Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Farley Granger, Ruth Roman, Robert Walker, Leo G. Carroll
Have I Seen it Before: Never. I’m desperate to go through the whole Hitchcock library like I did with the Carpenter library last summer. But considering I never quite got myself through to Ghosts of Mars (2001), it may take me a while.
Did I Like It: You get to a certain point with films where you can’t help but begin to think you know where it’s going.
But then you hit a Hitchcock film and you should really know he’s playing with you from beyond the grave and you should never feel comfortable you know what you’re getting.
You is me, in this equation, if anyone was wondering.
Hitchcock, with this subject matter, memories of Rope (1948), and with a little bit of Farley Granger to add into the mix and one (one is me) would be forgiven for thinking that this would be a tale of two different sociopaths find each other and think that murder is just one way for adult men to forge friendships.
Once it is clear that Granger is playing something of a milquetoast who quickly finds himself in over his head, the construction becomes one of a fairly typical film noir. Hitchcock sees me coming from a mile away and just as I’m confident that Guy Haines (Granger) will unfairly get overwhelmed in both matters of tennis and murder by the machinations of Bruno Antony (Walker), a flashy, borderline ridiculous sequence involving a merry-go-round later and I should have really known that the whole thing was never going to go the way I thought.
Add in just enough of the macabre humor that elevated Hitchcock on spec beyond his contemporaries, and I really, really, must make a point to follow through on that promise to go through the rest of his films.