Category Archives: British

The Long Haul (1956): Diana Dors and Victor Mature

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Although it was distributed by Columbia, The Long Haul is a bit unique from your typical Hollywood offerings. Victor Mature is an American G.I., who settled in England with his English wife following the end of the war. He has a cross-cultural marriage in a post-war landscape and since this is a British production, you have an American as the outsider.

While Victor Mature often comes off as a pretty face, even a plastic one, movies like The Long Haul offer him something to work with, and he gives it an earnest turn. There’s also some audience identification for the sole fact he is one of us (I’m speaking as an American), and if you’ve ever lived anywhere where you felt out of place, it’s easy enough to relate.

The Long Haul is also subtly a movie of family favors. Even as his bride is hesitant to leave her home country for the purported prosperity of America, she gets Harry a job with her uncle’s trucking company. There aren’t many prospects and it’s tough work, but he doesn’t have much choice if only to placate his wife.

It also turns out to be a dirty business, run more like a black market operation than a legitimate business and those with the most brazen tenacity are the ones who get ahead. Right at the center of the racket is Joe Easy (Patrick Allen).

As far as characters go, he’s probably the most intriguing with his lascivious, take-no-prisoners mentality. Again, he’s a heavy not unlike what we’re accustomed to seeing. Still, it’s up to the performer to make something out of it, and Allen has a brutal kind of conviction that makes him a worthy adversary. He’s not the kind of man you want to cross.

Harry does it unwittingly and finds himself thrown out of the man’s office in the presence of his sympathetic moll (Diana Dors). She’s with Joe, and also finagled a job for her brother — he’s off a stint in prison.

Sans the interludes of out-and-out melodrama and complementary scoring, there’s a lot to enjoy about the world in a noirish sense. We watch Mature as he is handcuffed, trapped in a life and a world he cannot get out of, and he finds himself doing a deal with the devil.

He tries to do the right thing, but the prevailing forces against him all seem corrupt. At the very least, the most powerful cogs are handled by the most devious hands. Over the course of the movie, he vies for the affections of the blonde draped in furs. She’s treated like a tramp, and Dors, while not given a whole lot that’s novel, tries her best to make the part a bit more fragile. She does garner some sympathy caught between all the loveless shows of affection.

Although it’s probably the weakest of the lot, it comes out of a solid tradition including They Drive By Night, Thieves Highway, and even Wages of Fear. The Long Haul of course offers its own British flair (if not exactly Liverpudlian).

The beginning of the end comes when he agrees to take one final load. They are racing against the clock whether it be creditors or the police, and they are forced to take the road less traveled. Their giant cache of furs rumbles through the woods, the rocky passages until it’s finally derailed in a stream. As the wheels come off, we’ve reached a tipping point. The uneasy alliance between Harry and Joe is terminated for good.

Depending on how you look at it, Harry is either aided or hampered by a conscience. Despite all the chaos, there is light at the end of the tunnel. He has a taxi with Lynn headed to the coast. They can catch a boat to America and begin a new life. But he’s not a selfish man. His heartstrings still tug at him — no matter the state of his home life — he feels compelled to be there for his son. The beautiful blonde watches her own plans crumble around her.

While Mature’s protagonist maintains his own private sense of integrity, it’s crucial in adhering to the tenets of noir. Heartbreak is the only answer, and there’s a dour question mark for an ending. While it’s nothing spectacular nor particularly original, there is some enjoyment gleaned from Mature and Dors being cast as tragic companions. In a cutthroat world, it just wasn’t meant to be.

3.5/5 Stars

Yield to The Night (1957): J. Lee Thompson and Diana Dors

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“For the night is already at hand and it is well to yield to the night.”

There’s immediate traction to Yield to The Night’s opening visuals. We look on at pigeons scuttling about, outdoor waterfalls, and Diana Dors’s heels clicking across an open plaza. Of course, we don’t know it’s her.

J. Lee Thompson’s introduction is almost Hitchcockian in how he utilizes the feet as a kind of synecdoche for the whole body distilling the action down to its most basic form. Because soon enough those feet make their way to an apartment belonging to a fashionable woman about to go inside.

In the chaotic sequence that follows, she gets shot in the back as Dors makes plenty sure her victim is dead in her tracks. Her first closeup almost crushes her face or closer still her face overwhelms the screen and she stares down at her handiwork. She’s just murdered a lady in the street. Riddling her in the back with bullets. There’s no doubt that she’s dead as the frenzied onlookers rush to the scene.

What makes the moment so effective is how purposeful it is from the outset, punctuated by this terrifying act of violence. However, what makes it even more startling is the fact we have no context. Is Dors good or evil? Is she on the side of justice or lawlessness?

Surely she has a reason for what she did. We half expect a flashback right about now — this seems like an opportune place if not the most original. Instead, we get the credits and the story keeps on moving forward.

Hilton’s in prison, but whether it’s a sign of the British civility in the prison system or only a result of the movie mills, there’s something rather congenial about the whole set-up. It’s not exactly Buckingham Palace or Balmoral for that matter, and there are bars like any prison, but the wardens, lawyers, and priests who all cycle through seem like generally decent people.

Hollywood alternatives like Caged or even I Want to Live! in one form or another feel like harsher, less forgiving films. The tone of Yield to the Night functions out of its own dissonance. As a fitting development, Mary’s story materializes in fragments, and it actually becomes a fairly absorbing way in which to take in the narrative.

The presumptive flashback actually comes a few minutes later than expected. Mary Hilton formerly worked in a beauty shop. One evening she encounters a particularly jovial client at a club. He’s at the piano when she sees him. His name is Jim, and he gives her the pet name “Christmas Rose.” She became madly devoted to him even as his own demons and self-destructive habits find him dallying with other women.

His primary romantic partner is a rich socialite named Lucy, who remains faceless and nearly unseen throughout the entire movie. For not having an overt showcase, she certainly holds a major sway over the picture as she effectively dominates and cripples Mary and Jim’s relationship. Mary loves him madly, but he can never be tied down to her, preferring the benefits the other woman affords him.

The ensuing bout of voiceover is a bit much, but there’s a pleasant gossamer quality in Dors’s readings — the lightness in her voice — somehow it juxtaposes with her place as a murderess, and in some small way, it humanizes her.

Back in the present, she receives a number of visitors. Her kid brother, a genial lad who is looking to lift her spirits joins their quibbling mother for the visitation. She’s trying to come to terms with how the girl she strove to raise the right way could end up like this.

Mary also gets called on by her husband Fred. He comes faithfully, leaving work to come check on her.  Suddenly it becomes plainly evident the reason they are separated is on account of Mary. He seems like another decent sort of chap, too decent in a way. He bores her and so there is a defined distance between them. It’s depressing to witness.

Finally, there is Mrs. Bligh, who feels like yet another embodiment of all the benevolent souls.  She’s a kindly old lady, a lover of flowers, and a prison reformer. What she also provides is a social conscience. Strangely, all this goodwill from both the attendants and visitors only emphasizes the disconnect between the warmth of all these people and the punishment at the other end of the hallway.

But the final stroke has to be how the movie foregoes any form of serpentine plotting and focuses in on an individual life in torment. It becomes a far more intimate meditation. Mary is caught in a debilitating cycle of unrequited love, watching her man destroy himself for another woman, and it tears her apart. She’s powerless to save him. The only flaw in the picture might be the suspension of disbelief, that is, how likely would someone rebuff Dors for someone else, albeit someone with higher social standing?

Otherwise, as we bide our time alongside of her in the confines of her cell, constant light streaming in, and guards playing chess, we are introduced to her every monotony. It builds a level of sympathy you can attain no other way. Dors is known as a great glamour girl — Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe — and yet when we see her stripped of all pretense, it’s a startling and impressive showcase of vulnerability.

In her own words, the actress acknowledged it was “the first time I ever had a chance to play such a part. I was very thankful to Lee J. Thompson for having faith in me. Until then everybody thought I was just a joke, and certainly not an actress to be taken seriously, even though I knew within myself I was capable of playing other roles.”

She exhibited emphatically she was far more than a pretty face by delivering some emotional resonance as well. One is reminded of the telling exchange with the Preacher.

“This day I shall be with thee in paradise. I think those are the most beautiful words in the Bible.”

“If you believe them.”

It sums up her entire experience. He is a man of faith and he burgeons with hope — hope for her, even in death — in spite of her shortcomings in this life. But her conception of the world doesn’t allow her to believe this. All she has is the melancholy and the pain stockpiled from her romantic heartache. Her outlook more than fits the shabby interiors of the film. It’s a dreary world to be privy to, and it’s just as depressing leaving it behind. Yielding is not in her nature. It doesn’t come easy to many of us.

4/5 Stars

The Mouse That Roared (1959)

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There’s something illuminating about getting a movie from our neighbors across the pond that offers a winking look at American society. The movie takes its title quite literally, scaring off the Columbia lady with a critter who subsequently carries away the animated title sequence. Because the U.S. might be the prototypical lion, but Grand Fenwick is the mouse that roared.

The minuscule duchy of Fenwick — a measly nation if there ever was one — remains stagnated in the medieval ages, economically and otherwise. Their major exports are wine, particularly popular on the West coast, though competition in the form of copycat businesses proves steep competition.

Teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, the Fenwick leaders resolve to declare war on America. It’s really all part of their contingency plan expecting that their quick and inevitable defeat will lead to American rehabilitation and, thus, newfound prosperity for their little principality. They no doubt are well aware of the Marshall Plan and the U.S.’s undying interest in any floundering nation, they can look to capitalize on. Better us swoop in than have the Soviets socialize them, right?

Regardless, all this poppycock and tomfoolery is made even more palatable thanks to the talents of Peter Sellers. He hasn’t reached Clousseau status nor the apex of his stardom in the 1960s, but he would be an international icon soon enough. For now, we get to sit back and witness him in dialogue with himself. First as the Machiavellian prime minister Mountjoy, then the Queen Victoria knockoff, Duchess Gloriana, and finally, the ultimate Sellers hero, Tully Bascomb.

Because it is this meek and unassuming game warden, who is called upon to lead the charge across the sea onto enemy territory. Armed with their bows & arrows, chainmail, and Fenwickian pluck, their force, 20 men strong, sets off. I mention Bascomb as the prototypical Sellers hero because he’s such a small character, and yet since he is lacking in much, it works impeccably well with the utter outrageousness of the comedy blowing up around him.

Before Monty Python and even before Dr. Strangelove, there was The Mouse That Roared, and not simply due to the trio of roles carried by Sellers. Like its future scion, it takes no umbrage about trampling over Medieval iconography in all its antiquity and finding wells of humor therein. It’s also an atomic bomb-conscious comedy. Surely, you could say almost all comedies of the 50s and 60s were informed by this reality — this pervasive fear — but Mouse takes these themes to heart.

For what generally feels like a humble picture, the moving parts are rather extraordinary. Beyond Sellers, we have director Jack Arnold remembered mostly for his Sci-Fi and monster movies of the 1950s. The marriage sounds less outrageous than it is (or maybe it’s just outrageous enough) because this is meant to be a farce. There are no creatures from the black lagoon or incredible shrinking men, but there is some extraterrestrial hysteria.

It plays with all the alarmist tendencies of the age when the Fenwick contingent prey on a passing truck and punctures its tires, leaving the victims thinking the nation’s being invaded by men from outer space. This streak of nuclear age anxiety with a distinct message is more than enough to wedge it into the rest of Arnold’s canon.

But we have yet to mention Jean Seberg. She’s no doubt at her most childish — she’s only 20 or 21 years old, after all — playing the peeved daughter of a famed scientist. It hardly accentuates her talents nor her playful mystique like Breathless or even Bonjour Tristesse, but it is something different. Because it’s her father’s Q Bomb, which could eat an H Bomb for breakfast, that is currently being tested and is accidentally discovered by the Fenwickians.

In a serendipitous act of lunacy, they instantly become the aggressors ready to take advantage of the situation and bring America to its knees by kidnapping some of its most fundamental assets. It’s the kind of goofy, lightweight stuff taking the edge off. Although there’s an agenda, no matter what implications it might have in the nuclear age, The Mouse That Roared is the perfectly tame goofball comedy we expect to see when we visit sitcoms of the 50s and 60s.

The fish out of water commentary about America dries up when the prisoners are carted back across the pond. Tully and his men make a triumphant return only to be met with some chagrin from the hoodwinked cabinet. They’ve mucked things up. Not only have they not surrendered, they’ve gone and taken hostages and ran off with the most dangerous superweapon in the world!

By this stage, the heart of the comedy has mostly dried up too, though there are a few passing gags relating to the hot potato bomb that wheezes and sizzles to the touch just waiting to annihilate mankind. Likewise, Tully finds himself smitten with feisty young Helen in a love affair that could be telegraphed from miles away. Ultimately, it plays the best when its intentions are made clear with the goofball inanity of it all before didacticism and treacly romance are allowed to give their final stamp of approval on the story. For what it’s worth, I’m one Yank who enjoys being invaded in such a manner as this.

3.5/5 Stars

Cry The Beloved Country (1951)

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As an American, the history of Apartheid is still something I feel relatively ignorant of even as I must confess to still be learning constantly about our own history of segregation in the U.S. This is part of what makes me marvel at Cry The Beloved Country, which really is one of a kind — a bit of a gem plucked out of the 1950s.

Because the talents are innumerable, a young Sidney Poitier on the rise and Canada Lee in what would turn out to be his final screen role. I haven’t seen many of them, but this might be his best. Because although there is plenty of time to speak of Poitier for any number of movies, well worth our time and consideration, this particular film is carried first and foremost by Lee.

It impresses upon us a certain dignity of spirit. He’s a priest named Kumalo, stately and compassionate in all aspects. His eyes bear the same melancholy of a man who has been forced live under the weight of many hardships. It also makes us yearn that his stage efforts might have been captured for posterity as he famously worked with a theatrical wunderkind in Orson Welles and built up quite a career for himself. Alas, this was not to be.

One must confess that the reason for his starring turn was partially out of necessity. American, now deep in the throes of the Red Scare, was no friend to him or anyone who purportedly had Communist connections, whether real or imagined. The fact that he was black definitely didn’t help matters (Just ask Paul Robeson).

Meanwhile, Sidney Poitier was on the entirely opposite end of his career: Now in his early 20s and coming from the stage to navigate the strictures of Hollywood set before him. He’s so young, but he holds a civility and a stature that make him feel fully present and somehow wise beyond his years. This would be a trend throughout his lifetime.

If it’s not evident already, Alan Paton’s 1948 novel is totally engaged with the contemporary issues of South Africa, ranging from systemic racism to pervasive poverty. If they are contextualized to this culture, surely we aren’t ignorant enough to believe they have no bearing on our own historical background.

So here we are in South Africa offered an auspicious film by Zoltan Korda meant to be about something of real consequence — to speak of the ills and indiscretions of society — when we purposely build structures of oppression. The production is steeped in its share of legends, the most famous one being Korda pronouncing Lee and Poitier as his manservants so he could get them into the country to film. If nothing else, it adds not only to the aura but also the concrete reality of what is in front of us.

For a black man, Johannesburg feels very much like the valley of the shadow of death. When Reverend Stephen Kumalo (Lee) receives a letter, it sends word that his sister is ill. His mission is twofold: support his ailing sibling and track down his son Absalom.

In many ways, Cry, The Beloved Country is a journey film as one man pursues answers and then restitution for a life. I wouldn’t say all the performances feel natural, but at the center of the drama Lee and Poitier act as a bit of an anchor for the entire movie. We have them to cling to. And even if the local, untrained performers leave something to be desired in terms of emotional resonance, the milieu around them speaks volumes.

There is an austere veracity that’s innate to on-location shooting. You could not possibly achieve this kind of atmosphere any other way. The overall degradation and the poverty are palpable in most every frame filled with the blocks of shantytowns.

It also willfully engages with issues of black-on-white crime. In a society whose social structures and racial castes are tenuous at best, these are perilous waters to breach. The newspaper headlines detailing a botched robbery are made far worse by their immediacy.

The man killed was an idealistic reformer envisioning a world of greater equality and stability for the black community. This show of brutality against someone sympathetic to their plight is poor P.R. nor does it placate his crusty old father (Charles Carson), who never believed much in his crusading, to begin with. For people of his age and estate, white is white, black is black, and never the twain shall meet. It’s not to say evolution is not possible…Between the frail sympathies of his wife (Joyce Carey), looking at his late son’s writings, and a fateful encounter, there’s still room for ample growth.

However, this crime also has bearing on Stephen as well. Because his boy Absalom is one of the men implicated in the killing. It’s a father’s worst nightmare, and he’s powerless to prevent it. Here two fathers are juxtaposed while coping with two strains of unfathomable grief.

Soon court dates are set, and there’s a trial for the murder of young Jarvis and the impending deliberations.  Although all the elements are there, the plotting and execution never add up to anything that feels more than intermittently affecting. It’s the kind of film I like the idea of it and what it stands for rather than what it actually culminates to onscreen.

Make no mistake. Cry, the Beloved Country feels like imperative viewing if we want to understand what empathy is in the face of our own limitations and human biases. To my knowledge, it’s nearly an unprecedented historical documentation granting center stage to black actors who deserved more acclaim. And thus, our attention must consider and appreciate the performances.

For Poitier, in a fledgling career, there would be still so much ahead of him. For Canada Lee, an unfairly forgotten talent now, it was the end. He would go the way of his buddy John Garfield and many others, perishing no thanks to the toxic industry around him. Cry, The Beloved Country is not a great movie, but it’s an understated one, brimming with solemnity, and sometimes we would do well to have this posture. We can mourn our own sins, the sins perpetrated against us, and the sobering reality that the world is not as it should be.

3/5 Stars

Note: This review was originally written before the passing of Sidney Poitier on January 6, 2022

Tiger Bay (1959)

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Horst Bucholtz has always held a soft spot in my heart. There are several very simple reasons. My father’s favorite movie might be The Magnificent Seven, and I grew up watching this young raffish upstart join forces with Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen against the forces that be. Then, years later, there he was again as an old man in La Vita è Bella. Somehow it served the movie and my own history with him well, to see him this way. A mere 5 years later he would be gone.

Of course, Tiger Bay, if you’ve never been acquainted with it before, is the picture that really put him on the map, at least for English-speaking audiences. And it’s easy to see why. He was advertised once upon a time as Germany’s James Dean, and if the comparison makes a modicum of sense at all it has to do with how masculinity can be at one time violent and then sensitive. There would be no other way for him to hold the movie together with Hayley Mills so well. More on that in a moment.

I must take a moment to acknowledge my growing esteem for J. Lee Thompson in recent days because although I am a fan of Cape Fear and not so big an admirer of The Guns of Navarone, it was earlier in his career where he showed his capability with material like Yield to the Night and here in Tiger Bay. The world is easy to place, especially in England with a working-class port town acting as a window to the world. One of the men fresh off one of these ships is the youthful sailor Bronislav Korchinsky, who looks to be reunited with his lover.

Hayley Mills makes her screen debut moments later as a feisty tomboyish pipsqueak ready to roughhouse with all the other street rats. She gleams with a delightful impudence, those large searching eyes of her projecting curiosity and at times rebellion. Her aunt is always scolding her and she always scampers around bumping into neighbors on the stairs or eavesdropping on conversations she has no business in.

One of them is between Korchinsky and his girlfriend Anya. But the scene before us is hardly bliss. It comes seething with angst and vindictive daggers you feel like would hardly have been in vogue across the pond at the same time — at least in mainstream Hollywood. As the woman scoffs at the money he sent home and lets him have it in their native tongue, it becomes apparent this kind of gritty vitriol might only seep into an American noir picture.

In fact, if there is any immediate reference point, it’s possible to find Tiger Bay reminiscent of The Window. However, in this case, Gillie Evans (Mills) is not so much a “kid who’s cried wolf” as a serial annoyance no rational-minded adult looks to take seriously. Still, she’s an eyewitness to what looks to be a shooting. A woman’s dead and the man is on the lam. What’s more, in the moment of initial tumult they crossed paths as he streaked away, and she nicked the evidence to bring back to her aunt’s apartment. For her, this entire scene feels like a novel curiosity, but she thinks little of the consequences in the moment.

Instead, she dodges the inspector’s gentle interrogations (John Mills) before rushing off to drop into church service late, taking up her spot in the choir while still packing the purloined pistol.

It’s fitting that in one moment they seem to be singing a hymn out of Psalm 23 and suddenly the spiritual journey through the valley of the shadow of death becomes all too real. There stands a familiar face in the crowded pews and suddenly her self-assured nonchalance drops off in the middle of her solo. There’s the man!

It feels like a showdown set up for Hitchcockian dread as the church clears out and she’s left to fend for her own against the crazed young man. This can only end poorly. And yet Tiger Bay works because the villain in this equation is not a horrible human being. There are moments he could press his advantage, whether it’s pushing her to her death or doing away with her with the gun, but this is not his character.

In fact, in its best and brightest moments, Buckholtz and young Mills become the welcomed nucleus of the movie, at first as wary adversaries and then companions and finally friends capable of playacting in the morning light. For a few moments, they are able to shed all the worries of the world and enjoy being in one another’s company.

In the latter half, it takes on a different tilt altogether as a little girl, now beholden to her new friend, looks to buy him time as he looks to sneak off on a ship out to sea. We have ticking clocks and stakes, all those storytelling tricks of the trade, but the core of the entire story is the relational capital that we build. It becomes a new, far more compelling kind of movie. Because now a child must live in the ambiguity of the moment and how are they to decipher the difference between right and wrong and what those terms even mean?

The ending feels a bit prolonged and drawn out for its own good though it’s kept afloat by this underlying relational tension. A man’s life hangs in the balance as Mills drags his real-life daughter out to sea to identify the purported killer before he can get away for good.

John Mills feels generally flat and uninteresting if a mostly benevolent authority representing a prevailing moralism. Otherwise, this picture has much to offer and a colorful perspective on the world circa 1959.

Suddenly, British society, cinematography notwithstanding, doesn’t look quite so monochrome. Because of course, it wasn’t. It’s a world of Polish immigrants, vibrant Calypso music on the street corners, and foreign sailors who are not totally subservient to the British powers. It’s a reminder that ports really can be windows to the world even as they can also bring disparate people together.

3.5/5 Stars

Whistle Down The Wind (1961)

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Whistle Down The Wind feels like it employs the “kitchen sink” aesthetic in step with British film of the day, bleak and tough around the corners with working-class folks coping with all kinds of toilsome drama. However, if the mantle of that zeitgeist was normally carried by the likes of Albert Finney and Richard Harris, then effectively we have the “angry young men” of the subgenre replaced by children.

It gives the picture a slightly different if altogether refreshing perspective on these same issues. At its center is young Kathy Bostock (Hayley Mills); she lives on a farm with her father (Bernard Lee), an aunt, and the aunt’s two children.

They are three rambunctious little farmhands but not altogether wicked, mind you. They come home with three discarded kittens in tow, looking to sneak past the prying eyes of their betters, so they might raise them in the barn. As such, it provides a safe haven and becomes an even more sacred space given what happens next.

Young Kathy is alone busying herself with their charges, and then she sees a stranger (Alan Bates), rather haggard and disoriented. Both man and child are shocked and as she inquires who he is, he utters the words, “Jesus Christ.”

Now many an adult could tell you lots of people exclaiming the Lord’s name are using it in vain, but this never crosses Kathy’s mind. Whatever you might think of her, whether foolish or otherwise, she takes the name very seriously.

This naive misunderstanding is what the entire movie turns on, and it’s a lovely bit of irony. It takes all our cynical assumptions about these people and their world and completely turns them on their heads. Suddenly, we have this glorious portrait of child-like faith set before us, and this only works because Bryan Forbes’ picture allows children to hold such a central place in the story from the outset.

They are funny and mischievous and yet so very sincere in spirit. A cat can be named Spider, and it’s completely honest to gripe and groan about everything little thing. There are these sublime closeups sprinkled through that, even momentarily, allow us to be in their place and empathize. I think of one where the little boy Charlie (Alan Barnes), always at odds with the girls nevertheless, peers over at the man in the hay, and his face lights up. Curiosity getting the better of him, he asks if it’s really Him? He too wants to believe this is the Christ.

This comparison might be tenuous, but rather like the internal logic of It’s a Wonderful Life and The Bishop’s Wife, there’s something pleasant and powerful about the spiritual reaching into our human environments. We want to believe in their benevolence — that they are able to redeem our families and hardships, with a bit of divine intervention.

There’s still a sense that the spiritual world enters into our lives of its own accord. In fact, there is no true distinction between one and the other, whether they be kindly angels or guests in the haystack. They have the capacity to invade the everyday and breathe new life into it while still feeling almost mundane.

If you’re like me, sometimes religious allegory can feel too on point and obvious. It’s not exactly subtle here, but there’s something about the context that still makes it delightful. After receiving further spiritual insight from their Sunday school teacher, we have the procession of three little kings returning into the presence of their visitor, complete with a musical cue to send them on their way.

The hypothetical question of what to do if Jesus came back takes on very concrete meaning for them because of course, he’s lying right there in their barn waiting for them. And so, with all sincerity, they bring their gifts to place before him. They want him to feel welcome. They want to find favor with him.

It’s a striking allegory — not quite to the degree of Flannery O’Connor’s gothic gallows as it were, but there’s something moving in this picture. Rich in content and meaning, but never in a way that makes one feel put upon or totally scandalized. We watch their visitor become the subject of ensuing pilgrimages of all the local children.

As we’re privy to both worlds, we know this man is actually wanted by the authorities. He’s no Christ; he’s not even a saint, and we must watch and wait for their expectations to be utterly crushed. Because there will always be persecution and unbelief in some form acting in constant opposition. Although they conveniently keep their secret from the grown-ups, it cannot last forever.

A local bully tries to intimidate them all back into the status quo. One small boy on the playground all but recants a visitation with “Jesus,” which in his mind is tantamount to Peter’s denial. There’s personified devastation on his youthful face as he gets a reprieve from earthly torment, but at what cost? It sounds almost silly to speak of these things in such weighty terms, but I’m only treating them with the same gravity as these little children.

If this is the case, we must always return to our protagonist. Hayley Mills shows off all her most extraordinary traits as a young performer, buoyant and yet defiant and determined in the face of naysayers. There’s an assurance she holds onto that guides much of the movie, and it must lead to the inevitable.

The final juxtaposition of Charlie’s boisterous birthday party full of hearty squeals and blind man’s bluff plays against the more ascetic sense of the outdoors as the wanted man tries to escape the local dragnet. He gets cornered in the barn with the police flying to the scene and the whole town hot on their heels. It looks like the children’s faith is bound to be dashed right before their eyes.

What a difference a point of view makes and the intention behind it. Instead of churning up the local rumor mill with clamoring gawkers and gossipers, it feels more like one final act of belief with all the masses set to pay their respects and catch a glimpse of the man. Certainly, the masses are mostly children and that says something in itself.

Because you can take its parable in two ways: either it’s a pragmatic lesson that children must learn how the real world works — with sin, moral ambiguity, and heartbreak. Still, maybe it’s actually a reflection of the Christ’s sacrifice, coming into the world for the humble and the downtrodden, those who would willingly put their trust in him. If we consider these children, their trust is such that they believe he will come back again someday. It’s similarly arresting.

The extraordinary nature of the ending comes with the revelation that this sense of reverence is never broken, keeping with the film’s guiding light from start to finish. This is far from the norm, and it’s rather refreshing that hope is never completely quelled. It’s up to the viewer to decide what to do with this.

4/5 Stars

Frenzy (1972): Cleaning Up The Streets

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There we are gliding across the River Thames making our way toward the regal facade of Tower Bridge. Where’s one apt to find a more picturesque view of London? It’s definitely an auspicious return to his native land for the Master of Suspense.

Frenzy is without question a singular Hitchcock movie taking him back to his roots in the ’20s and ’30s — not just the days of Stage Fright (1950) or The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) — something like The Lodger (1927) or Sabotage (1936) springs to mind.

Of course, it’s a different England. It’s gotten bitten by the bug. Certainly one of them was Swinging London and The Beatles, but even as the old world, the small-town world continues to pass away, there’s a sense this same progression is being documented in Frenzy.

The characters knock around town at all the pubs, street corner grocers, and everywhere else in Convent Gardens — what’s left is a remnant of Hitchcock’s boyhood world. The director’s father was a grocer, and thus, it’s a return to his roots in the most Hitchcockian way possible: replete with murder.

A charismatic civil servant stands atop his soapbox with a rapt audience rallying the people they’ll soon clear the rivers and canals of society’s refuse — pollution will be banished — and right on cue, there’s an interruption from the masses. He gets preempted when an onlooker realizes something bobbing in the river: A woman’s body with a tie twisted around her neck.

Irony notwithstanding, it causes a surge through the crowds as gossip about the rash of necktie murders throughout town. In this way, the traditions of Jack the Ripper have been modernized and remain alive and well in contemporary London.

It’s not only these onlookers but acquaintances in pubs and any other random passerby who all have a callous, morbid curiosity about them — their conversations are overwhelmingly about the killer — and they come off darkly cynical.

The men from New Scotland Yard for their part are on the lookout for a sexual psychopath and a social misfit who might be easily categorized. Because what better way than to put criminals in a box to understand them?

Right about now we must introduce our protagonist, who also becomes the obvious target of all this foreshadowing. We are led to believe Richard Blaney (Jon Finch) an acerbic ex-RAF man who is the obvious culprit, although, for the time being, he’s unsuspected.

Still, after his ex-wife, who runs a new-fangled matrimonial agency is brutally murdered, unbeknownst to him, the forces of the plot are already out of his control. It’s as if the film is cruelly conspiring to ensnare him like all the most crippling of Hitchcock’s man-on-the-run thrillers.

The police are looking for a fugitive with a tweed jacket with patches on the shoulders and elbows. It’s true all pieces of circumstantial evidence, motive, and eyewitness accounts point to Blaney. At every turn, he looks to be guilty and he does very little to help his case. A hotel bellman tips off the law, and then the testy bar owner (Bernard Cribbins) he used to work under accuses him further.

He does have several allies in the generally morose landscape. One is the local barmaid Babs (Barbara Massey), who stands by him in his innocence. Another is Johnny Porter, a buddy who gives Richard asylum, despite the chastisement of his suspicious wife.

Although Johnny feels like a far too convenient character — he implicates himself in a potential crime quite readily — but let’s not allow this to detract from the story. Dick does have one other friend: a local grocery worker named Bob Rusk (Barry Foster), who gives him free handouts and tips at the races, among other things.

Frenzy is the most visually grisly and unnerving Hitchcock picture with a kind of in-your-face depiction of the murders. In this regard, it seems uncharacteristic of the man who often seemed the king of simulated gore and suggested horror.

The Shower Scene in Psycho is the unadulterated pinnacle of this. Where the intensity comes in the layering and total manipulation of all the formalistic elements. Frenzy is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum showing everything far more explicitly. It almost seems to lack the elegance of a Hitchcock picture — Blaney and Bob are earthier types than we’re used to.

Still, in one of Frenzy’s most telling shots, Hitch literally pulls the camera down the stairs out into the street just as we recognize that the dastardly deed is being done. It’s a second murder, and he makes us painfully aware of it without ever putting us inside the room. The same cannot be said in the other instances.

However, what truly sets the picture apart is how Hitchcock scrapes the dividing line between psychotic killer and despicable human being so close that nobody wins. Because Dick’s yet another man on the run framed by fate. The only difference is he’s a wholesale cad. Whether he’s innocent or not is immaterial here. He might be The Wrong Man, but he’s no Henry Fonda and he’s certainly not Cary Grant.

The movie wraps up briskly and abruptly. There’s hardly time to catch our breath though Hitch does put us out of our misery. Our “hero” is exonerated, and the police apprehend the criminal, all in a matter of seconds. All this might be true, but it doesn’t make the world any more livable. There’s still refuse in the waterways and rubbish in the streets. Not only is the nostalgic world Hitchcock knew disappearing — this is sad in itself — it does feel like the world itself is a tawdry, cynical place.

To be fair, this might not be the director’s perspective — he holds a far more perverse sense of humor than mine — but when I look at this world it’s far from comforting. I’m a bit of an anglophile so there’s an appreciation in seeing familiar faces like Clive Swift (Keeping up Appearances) or Bernard Cribbins (Doctor Who), but maybe I’ve been watching the wrong things.

Then again, Hitchcock always did suggest the dark desires and inclinations of society conveyed through this lens of macabre amusement. Now his depictions are simply sharper and more direct.

In other words, the legacies of Jack the Ripper or Jekyll & Hyde aren’t dead. Over time, we just got better at trying to dissect them, and we’ve become increasingly more numb to their depravity. Could it be presumed innocence no longer matters? We’re all on the run. We all go a little mad sometimes. We’re all guilty of something.

3.5/5 Stars

Blow-Up (1966): A Mystery Dissolving Before our Eyes

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With time it’s become more and more ironic that Blow-up, the film having become synonymous with the Swinging London scene of the 1960s, came from two Italians: Carlo Ponti and Michelangelo Antonioni.

In the picture, Antonioni casts David Hemmings as a kind of snarky, scruffy hero of the London street scene. He’s a fashion photographer armed with the testosterone-fueled vigor of a 25-year-old. Without mincing words, he’s a bit of a hedonistic brat.

We soon come to understand his day job has a volatile intimacy to it as he shoots gorgeous models up close and personal, barking orders at them, commanding their every movement, all so he can capture their look.

But if we give him a long hard look, his heart isn’t in this kind of glossy mainstream work. He’s intrigued by the art, and it’s hinted at that this is the kind of lucrative crud he takes on to fuel his passion project. So he is a true artist. After all, commerce fuels art. However, Blow-up is hardly a commentary or a simple mediation on the artistic experience. So what is it about?

Perhaps we’ll get our answer when Thomas takes a fateful detour to an all but deserted park. Although both of these descriptors might give the wrong impression. It’s fateful in as much as it takes over his thoughts and the consciousness of the movie. It’s also not entirely deserted; there’s a couple making out, and he starts wildly flashing photos of them like a voyeuristic maniac, leering from behind fences and trees. It’s almost compulsion that draws him in.

Finally, the girl (Vanessa Redgrave) chases after him desperately wanting them back — could they be compromising to her career? He gives her a vague promise to give them back. Still, he needs them for his passion project.

If it’s not obvious already, every so-called expositional answer is evasive — about wife and kids or anything personal — and so all we have to go on is the visual depictions, although eventually, even these will begin playing tricks on us too. For the time being, the woman appears at his apartment unannounced, and he’s intrigued by her, slightly obsessed.

He complains to her “even the beautiful girls you look at them and that’s that. I’m stuck with them all day long.” Like a calling card of the old noir archetype, his mysterious woman all but evaporates. He blows up the images of her and her man in his darkroom and pastes them up all over his studio to study them frame by frame.

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Has he uncovered a plot? Somebody was trying to kill someone else. The images are so blurry we can’t possibly tell with any definitive proof, though Thomas tells a friend over the phone, “I’ve saved someone’s life.” He seems to believe it wholeheartedly even as Antonioni’s movie starts dissolving as fast as it formed.

The young photographer returns to the scene — he feels scared (maybe implicated), and flees as quickly as he arrived. Back at his flat, he flies around, snacking and grabbing and whipping around — there’s an almost animalistic fight or flight to his every movement. This frantic energy carries throughout his performance, and it’s extremely telling.

So much of the movie is built out of the pace of Hemmings’s footsteps. Because certainly you have the striking images and Herbie Hancock’s jazzy compositions, but the movie is indebted to its use of sound.

Hemmings and Sarah Miles, his neighbor, have a curious relationship fraught with a kind of disaffecting malaise. I’m reminded of the scene where he admits to her he’s seen a murder. “Shouldn’t you call the police?” she inquires. And already distracted he wonders why they shot the man. There’s a kind of spellbinding inaction to them. It’s either apathy or helplessness or a bit of both.

Instead of facing the circumstances, Thomas runs away again. This time down into a basement concert with a bunch of similarly catatonic youth imbibing the Yardbirds (Jimmy Paige and Jeff Beck both rocking away) complete with a Pete Townshend-inspired guitar demolition.

It sends the entire room into a mad frenzy of emotion. Thomas races away from the mob clutching the remnants of the guitar — making it back out to the street — and then proceeds to drop the guitar neck on the street corner. Suddenly, it’s become a piece of junk again, another meaningless token, in another meaningless sequence, in another meaningless life.

It’s at this point where dialogue is little more than ambiance. Take as a fitting example the party Thomas shows up at acknowledging his acquaintances and making his way through the rooms, eyeing all the people. I’m not sure if there’s one word of intelligible dialogue, but it gives us a sense of the environment full of strung-out dead heads. So he goes to meet his colleague.

At first, it seems like he’s looking to fess up — they’ve got to go back and find the body — still, not to tell the police, but to take more photos of it! This insanity too falls on deaf ears. It’s yet another dead end. So Thomas returns to the park alone — no one prepared to support him or corroborate his story, we never see neither hide nor tail of the woman again, and now the body (if there ever was a body) is gone. Again, the whole plot has literally degenerated in front of our eyes. We have crossed over into an entirely new stratum.

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If his dilemma wasn’t plain already, our hero resigns himself to watching a pair of Mimes playing tennis, eventually losing their ball over the chainlink. He goes to fetch it for them with nothing left to do but dissolve into the background himself. It’s become evident reality as we know it has totally disintegrated. It’s a terrifying thought and you can either fret or blindly make peace with it.

One of the taglines for Blow-up is surprisingly apt. It goes like this: “Antonioni’s camera never flinches. At love without meaning. A murder without guilt.” If you think about their essence, romantic love is a very comforting force because we can make it into a kind of ultimate thing that can fill the void — making us complete in some manner — whether this is entirely practical or not.

Then, we have the narrative construction of murder mysteries. There’s something satisfying about them because we know the culprit will be found out. There’s closure and some form of justice, a reestablishment of order in an inherently disordered world.

Antonioni is not having any of that and his explanation of Blow-up — this metaphor of photographed images extended to life — proves a telling way to make sense of what he is doing on a very conscious level. He explained his ambitions the following way:

“By developing with enlargers…things emerge that we probably don’t see with the naked eye….The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there’s a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up.”

Photography, Swinging London, models — all these things become immaterial — the film’s not really about any of them at all. It’s about how all truth, all meaning, whether subjective or objective, has dissolved in front of our eyes. By the end of the film, there is nothing of the sort. The murder is a figment of his imagination. Love as a romantic concept with any real sway is also dead. Frankly, it sounds terrifying.

Because films cannot be totally stripped away from their worldview, and they become one and the same. Either you agree with them, you disagree, or they can become a kind of trojan horse entering into your psyche. But Blow-up leads us right into the middle of the modern man’s dilemma. At this point, it feels like more than a mere cultural artifact. It calls for some ideological response from every viewer.

4/5 Stars

Black Narcissus (1947): Another Archers Masterpiece

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Under their collaborative umbrella, The Archers, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger formed one of the most mystifying and extraordinary partnerships within the annals of British cinema history. Black Narcissus is just one of the many enchanting jewels in their collective crown.

Part of the acclaim must be heaped on Jack Cardiff because there’s little doubt; his compositions are absolutely stunning front to back. It starts with this gorgeous even intoxicating brand of Technicolor mingling the real and artificial in a manner on par with anything Hollywood was cranking out at the same time.

Whether through miniatures, grandiose matte paintings, or Pinewood Studio sets, it creates a spectacular illusion as a cinematic representation of the Himalayas. In perfect juxtaposition are the sculpted interiors with columns and facades bathed in this equally mesmerizing patchwork of glowing light and meticulous shadows. Not in the sleazy low-grade setups of film noir, but rather like the Rembrandts and Carravagios might have done it in their Baroque works.

One of the earliest images to leave an impression comes from the POV of two nuns as they gaze down at a cruciform table with nuns moving about for their daily meal.

Deborah Kerr as Sister Clodagh comes off somehow regal in her white habit, proud and imperious, even as she sets out assiduously to manage the task at hand. The Sister Superior divvies out her allotted help scrounging up a task force of sorts, within the convent walls, to send out into the world and form a community.

Admittedly, the veteran sister has her doubts about the youthfulness of her counterpart, chiding her pupil, “The superior of all is the servant of all.” This is her word of admonition as they head off to face the unknown set before them.

I’ve never fully considered the methodology of the habit and yet purely from a cinematic perspective, what it does is put all the focus on an individual’s face — their features and, thus, their emotions speak for them. Then, of course, hidden under the garb is their heart and this is the seat of all their actions whether sympathetic or callous. Otherwise, they might all look the same. But of course, the head and the heart are what set us all apart.

While they are nestled in the Himalayas, there is some mention of Darjeeling, India as a stepping stone to civilization, and yet otherwise they are quite secluded. Still, they make it clear they are not merely looking for a place of solitude to live out a reclusive existence.

Mr. Dean (David Farrar), the knowledgeable yet resident cynic, is meant to be their point of contact to help them settle in, but his brusque often insinuating comments lingering in the air don’t begin the relations in a cordial manner. The fact he’s a handsome, strapping young specimen creates yet another layer of unspoken tension.

He explains the local General used to keep his women there — his concubines and wives — in a place where the nuns have plans to turn into a medical dispensary with a school and a space to minister to the needs of the local populations.

But there are numerous reasons to be uneasy. The people pile into their compound with their sick and old overwhelming the newly installed outpost. There’s also the wind, altitude, and disease which have a curious joint effect on the new transplants still trying to gain their legs.

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The sisters find everything distracting, even disturbing, and Sister Clodagh, for the first time in ages, finds her mind clouded by past memories — triggering flashbacks from her former life. Could it have been a mistake to join the order? Are these her nagging regrets come back to haunt her? She yearns for the liberation of a normal life, and she’s not the only one.

Likewise, the best encouragement she can muster against the elements and spiritual forces working against them is to, “work hard, work until you’re too tired to think of anything else.” She hasn’t been equipped by any other means, and it becomes obvious she will not be able to succeed with such a plan.

At the same time, they receive requests to take in a local outcast Kanchi (a bedazzled and brown-skinned Jean Simmons) known for her meretricious ways. Also, a young prince (Sabu) inquires about being a pupil within the establishment, which normally only caters to women and children.

We see the remnants of imperialistic disdain especially in Sister Ruth (a wildly manic Kathleen Byro). Far from being all marked with the image of a higher being, she sees the indigenous people around her as lesser beings whom she deigns to help in all their ignorance. It is this relationship between the enlightened few on Christian mission and the impoverished heathens.

We must come to terms with this complicated relationship even with Sabu playing opposite the Anglo Jean Simmons in brownface. Effectively a cross-cultural attraction forms between them even as he is her social and patriarchal superior within the storyline.

The aftermath of WWII also meant many displaced people groups were readily available to serve as extras in the picture, and in this regard, the film is blessed with some genuine sense of authenticity around the edges to counteract the whitewashing represented by Simmons, Edmond Knight, and May Hallat.

The film implicitly dances around these ideas. One moment the fiery-eyed Sister Ruth dismisses the young general as vain and black like a peacock. Although she does seem utterly tantalized by his lavish clothes and his pervasive scent: the titular black narcissus.

He’s also the one who on Christmas night says with all candor, ” I am very much interested in Jesus Christ.” Sister Clodagh extends him some leniency for speaking of their Lord and Savior with such familiarity. Ironically, it is the half-drunk Mr. Dean who chastizes her in the very same moment: “He should be casual and as much a part of life as your daily bread.” Truthfully, she doesn’t like it; it hits far too close to home, especially from a man of such ill-repute.

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While not quite the same sentiment as Luis Bunuel, there is something about the movie that proves unsettling in a religious context. There’s some unseen force, whether merely ill-fortune or closer still spiritual warfare, taxing them and splintering their meager enclave apart.

The two defined poles have been made obvious. Either you give yourself up to the world like Mr. Dean or live like the Holy Man. Neither will do for the Nuns who are stuck in the middle as the emblem of Christ in this far-off land.

After, the locals are scared off by the death of one of their infants and leave the Sisters all alone, hysteria sets in. With time, the impending psychological drama fills the world with unease. It has all these unnerving undercurrents accentuated by Cardiff’s own striking palette bursting with this vibrant even violent color scheme.

Mr. Dean matter-of-factly notes there is “something in the atmosphere that makes everything feel exaggerated.” The comments feel strikingly self-reflexive of the film’s own art direction burning images deep into our retinas.

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Still, the sisters are left drifting and dreaming through the world. It matches the, at times, hypnotic often queasy psychological torment in Hitchcock’s Vertigo to the point it pulls you in and wears on the psyche. That’s before even getting to the climax, which coincidentally also relies on a bell tower. It manages so much out of the very fact it is being manufactured to create a heightened impression of reality by manipulating the audience.

Even in the final scene, as the clouds envelop the castle high above and the Nuns are led off dejectedly in their little caravan, there’s nothing but this residual innervation. They must give up their mission and be humbled knowing they will be sent to other lowly assignments having failed by the world’s standards.

While India isn’t central to this story there is this lingering sense of colonialism as missionaries were often tied up with this since they were such a staple of the British Empire. There are enough movies to suggest this is true including The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Keys of The Kingdom, and 7 Women.

The rain starts to pour down in sheets as if signaling the end of something — something being totally overrun. Could it be the British Empire collapsing right in front of us? If you were curious like me, India officially gained independence in August 0f 1947. This was after Black Narcissus‘s release in the U.K. and during its run in the U.S.

Somehow they feel interlinked even as this story bursts out of the confines of reality under the exhilarating vision of The Archers. It remains an astounding feat in cinematic magic verging on the otherworldly, positively possessed by color. Like all the most enduring films, it stays with you long after the credits roll like a bewitching fragrance.

5/5 Stars

Stage Fright (1950): Hitchcock and Dietrich

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It’s true that “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” However, dress it up with murder and life becomes a series of stages and varying performances you’re putting on for different audiences — trying your best to play your audience — while not giving yourself away.

Stage Fright feels very much like Hitchcock getting back to his roots; there’s something simpler and yet still charming about the milieu he’s able to drum up evoking the British Isles. In reality, it was a convenient excuse to spend more time with his daughter Patricia currently away at school in the U.K. She even earned a small role. It’s also propitious he seems to be having good fun with the conceit: the combination of play-acting and murder with actors trying their hands at amateur sleuthing.

We are thrown into an almost instantaneous thriller. It dispenses with the lead-up altogether by showing a couple on the run in a car. A fledgling actress, Eve (Jane Wyman), is the complicit accomplice and Richard Todd is a man fleeing the authorities. Through an extensive flashback, he relates how he was pulled into the web of murder spun by his lover — the famed and gorgeous prima donna Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich).

He tries to touch up the crime scene she’s left behind only to get spooked by her maid turning up on the scene. The murder investigation commences in earnest including a respectable detective named Smith (Michael Wilding).

Eve sets the fugitive up with her father, out of harm’s way, before turning right around and hatching a plan to get to the bottom of the whole thing. One minute she’s trying to get close to the aforementioned policeman to somehow pump him for information with her damsel in distress act. The next moment, she’s putting her thespian training to good use posing as a cockney maid (and temporary replacement) for dame Charlotte herself.

It has some of the dynamics of an All About Eve between actresses though it’s admittedly hinging on cloak-and-dagger antics opposed to true backstage drama. Because it’s on this plane of performance that Hitch seems most intrigued — where acting becomes a conduit for understanding the mystery at the core of this movie.

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If there were any undisputed secret weapon, my bet is up for Alistair Sim. He was always a mirthful co-conspirator if I’m to recall a movie like Green for Danger. He’s eminently likable, though the spark in his eye suggests he’s ever prone to mischief. This accords him all the prerequisites to play a fine father figure opposite Wyman if only for the primary reason they both seem to relish the game and being a part of it together.

They have the most instantly vibrant relationship within the picture, and they give it the comic underpinnings one comes to expect from the director. Sim himself meets the macabre of Hitchcock thanks to a bloodstained dress on a carnival doll used to shock Dietrich out of her performance of “La Vie en Rose.” It mirrors the ugly token of her secret transgression.

In another sequence, the wanted man shows up during her performance — a particularly saucy rendition of Cole Porter’s “The Laziest Gal in Town.” Before this interruption, the scene is pulled out of the Hitchcockian world momentarily. It’s an individual moment where an auteur like Hitch gets totally overpowered by Dietrich or, in many ways, he acquiesces allowing her to be her scintillating self in the golden limelight before the mechanisms of the plot are meant to take over once more.

Stage Fright feels perfectly comfortable being so theatrical. However, the ideas never feel fully wrought; it’s a bit scattered and inconceivable — nor is Jane Wyman the most compelling Hitchcock lead. Mind you, I’m not expecting her to be a Hitchcock blonde or Ingrid Bergman, but she’s not quite on par with even someone like Teresa Wright in Shadow of a Doubt.

Likewise, the theater finale is terribly abrupt though it functions on the tenets of many of Hitchcock’s grandest set pieces by taking a novel environment and turning it into a thrilling locale for drama (Donen would rehash a similar sequence in Charade). The scenes in the build-up are of all shapes and sizes as Wyman rather coincidentally juggles a double life. It’s all highly circumstantial.

As it turns out, the lynchpin scene is right at the very beginning. Of course, we don’t realize that until the end, but right there is Hitchcock’s point. To see it any other way is a mistake. Because obfuscation and chicanery are the building blocks of not only acting but murder as well. Perceptions can change so quickly, and he was one of the greats at visual audience manipulation. In Stage Fright he takes it a step further. He lies to us outright on the screen.

3/5 Stars