A Secret Service agent, gone to pieces after losing his wife in a furious gunfight, comes out of three months in a sanatorium with shaky hands and a stupendous suntan, and back at his apartment finds an anonymous death threat written in ancient Aramaic. The story, as it unfolds from …
Alfred Hitchcock's high-rent spy romance, in romantic Rio de Janeiro, maintains an atmosphere of crackling sexual tension, with Ingrid Bergman as a loose liver wooed (too well) by a suave American agent, and propelled, against both their better wishes, into squeamish wedlock with a Nazi. Cary Grant, Claude Rains, Louis …
The reworking of the old Frederick Knott damsel-in-distress stage play, Dial M for Murder, filmed originally (and in 3-D) by Alfred Hitchcock, is sufficient to qualify as too-many-cooks but not to qualify as genuine originality. Did the business with the key makes better sense in the 1954 film? (Why can't …
The fundamental idea -- a thriller tethered for almost its total running time to a public telephone, squarely in the telescopic sights of a taunting sniper -- had reportedly been around long enough for scriptwriter Larry Cohen (subsequently the writer-director of such disreputable entertainments as It's Alive and The Private …
Science fiction of the subgenre Last-Man-on-Earth. Or at least on New Zealand. The "Man" in this instance is an Auckland scientist who, in league with "the Americans," may or may not have had a hand in "the effect," as it comes to be known, that has seemingly removed all trace …
For a while we're on an illusion-and-reality merry-go-round, with cheap-trick dream scenes and imaginary evil twins and oh-by-the-way flashbacks. Once we're let off the merry-go-round the degree of reality doesn't increase. Director Brian De Palma has always been lax about improbabilities, and here writing his own script he is able …
At least it has a definite and deathless theme: voyeurism. A New York book editor, and not incidentally a specialist in tell-all celebrity biographies, moves into an East Side high-rise, and someone who signs himself "Secret Admirer" warms her new home with the gift of a telescope through which to …
or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Dissociative Identity Disorder. Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan reminds everyone why folks used to associate him with Alfred Hitchcock, swiping a mental condition from Psycho, a sympathetic shrink from Spellbound, and a bold theorist from Rope. (Oh, and there’s some good …
Uneven suspense film from Alfred Hitchcock, watered down from the diabolical Patricia Highsmith original. Too many lumpish set pieces and too many stuffy characterizations (a glamorous tennis star, his loyal fiancée, her U.S. Senator father, a gaggle of Capitol Hill socialites, and an unctuous psychopath). However, the beautifully synchronized opening, …
The truest movie translation, to date, of a Patricia Highsmith thriller -- a category that includes the likes of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, René Clement's Purple Noon, and Wim Wenders's The American Friend. Despite the offbeat casting of Gerard Depardieu and Miou-Miou (neither of whom has ever been …
Alfred Hitchcock, slimmed down to the lightweight class (he's in best form as a light-heavy), tells a nothing tale about a debonair cat burglar who is forced out of restful retirement on the French Riviera. Hitchcock uses jewels as a sexual symbol in such a manner as to pass for …
Alfred Hitchcock's demystification of espionage agents, who herein bear a strong likeness to corporate execs (well-tailored suits, lots of conferences, phone calls, plane trips, and business lunches or teas). Except when it tries to be romantic or suspenseful, it's a very sedate, straightforward treatment of a very sinister, serpentine plot. …
An American scientist's feigned defection to the Soviet Union in hopes of acquiring the solution to his own Physics problem is replete with Alfred Hitchcock's mannered, overdesigned "set pieces," most of which fail to rise up, full-bodied, from the drafting table. Now and then a nice feel for character brings …
Where to begin? Or the tougher question: where to leave off? The shorter list, certainly, would be what is not the trouble: firstly and foremostly the Vermont autumn, with its fiery Van Gogh palette. Perhaps the chief reason why this Hitchcock "black comedy" dates so badly is that the movie …
Nominally a post-WWII thriller in the vein of The Third Man, about a German-American peacenik who hopes to be part of the postwar rebuilding effort (as a sleeping-car conductor, of all things) but who finds himself embroiled with Kafka-esque bureaucrats, Patton-esque militarists, and Third Reichian bitter-enders known as Werewolves. Questions …