Ick… it turned out I had seen this one before. This has to be the most forgettable Hitchcock movie, and I’m pretty certain the longest too. I think it’s the length of it that makes it feel most un-Hitchcockian to me. But there’s also severe absence of the grandeur found in his other work. No stars, and even on the second viewing, I could detect no plot either. I just cannot get my head around whatever point this movie has. I don’t care about any of the characters so when the best image does occur (some key female character’s dress billowing beneath her – Hitch shooting from above – like a pool of blood), it doesn’t have anywhere near the impact it should.

Maurice Jarre’s music gets a little catchy towards the end, but any Hitchcock movie without Bernard Herrmann is really missing some of the old magic (not that it bugs me too much – it makes Marnie even more special as their last collaboration).

It’s not overall a bad film. The near total absence of dialogue is pretty cool, and some sequences are beautifully edited in the instantly recognisable Hitchcock style. But it’s such a bore in the end, and all you feel, when you think of all the greatness Hitchcock achieved, is sadness at a master losing his touch.

There’s a short documentary on the DVD by Leonard Maltin where Maltin discusses what I just said – Maltin doesn’t feel like it’s necessarily a falling down for Hitchcock, but possibly just Hitchcock doing something that he was entertained by rather than making mass entertainment. I don’t know, and I guess we’ll never know. But I do know that I’ll take Psycho, North by Northwest, even Blackmail, (and of course my personal favourite Marnie) over this wasted 2 hours any day of the week.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 18th, 2004 at 3:31 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.