65/100

Had a lot to say about this, but unfortunately I was smacked by the flu the same night; a week later, as I slowly re-enter the world, it's all gone a bit fuzzy. (Some may argue that my low rating relative to its canonical status indicates that the virus had already gone to work on my faculties.) Virtues speak for themselves—Hitchcock, cat-and-mouse, whaddaya need, a road map?!—and it feels to me as if the problems should be equally apparent...yet here I go again on my own like the goddamn Whitesnake drifter. Short recovery-room version: Everything involving the detective who gets romantically involved with Girl Charlie is terrible. Some aspects are so freakishly lame that you'd swear entire scenes are missing, most notably the dissolve from Charlie and the dick out on their date, embarrassed at having been "caught" by one of Charlie's friends, to Charlie suddenly exclaiming "You're a detective!" in alarm.

This is such a hugely revered movie that I really want folks to understand where I'm coming from, so stop for a sec and actually watch that "transition." The film, at this writing, is here [2023: sorry, gone now], start at 49:20 and watch the next 40 seconds or so. I'll wait.

See what I mean? I don't see how you can make a case for this as subversive in the way that, say, Judy's letter to Scottie in Vertigo is subversive. It's just inept. Rather than depict Charlie's realization either visually (catnip for Hitch) or through dialogue, the movie just vomits it up: BLEEAARGHHH. And their entire romance is more or less the same—just stipulated according to the requirements of the plot, rather than actually dramatized. There's scarcely a moment Macdonald Carey is onscreen that I'm not thinking that the film has gone terribly wrong. This even though Carey's performance is perfectly fine, if superficial in the manner of the soap-opera icon he later became.

Also—and this is where I probably would have been more detailed/specific had I been able to write this a week ago—I'm not super-keen on Joseph Cotten here. He really telegraphs Uncle Charlie's debased side, which isn't a problem suspense-wise (we know Charlie's a murderer from the very first scene) but is a problem in of basic plausibility, since it's hard to believe the rest of the family doesn't see all those sneers and scowls.

Wright, on the other hand, is magnificent. And the movie is certainly very entertaining when it's strictly a battle of wits. I do like it. But I don't think it's saying anything trenchant about society's seamy underbelly, and way too much of it clangs for me to retain it in Hitchcock's top tier. I've made up my mind. I ain't wastin' no more time.