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Welles praised it as he later would Fellini's Lo Sceicco Bianco, a fresh eye on the big city. To kick off the string of Hitchcockisms, drinks are on the King of the Jungle in an empty Philadelphia bar, a joke that surely goes into The Producers. The raucous boor with a wad of cash is soon a strangled fat cat in his room, meanwhile there's the bride from Ohio (Kim Hunter) on her way to the husband she barely knows in New York. The traveling salesman (Dean Jagger) is so opaque that even Coney Island's Hugo the Great Mental Marvel is stumped, he'd be a perfect dullard if he weren't also the main suspect in a murder. Vulnerability in ominous terrain, a Hunter specialty (The Seventh Victim), alone in the hotel with odd noises and a neon billboard flashing outside the window. A matter of little things, assures her former beau (Robert Mitchum), "take each one separately and you find a simple answer." William Castle works it all out with speed and inspiration in drab Monogram sets, a keen idea or two in every shot. High-angled camera to turn a shadowy corner of the sound stage into "a not very healthy neighborhood," low-angled camera to stretch a boarding-house door into a storybook engraving. The shriek-whistle from The 39 Steps, a chat in a busy sauna and a stop at a jumpin' Harlem joint, mirror couples (old and jaded in the train, or exhausted with wailing baby in the back of a car) like projections of the young heroine's fears. From Suspicion to Shadow of a Doubt or vice versa, toward a bit of sweat around a glass mail drop. "You tell a good story, lieutenant!" With Neil Hamilton, Lou Lubin, Milton Kibbee, and Dick Elliott. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |