1948 suspense, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, Farley Granger, James Stewart;
IMDb /
allmovie. Two students commit
the perfect murder, and to prove it host a dinner parry over the
corpse.
Ths is not at all a mystery: it's made explicit up front just
what has happened, and more or less why. So all that's left is the
tension: will they look in the chest? No, not yet. Will Phillip break
down and confess all? Yeah, it's only a matter of when. Which makes it
a little disconcerting when James Stewart's Rupert clearly things he
is in a mystery and that this needs to be solved, when in fact it's
must a matter of waiting for the weak reed to break.
The famous trick of shooting without apparent cuts is not terribly
impressive to this modern viewer (though I wasn't terribly impressed
by Birdman either). You could load up to ten minutes of film into a
camera, and up to twenty minutes onto a projection reel, so that sets
the parameters: a hard cut every twenty minutes, and soft cuts
half-way between them. The soft ones usually manage just to have a few
seconds with nobody in frame, while the camera can be stopped and the
film changed, but the hard ones seem very blatant to me: oh, we'll
zoom in on the back of Brandon's jacket, or on the top of the chest as
it's opened, for no particular reason. More to the point, it has
nothing to say to the story; it's just a gimmick.
The men here all look very similar to me; presumably a contemporaneous
viewer would have been able to read subtle stylings of clothing and
hair. As it is, I'm grateful for the different suit colours, like the
hair colours in an anime series.
Patrick Hamilton, who wrote the original play (as well as Gaslight),
claimed this this was not inspired by the Leopold-Loeb case. But it
shows some obvious similarities.
I think the reason I ended up not being impressed with this is that
it's got one gimmick (the ten-minute shots) and one point to make
(these killers are not the supermen they think they are), and once the
gimmick ha fallen flat and the point has been made there's nothing
much to enjoy for the remainder of the running time.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of
#Memes.