Excellent Hitchcock murder mystery, one of my new favorites from the master, tells of a man (Richard Todd) unwittingly roped into a murder, and the young woman (Jane Wyman) inveigled into helping him escape capture. At the center of the affair is Marlene Dietrich, the cold, calculating star of stage and song who views people as nothing more than her playthings, and Michael Wilding as the astute detective ‘Ordinary’ Smith. The well-wrought plot, focused on the efforts of Wyman’s Eve Gill to penetrate the secret world of Dietrich’s Charlotte Inwood and procure evidence to exonerate Todd, is enhanced by Alastair Sim’s Commodore Gill, father to Eve, erstwhile smuggler of Brandy, current resident of a dockside shack, and a man who views life as little more than a whimsical farce. The humor inserted into the story by Sim, and to a lesser degree by his oblivious wife, turn this rather serious crime drama into an unpredictable black comedy.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Warner Bros. DVD
10 Apr 2005 7:25 PM | Submit Comment
