Movie Reviews
North By Northwest
Here is the ne plus ultra of the romantic chase thriller, and probably Hitchcock’s most appealing movie. I mean, what’s not to like? Cary Grant is an entirely innocent man snared up totally by accident in a government scheme with Leo G. Carroll and his nameless organization on one side and an urbanely sinister James Mason and really scary Martin Landau—in only his second movie role—on the ... Read more »
Vertigo
What a deeply disturbed, horrific, perverse, alarming and thoroughly wonderful film this is! Though it is not my favorite Hitchcock film (that would be Rear Window), I have no problem with the majority of critics, who label this one Hitchcock’s greatest masterpiece. It is. It’s just not a film I will ever have any affection for, sort of like Scorsese’s Read more »
The Wrong Man
Although this is in some ways the quintessential Hitchcock film, in that it revolves entirely around an innocent man wrongly accused of a crime, it is in every other aspect miles away from anything else he ever did. First, it is based on fact, and apparently sticks pretty rigorously to the real events and characters. Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda, in a wonderfully restrained performance) ... Read more »
The Man Who Knew Too Much
It’s a good story, but I’ve never quite figured out why Hitchcock wanted to make it twice. Did he think the title was The Man Who Knew Two Much? Anyway, he retained only the basic story of a man who was given a secret from a dying spy, then was unable to tell anyone about it because his daughter (in the remake, a pain-in-the-ass son) was kidnapped to threaten ... Read more »
The Trouble With Harry
Hitchcock said on several occasions that this was his favorite of his films. I think he mentioned others at other times, but this one is clearly from the heart. A very black, very strange heart, but still. Audiences in 1955 weren’t ready for this sort of black humor, and the film was a financial bust. I just dearly love it, and have since the first time I saw it. In a forest near a tiny ... Read more »
To Catch a Thief
This light, frothy romance has always felt to me like a practice session for North By Northwest, four years later. It’s about an innocent man pursued by police who, in this one, are amazingly incompetent (because they are French, I suppose), so there’s not really a lot of suspense here. It’s about the sexual tension between an older man, John Robie (Cary Grant, ... Read more »
Rear Window
This is my choice for Alfred Hitchcock’s finest film, even better than Psycho, even better than Shadow of a Doubt. I recall seeing a trailer (we called them “previews” back then) for Rear Window when it was just coming out. I believe it featured Hitchcock himself, and he was showing us around his huge indoor ... Read more »
Dial M For Murder
The current obsession with 3D is not the first one. Whether modern 3D will last is still to be determined (I suspect it will), but the one that blasted into theaters in the 1950s turned out to be just a fad. There were two processes involved there. The one that’s best remembered was that truly horrible thing that involved wearing glasses with a red and a blue plastic lens. Read more »
Strangers on a Train
Here’s a perfect example of what I think of as Novelist’s Despair. Hitchcock bought the rights to Patricia Highsmith’s novel … and a short digression here, he bought them for $7500, through a dummy—which he did a lot, he was a cheapskate—because his name attached to it would jack up the price. Highsmith was pissed, and rightly so. Where was I? Oh, right, despair. ... Read more »
Stage Fright
There’s an amusing anecdote on the DVD extras. The movie opens with a huge stage curtain rising to reveal St. Paul’s Cathedral and the recent bomb damage around it. Cut to a car speeding directly at the camera. As the grill fills the screen, we cut away. This scene called for someone to drive right at the camera. I don’t know how they got it out of the way, but they did. Now, that was ... Read more »