Another Hitch movie I thought I’d seen but hadn’t. I don’t know if it’s just me, but after Marnie I swear Hitchcock’s movies just began not only to get worse (I think most people agree on this, some taking the start point back beyond Marnie even), but also to look increasingly like TV movies. That or, as here, Brian De Palma movies (no insult intended).

This is better than Topaz or Torn Curtain (Frenzy, I remember loving but I’ll have to check it out again some time) in many ways but nowhere near Hitchcock’s best. John Williams’ score is a fine replacement for Bernard Herrmann (didn’t Williams pretty much take over from Herrmann anyway?), Barbara Harris is beautifully cheeky (check out that wink at the end!), and the story is a little more ‘there’ than in TC and Topaz.

The DVD, like most in the recent Hitchcock series, is pretty good. There’s no commentary by historians or biographers (or cast, I think most are still around), but there’s a nice documentary which features a pretty sad story about Hitch confessing that he couldn’t go on and saying he would never make another movie after this one. That must have been intense for the other guy in the room (I forget who tells the story on the DVD).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2004 at 4:25 pm in Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.