The Writer's Poke

Farley Granger, previously in Rope (1948), is back again in another Hitchcock picture, this time as Guy, tennis player and aspiring politician.  He has a wife, but she's pregnant with another man's baby. She had asked Guy for a divorce, but apparently, she changes her mind. Did divorce laws work that way? Did both parties have to agree to divorce for it to be granted, and when she threatens to tell the world that the child is his, were there not paternity tests available to prove otherwise? None of this matters, because Bruno (Robert Walker) has carried out his end of the unagreed-to bargain, strangling Guy's wife. Guy had met Bruno on a train. He assumes it was an accidental meeting, but Bruno has clearly been following Guy and has planned the meeting. I don't know if Bruno just assumed that Guy would be eager to go for the "crisscross perfect murder plan" or if he cared.  Much is made of Bruno ending up with Guy's lighter -- not something that was part o...

This movie has the two iconic scenes -- Man being chased by crop duster plane, and couple being chased on the top of Mt. Rushmore. That probably is enough to give it at least 4 stars. What about the rest of the movie? Roger (Cary Grant) is just a typical New York dude. Somehow -- never explained in the movie -- the bad guys come to believe that he's someone else. That someone else is a Cold War undercover agent. Turns out this agent isn't even real.  By the way, the crop-dusting scene is supposed to take place in Indiana, just 90 minutes away from Chicago. It's a completely barren and flat landscape. No trees. I'm pretty sure none of Indiana actually looks like that. Maybe it could pass for parts of Kansas, but I'm not sure. In fact, the scene was shot in central California. Regardless, it's a cool scene. And about the femme fatal: The movie really makes us think about Eve's ethics (Eva Marie Saint). She knew she was sending Roger to his doom, but in her pos...

Seems like every Hitchcock film has at least someone that wants to murder someone else, often for vague reasons, and killers are all very cold and calculating about it. They all think they have the perfect plan. Even when they get caught, they remain cold and calculating, like it's all just a game that doesn't matter anyway,  In this edition of Murder by Hitchcock, Tony (Ray Milland) knows that his wife, Margot (Grace Kelly) no longer loves him and that she's been seeing another man, Mark (Robert Cummings). Mark happens to be a murder mystery writer, and so its jolly good fun to hear Tony ask Mark how he plans his murders for his novels. Mark makes the pithy comment that planning murders in novels and planning them in real life are two different things, because real-life murders never go as planned. Tony does seem like he's got everything planned out down to the last detail, but what he doesn't plan for is Margot's scissors. She has a weapon that helps her fight...

While we are confronted with a dead body and a possible manslaughter/murder/coverup, the quirkiness of the situation and how all of the characters respond to it make this film quite different from other Hitchcock films.  Is it a 5-star film on the level of other 5-star Hitchcock films? Man, that's a tough question. And I'm going to punt on that. I don't know if this film is as good as Vertigo or Psycho. Honestly, probably not, but regardless, I do find the character development, the acting, and the setting all top notch.  Who is Harry? He's a dead body. And the trouble is, the people involved can't seem to get rid of him. He's buried, unburied, and so on, "throughout the day." Although Harry isn't a local, and for a while seems to be a stranger that's just unfortunately been shot, we discover that he's not a stranger, and the cause of his death is more complicated.  At the end, I love when Jennifer (Shirley McLaine) explains to the doctor j...

So I'm not sure how much we're supposed to care or how much they think we're going to remember... but at the end of the first movie, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) dies, right? And didn't they mention and confirm her death in part 2? Well, apparently not. Even if she "went crazy" at the end of the original movie, she must have gotten better quickly, because she's back front and center in part 3, as a gifted psychology graduate student. She's so amazing that she even gets a full-blown adult male psychiatrist to fall in love with her. It's a budding relationship that's never really explained or developed. But anyway, this movie does lowkey rock. At the beginning of the film, Nancy (Patricia Arquette) cranks up Dokken's "Into the Fire" in an effort to stay awake, and so we're already Rokken with Dokken, and all is right with the world. Even before anything happens, you can already tell the production value is ten times better than it...

Unlike the first movie, which has the novelty of casting Johnny Depp, as well as having some interesting special effects, I gotta say that this movie has nothing really going for it.  A new family moves into the old house. Five years have passed, and we're told that Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) had killed herself. In the insulting twist ending to the first film, that's not how I remember it, but no matter. Franchises like this will change little details, either out of laziness, or because changing the details suits their purposes in some way. This time a boy, Jesse (Mark Patton) has the bad dreams. His dad knows about the house's history, but even though his son is going crazy, he never thinks that the house and his son's condition are connected. In the first film, Freddy (Robert Englund) stays on the dream side, more or less. But the idea is established that he can, somehow, cross into the side of the living. He seemingly crosses over a lot in this sequel, but really, wh...