesn't quite know what he's supposed to know to perform his new role. It soon becomes clear he is not the man he claims to be. In the meantime, of course, the previously dedicated and workaholic Bergman is uncharacteristically smitten with him and, like Nova Pilbeam in "Young and Innocent", runs off with him to help him clear both his name and his head. If there is any suspense in this film, it is found in Bergman risking her career to help a man who she thinks is probably not a criminal but cannot be absolutely certain of it. The plotline is, of course, utterly ridiculous, without the slightest hint of credibility. But Bergman and Peck are sufficiently good actors to make it work.

They are aided by the efforts of Salvador Dali, who put together the famous dream sequence, and of Miklós Rózsa, who composed a great score that is simultaneously romantic and eerie. Without these men's contribution, this film would likely be judged one of Hitch's lesser efforts.

I had trouble finding this film in the local video store but finally saw it on television. It's well worth watching. It's a wonderful commentary on the American suburban corporate culture emerging in the years following the second World War. Peck plays the stereotypical businessman living in Connecticut and taking the New Haven Railroad into New York City each day. He is faced with a number of seemingly mundane dilemmas, such as settling a deceased relative's estate, how to deal with a dissatisfied wife more ambitious than he, whether to switch jobs for better pay, and whether he should tell his new boss what he *needs* rather than *wants* to hear. Hanging over him are the ever-present memories of his wartime combat experience, which intrude on him occasionally – especially during those otherwise empty hours spent commuting on the train.

I disagree with the reviewer who found the film boring apart from the war scenes. One of the reasons why this film works so well is that it regularly jolts the viewer, nearly lulled into complacency by the apparent ordinariness of suburban life, with those sudden flashbacks of the horrors of war. The juxtaposition of these quite different scenes was quite deliberate and speaks volumes in itself. How is it possible for someone who has spent four years both killing and avoiding death to settle into a normal life of family and work? Obviously it's not easy.

Furthermore, death continues to haunt the family in various, almost light-hearted ways, particularly by way of the children who were born after the carnage had ended and for whom death is no more real than the gunfights in those television westerns to which they are so conspicuously addicted. A scene near the beginning has one of the girls suffering from chicken pox, a fairly minor malady, as everyone knows. But she tells her father she has "small pox" and her sister keeps teasing her with the morbid suggestion that she is going to die. The father tells her to stop, but she keeps it up. He knows what death is all about; his children do not.

The term "workaholic" had not yet been coined in 1956, but the contrast between the man who chooses a fuller, less driven life – including time for family – and the man married to his career could not have been more starkly portrayed. The viewers find themselves applauding the choice Peck eventually makes and pitying March for not having done so himself.

I am a great fan of the score's composer, Bernard Herrmann, whose music is uniquely capable of evoking a range of strong emotions in the listener. The music here is typically Herrmann, although it is not as central a "character" in this film as are his scores in, say, "Vertigo" and "Psycho." It is impossible to imagine the latter two films without the music, while this film seems less obviously dependent on its score.

Although I quite liked this film, it is overly long and could have been better edited. The several subplots needed to be better integrated into the whole. What, for example, was the purpose of the challenge to Peck's inheritance, other than to show the persistent salvific role Cobb played in his life? This subplot could easily have been cut and the film would have suffered nothing in terms of its overall impact. In fact, it might have been better for being more tightly constructed.

This is one of the better of the early Hitchcock's British-made films, probably second only to "The Lady Vanishes." It is also the one that has been remade the most number of times – in 1959 and again in 1978. It is loosely based on the novel of the same name by John Buchan, who, incidentally, became Governor General of Canada under the title of Lord Tweedsmuir the very year the film was released.

The plot will be familiar even to Hitchcock fans who happened to miss this movie. A visiting Canadian, played by Donat, is falsely accused of the murder of a beautiful spy who had sought refuge in his London flat. Like Cary Grant a quarter-century later in "North by Northwest," he is forced to flee both the law and an international spy ring, heading north to Scotland to seek out a man missing part of his little finger who turns out to be the ringleader. While fleeing south again he is kidnapped and handcuffed to Carroll and, naturally enough for a Hitchcock film, an initial friction between the two eventually blossoms into romance as she is increasingly persuaded of his innocence. The action is fast-paced and there are some wonderfully amusing scenes. My favourite found Donat accidentally thrust onto the platform of a by-election campaign rally and forced to improvise a political speech as if he himself were introducing the candidate. The humour lies in his actually pulling it off to the audience's satisfaction and applause!

There are a few scenes of a sexually suggestive nature that probably would not have appeared in an American film at that time, although they might have only two years earlier before the adoption of the Hayes Code. One has Donat and Carroll checking into a small hotel together, with the proprietors uncertain whether or not they are married. Another is a closeup of Carroll removing her stockings while handcuffed to Donat.

Virtually everyone notes the appearance in two brief scenes of a very young Peggy Ashcroft, the famous Shakespearean actress. I myself didn't like these scenes. Although Hitchcock was a Roman Catholic, he was apparently not above stereotyping the man of faith (John Laurie) as a dour, humourless wife-beater whose one positive contribution is a bullet-stopping hymnbook! I can't help wondering whether C. S. Lewis or G. K. Chesterton saw the film and, if so, what they would have thought of such a one-sided portrayal.

Three more flaws keep this from being a masterpiece. First, like many of Hitch's early efforts, it has something of a rough, amateurish feel to it. (Admittedly, part of this may be due to a physical deterioration of the film over the decades, but it's difficult to tell for sure this many years later.) Second, Donat's accent is obviously not that of a Canadian. Surely I'm not the only Canadian to have noticed this? Third, it all ended too abruptly. I found the final scene something of a letdown.

"Rebecca" was the first Hitchcock film I ever saw, and I was mesmerized by it from the start, convinced that I had to see more of the director's work. It richly deserved the Oscar it received, but it's a real puzzle that the Academy saw fit to withhold a best director award for Hitch. Would one possibly give an award to a work by Picasso and not to Picasso himself?

"Rebecca" was the first of the director's American-made films, and it shows. It's quite different from his earlier British-made films, such as "Young and Innocent" and even "The Lady Vanishes," which somehow seem more amateurish by comparison. (I know little of the British cinema of that era, but it's difficult not to conclude that Hollywood was better at producing more sophisticated efforts.) I would even judge "Rebecca" the best of his films of the early 1940s, with the possible exception of "Shadow of a Doubt." It is true, of course, that much of this film has become cliché (remember the spoofs on the old "Carol Burnette Show"!), but it still weathers the decades very well. The acting is uniformly excellent. Olivier is the hardened Maxim de Winter, untitled lord of Manderly, trying to forget the past and given to unexpected bouts of anger and coldheartedness. Fontaine is perfect as the unnamed mousy heroine, innocent yet deeply in love, still carrying with her the aura of an awkward schoolgirl. Even character actor Nigel Bruce, best known for his role in the Sherlock Holmes films, makes an appearance and plays, in effect, Nigel Bruce!

But it is Judith Anderson's role as Mrs. Danvers that viewers are likely to remember best. Her presence is as dark and foreboding as that of the deceased Rebecca herself, and Fontaine is evidently cowed by her icy stare and unnervingly formal manner. The dynamics between the two actresses are wonderful. Who could fail to empathize with Fontaine's unenviable position as, in effect, the new employer of such an intimidating personage? On the other hand, Olivier seems quite unfearful of Anderson, despite her representing so much of the past he is trying to block out. This part of the plot (even in the book) never made much sense to me and is unconvincing.

As far as I know, this film marked Hitch's first collaboration with composer Franz Waxman, whose haunting score makes it all the more memorable. Waxman's scores are perhaps less obviously cinematic than those of the incomparable Bernard Herrmann, who would score Hitch's films from 1955 to 1966. Contrast the score for "Rebecca" to Herrmann's music for "Citizen Kane" the following year, and you'll immediately hear the difference. Waxman's is more symphonic in the central European style reflective of his own birth and upbringing. Yet it is worth recalling that scoring films was still a new art at this time, and both Waxman and Herrmann were pioneers.

Finally, one has to mention the cinematography, which is magnificent. Technically "Rebecca" might have been filmed in colour, which was newly available in 1940. ("Gone with the Wind" was filmed entirely in colour the previous year, while "The Wizzard of Oz" and "The Women" had colour scenes.) But colour would have diminished its impact. The suspense and the ominous sense of impending doom could only have been communicated through the medium of black-and-white and the deft use of light and shade which it affords.

In one respect, of course, "Rebecca" is not a typical Hitchcock film. There is no fleeing innocent trying to clear his name of a crime he did not commit. Surprisingly, there isn't even a murder, although its absence was apparently imposed by the Hayes Code and is certainly foreign to Daphne du Maurier's original novel. Some have said that there is more Selznick than Hitchcock in this film, and perhaps there's something to that. Still, if the collaborative effort between the two was not exactly amiable, it was nevertheless successful.

In short, this is the first in a string of Hitchcock masterpieces.

More than two generations later it is difficult to imagine how it must have been for the men and women who had so recently won the second World War to come home to an America different from the one they had left behind a few years earlier. This cinematic classic conveys the atmosphere of that poignant time, and even those born years later will easily identify with the joys and heartaches of this homecoming.

During the war years so much of the nation's efforts were put into supporting the fighting men on the frontlines who were, quite naturally, the centre of everyone's concerns. But with the war over, and with the soldiers back out of uniform, they became once again ordinary citizens who had to make their way in life along with everyone else who had stayed behind. In many cases their lengthy absence proved a handicap. Wyler's sensitive direction captures the dilemma perfectly in the lives of the three protagonists. March is a banker who had left behind a family and returns to find his two children grown and thinking for themselves – and not always in ways with which he is comfortable. Andrews is a former soda jerk-turned-bomber who comes home to a crumbling marriage and a wife he barely knows. Russell leaves a fiancée – literally the girl next door – loses both hands in combat, and, assuming he is no longer lovable, cannot bring himself to accept her unwavering devotion.

Although none of the three had known each other before their war experience – mostly, it seems, because they came from quite different social and economic circumstances – their lives are now inextricably interwoven. The principal storyline consists, not of a single main plot with related subplots, as one might expect, but of the three skilfully interconnected subplots themselves, all of which come together in a satisfying way in the final scene. Under a lesser director this might have turned messy. But the result here is a wonderfully rich and moving film.

I've always liked Teresa Wright, whose characters invariably exude warmth and compassion and make the viewer wish she really did live next door. One hardly expects such a wholesome person to announce to her astonished parents that she intends to break up a marriage, but she makes it work. Coming from her it seems like the most logical thing in the world. Loy too has a way of being both sexy and maternal. She's exactly the sort of woman a returning GI would want to find waiting for him.

Two peculiarities do not stand the test of time very well. First, nearly everyone in this film smokes. For better or worse, if North Americans as a whole have become less puritanical about sex, they have become more so concerning tobacco use. Second, it would seem fairly evident to us now that March's character has an alcohol problem. If so, one wonders how he got through the war in one piece. In any event, making light of someone's excessive drinking would not go over very well at the beginning of a new century.

When I first saw this film I missed the name of the score composer and thought it might have been Aaron Copland. Some of the musical phrases and chord progressions seem somehow reminiscent of "Appalachian Spring." Of course, it was Hugo Friedhofer. Like the better known Copland, Friedhofer seems to capture well something of both the expansiveness and the ordinariness of the American heartland, but this time in the lives of the three GIs and their families. The music has a profound emotional appeal without becoming overly sentimental. It communicates simultaneously a nostalgia for those missed years, the unimaginable joy at being home again, and the bittersweet feeling of trying desperately to fit in and make up for lost time.

This is, in short, very nearly a flawless film well worth multiple viewings.

The first time I saw this film I was quite disappointed. So much of it has become cliché in the four decades since its release, including the famous shower scene, Perkins' oedipal relationship with his mother, and even Bernard Herrmann's unsettling score. I had known the identity of Perkins' "mother" even before I saw the film and had to be told by a sibling that the audience was not supposed to be aware of this up to the last. It was like knowing the punch line in advance and not really getting the joke once it was actually told. It is, to be sure, a tribute to Hitchcock that this film has become so much a part of North American popular culture, but the downside is that the element of shock that so affected audiences back in 1960 is almost entirely lost on a later generation of viewers. One thus has to imagine what it would have been like to see it during its first run in the movie theatres.

Had I been there at its opening, I think I would still have judged this film to be inferior to the string of excellent Hitchcock offerings preceding it during the previous decade–from "Strangers on a Train" to "North by Northwest." Why? So much of his previous work had relied on the use of suspense to draw the viewers into the plot. A good thriller builds this up carefully and deliberately until the final climax at or near the end of the film. Good suspense leaves much unstated and works its way subtly into the imagination. It's what you don't see that's the scariest. Think, for example, of the murder in "Rear Window." You hear a crash and a short, shrill scream followed by ominous silence, but you're not really sure what's happened until much later. Here, on the other hand, Hitch kills off his heroine brutally near the beginning of the film, leaving little if anything to the imagination, and largely putting aside the issues we had been misled to think the plot was building up to.

Moreover, despite Hitch's tongue-in-cheek claim that he had intended it as a comedy, there is little of the director's famous humour so much in evidence in the immediately preceding film, "North by Northwest." There is not much humour to be found in shock, while there is great humorous potential in suspense. He should have stuck with suspense and left shock to a lesser director.

I alluded to Herrmann's score. Without it, I think this would have been judged a far less effective film and less the classic it is generally reputed to be. Imagine Leigh driving along the highway without the composer's jittery music in the background–or, perhaps more accurately, the foreground. In such scenes it is the music that almost entirely creates the suspenseful atmosphere. Without it there is nothing of the sort–just Leigh driving and looking in her rear view mirror. Period. Not very scary.

Is it a classic then? It is, insofar as it influenced a whole generation of movie-goers and film makers who sought to imitate it. But on its own merits, I don't think so.

This is the best of the early Hitchcock films. The plot is absorbing, the dialogue clever and the cast great. Whether or not this was the first of the director's films to place its principal action on a moving train I cannot say, but it's a theme that would come back again in his later work, most notably in "Strangers on a Train."

The film gets off to a somewhat rocky start with the camera panning over an Alpine inn and a train halted mid-journey by an avalanche. I agree with the review who observes that we've become spoilt by more sophisticated special effects. A Lionel half buried in a heap of bleached wheat flower just doesn't cut it nowadays. Think also of the stick figure engulfed in the munitions factory explosion in "Saboteur." I suppose directors of that era had to do with whatever was available.

But after this point the film really takes off, and one scarcely recalls the unpromising opening. Viewers always look for the chemistry or lack thereof between actors. Well, Lockwood and Redgrave definitely have it. One cannot help but enjoy seeing how the initial sparks flying between their clashing characters develop into true love by movie's end. As the two are making their way through the train trying to locate Whitty, they move from one barely plausible predicament to another. But we love it, as one witty exchange turns quickly into another. (For example, Lockwood is asked to describe the missing Whitty and launches into an extremely detailed portrait that leaves not a single button unaccounted for. Then she ends by saying, "That's all I can remember." Counters Redgrave dryly: "Well, you can't have been paying attention.")

Much of the film's action occurs in the fictional country of Bandrika, which seems to be a thinly disguised stand-in for nazi-controlled Austria, so recently annexed by Hitler's Germany. As an amateur linguist, I found myself trying to make sense of the made-up "Bandrikan" spoken by the natives, but of course was unable to do so. (What could it be? A Finno-Ugric language? :) Most of the time the identity of Hitchcock's villains remains deliberately vague, except in "Notorious" and "Torn Curtain," where they are nazis and communists respectively. It works better when he leaves us guessing.

As an amateur musician I loved Hitch's "macguffin," namely, the secret formula encoded in a song which the protagonists had to memorize and carry to the Foreign Office in London. (I should think, however, that a genuine secret message might translate into something more like Schoenberg's twelve-tone music than a central European folk song, but of course that would hardly work in a film. :)

The early Hitchcock seemed to like shootouts, as seen also in the first version of "The Man Who Knew Too Much." But shootouts are an ineffective way to convey suspense, and this is perhaps the one thing that dims what is otherwise a masterpiece.

It's too bad the director lived long enough to see this film remade in 1979. Cybil Shepherd is no Margaret Lockwood, and it's pretty unpleasant-almost embarrassing-to see her shrieking her way through each scene. Couldn't they have waited a few years until he had passed on? They ought to have let him die in peace.

The first time I watched "Torn Curtain," I grew bored and turned it off before it was over. I've watched it in its entirety more than once since then. It's difficult not to conclude that the master director's age was beginning to take its toll by 1966. It could have been a great film except for some major flaws.

First, the main characters. Newman and Andrews look distinctly ill-at-ease and their acting is wooden. There is very nearly no chemistry between them, and viewers are not really drawn into their somewhat implausible situation. Both actors are compelling in other films, but for some reason not in this one.

Second, Hitchcock would have done better to keep his villains' identity less specific. In "The Lady Vanishes", "The Thirty-nine Steps," and "North by Northwest," the identity of the foreign agents is left deliberately vague and thus little plausibility need be attached to their actions. Here they are East German communists, of which we know rather a lot.

Third, there are inconsistencies in the plot. At one point Newman and Andrews are forced to go out into an open space to avoid being overheard. But in another scene a pro-western spy communicates confidential information to Newman in a hospital room, seemingly oblivious to the possibility of wiretaps.

Finally, there's John Addison's score, which seems to have been written quite independently of the film's action. A suspenseful scene is inappropriately matched with cheerful, melodic music. Everyone knows, of course, that Hitch's longtime musical collaborator, Bernard Herrmann, wrote a mostly complete score for the film, but the two had a falling out on the set and Herrmann was dismissed. Another example of poor judgement on Hitchcock's part. Herrmann's score would have immeasurably improved a mediocre film. (Look at "Obsession" nearly a decade later.) With all the recent film restorations, I would love to see someone redo "Torn Curtain" and put in as much of Herrmann's score as the composer was able to finish. (But perhaps there would be copyright problems.) Had Herrmann's score been used, the murder sequence in the farmhouse might have become as famous as the shower scene in "Psycho."

As I was watching the protagonists flee through the East German landscape in their efforts to reach the west, I found myself thinking that, if they had only waited another twenty-three years, the wall would have come down anyway and they could simply have walked out! That's how much their plight gripped me.

Viewers have long been divided as to which version of "The Man Who Knew Too Much" is the better. I personally prefer the second. Though it doesn't measure up to the likes of "Rear Window", "Vertigo" and "North by Northwest", it is vintage Hitchcock at his best. In the 1934 original a British couple are on holiday in Switzerland, become privy to sensitive information and, as a consequence, their teenage daughter is kidnapped. In the 1956 remake Stewart and Day are Americans on holiday in Morocco, inadvertently learn of an assassination plot, and have their ten-year-old son taken from them. The overall plot is more sophisticated in the second version, and, of course, the use of colour cinematography lends a certain visual depth lacking in the earlier film. However, the second version is not in every way superior to the first: much of its playfulness is sacrificed in the remake, which takes itself a little too seriously.

Stewart is always a pleasure to watch in his films, and this one is no exception. Day is very good in her role as well, though she is hardly the cool blonde typical of Hitch's other films. In this respect Day's selection as female lead is perhaps a bit unexpected, although admittedly few other Hitchcock blondes are called upon to play the maternal role at which Day excels here. One can almost feel a mother's anguish when Day is told by Stewart that their son has been abducted. Her reaction is entirely believable. All the same, I was bothered to think that a trained physician would bribe his wife with tranquillizers before telling her the unpleasant news. This doesn't ring true.

This film marks Hitchcock's second collaborative effort with composer Bernard Herrmann, who actually appears as himself in the Albert Hall sequence. But insofar as "The Trouble with Harry" is not a typical Hitchcock offering, this film might justly be considered the first of the great suspense movies created by the gifted duo. Herrmann's score is not as integral a part of the plot as it is in, say, "Vertigo" or "Psycho"; here it definitely remains in the background. Nevertheless it lends itself perfectly to the feel of the story as a whole and hints at greater things to come in those later films.

I thought the shootout near the end of the 1934 film was heavy-handed and amateurish. It seemed like the work of someone stuck for a better way to resolve the plot. The comparable scene in this later version is more suspenseful–after all, there's no real suspense if you're already being shot at. But the use of Day singing what would soon become her trademark song at a foreign embassy is a questionable improvement. Both versions of this film should be seen. And then decide for yourself which is the better of the two.

This is the master director's greatest film, slightly edging out "North by Northwest" and "Vertigo." Even the absence of a score by Bernard Herrmann cannot dim this masterpiece. Everything comes together in a seamless whole. To begin with, the set is impressive. The fact that the viewers are seeing so much happening in so many different people's lives makes them forget that, except for one or two scenes near the end, the camera never moves from the protagonist's apartment. What Jeff sees we see and nothing more. The voyeuristic fantasy is so complete, we forget that no one in his or her right mind would put on a brassiere, attempt suicide, or commit murder in front of an open window. I can't help wondering whether this looking in on so many people's private goings-on had anything to do with the still new medium of television, which enabled people for the first time to sit in the comfort of their own living rooms and watch, as if through an open window, the antics of Lucy and Ricky, Ozzie and Harriet and others in the supposed privacy of their own homes.

I mentioned the score. This film apparently marked Hitch's last collaboration with composer Franz Waxman, who scored the earliest of the director's American films, including "Rebecca" and "Suspicion." Yet it's not a conventional score. Apart from the opening theme, the music is part of the action and pours out of various apartments overlooking the courtyard, particularly the penthouse apartment of the songwriter, whose evolving composition provides a melodic--and sometimes not so melodic--backdrop for the developing plot. (What a noisy place! And this was in the days before boom boxes. Yet somehow it looks like a delightful neighbourhood to live in.)

Then, of course, there are the three stars, Stewart, Kelly and Ritter, who are wonderful together. In many respects all three are character actors, but the characters blend in so charming a fashion that the viewer is taken in as much by the personalities as by the suspense-filled story line. Each character is surrounded by a certain ironic twist. Stewart is the adventurer whose wanderlust is forcibly curtailed by confinement to a wheelchair. Kelly is the pampered socialite who nevertheless summons up the courage to collect clues to a suspected murder in a most unconventional way. And Ritter is an apparently ordinary insurance company nurse whose homespun wisdom makes her part psychoanalyst and part clairvoyant. The chemistry is marvellous and would be difficult to replicate.

What about the 1998 made-for-television remake? It's interesting enough entertainment in its own right, but not as a remake of the 1954 film. The original is definitely the one to see.

David Lean's 1965 film is definitely worth seeing. It's a visual tapestry that's stunning from beginning to end, and one of those wide screen epics of the 1950s and '60s that attempted to pull viewers away from the banalities of television.

However, the film misses a central point of Pasternak's novel and could hardly do otherwise if it intended to communicate to English-speaking audiences. In the author's narrative, which takes place during the Great War, the Revolutions of 1917 and the ensuing Civil War, he takes great pains to focus on a particular family and its trials, bringing in the specifics of external history only when absolutely necessary. The reader is never told in so many words that, for example, the February Revolution has taken place and that the Tsar has abdicated. Nor is the reader told that Lenin has seized power and that civil war has broken out between the Whites and the Reds. We are told that, say, Kolchak's army is nearby, and that it's had such and such an effect on the novel's main characters.

Pasternak was evidently attempting to de-emphasize the grand historical forces that are so central to the Marxist worldview, focussing instead on the personal at the expense of the political. This is one of the things that likely got him in trouble with Soviet authorities. However, no filmmaker could possibly have taken this approach and hoped to make sense to those unacquainted with Russian history--which, after all, includes most of its intended audience. Thus a brilliant film will always remain but a shadow of the original novel.

This is, in my view, the last of the great Hitchcock films. I agree with the reviewer who said that only "Rear Window" keeps it from being THE best. It's a pleasure to view from beginning to end. Hitch's later films (even "Psycho" and "The Birds") are markedly inferior. The story is a reprise of the director's favourite plot line--the innocent man falsely accused of committing a crime and who has to flee his pursuers and clear his name--but with a twist. Grant is being chased from two directions: by international spies who believe he's a counterspy and by the police who believe he's a murderer. Hitch's typically morbid sense of humour is in evidence throughout, and the entire film is magnificently tongue in cheek. Bernard Herrmann's gripping score is arguably a co-star, right along with Grant, Saint and Mason. It's difficult to imagine what the movie would have been like without the composer's agitated musical phrases that never seem to find resolution. The weak link is Saint, whose acting is wooden and whose screen presence cannot begin to equal those of Grace Kelly ("To Catch a Thief", "Rear Window") and Kim Novak ("Vertigo"). Had Kelly not married her prince and had she appeared in this film, it would have been even more of a masterpiece. Try to imagine Kelly as Eve Kendall and see if you don't agree.

Railfans and longtime residents of Chicago will notice that one of the scenes was filmed in the old LaSalle Street Station, torn down in 1980 and for decades the western terminus for the New York Central's famous Twentieth Century train. Hitch's penchant for filming action on trains is once again evident in this film.

It's unusual to see a colour film of such cinematic beauty made as early as 1945. It's a pleasure to watch if only for the succession of scenic locations, and also for the architectural beauty of the homes inhabited by this evidently well off but troubled family. However, the plot becomes increasingly implausible with each twist of the storyline. The courtroom scene near the end was least believable of all. To think that a judge would allow someone to act as prosecuting attorney who had once been jilted by the alleged murder victim stretches belief nearly to the breaking point.