BEFORE: Full disclosure, I went to see "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" last night, and I'm not planning to post my review until just before Comic-Con, when I'll also have a chance to watch the new X-Men and Spider-Man films. I'm not proud of monkeying with my timeline, since this is supposed to be a record of what I've watched and in what order, but I've got my plan and in order to stick to it and reduce the watchlist, this is the course I've chosen. But since the "S.H.I.E.L.D." TV show made direct references to the events in the Captain America film, I needed to check it out now.
I sort of realized too late that the linking was ideal - Anthony Hopkins was also in "Thor: The Dark World", and then Stan Lee would have been my link to "Captain America: The Winter Soldier", and then Scarlett Johansson could have linked to "Hitchcock" - but that would have thrown me two days off of my tribute date. So I'll find another way to get there...
THE PLOT: A landlady suspects her new lodger is the madman killing women in London.
AFTER: Old Hitch made a couple of short films before this one, but this is the oldest one in the DVD collection, plus it represents his first "stab" at the suspense genre. If you try hard enough, you can almost see the genesis of "Psycho" in this film about a serial killer. (For that matter, this could easily be the film that Woody Allen ripped off...sorry, paid tribute to with "Shadows and Fog".)
Problem is, it's something of a mess. The killer is targeting young blondes (funny, so did Hitchcock, but in a different way...) and you'd think this would lead to an increase in the sales of hair color and hats, but no, the blonde girls are on display at fashion shows and such - why, they're practically daring the killer to murder them! How dare they walk down the street in such a brazen fashion, those hussies!
When the stereotypical "mysterious drifter" shows up at a boarding-house, bearing quite a resemblance to a man that no one has ever got a good look at (wait, what?) and he chooses a room with many portraits of blonde women, and then turns all the portraits around so he can't see them. So, umm, why didn't he just pick another room, then?
Meanwhile, girls keep getting killed, and the pattern leads right to the boarding house. Because killers often work in patterns, and they usually make sure that the pattern leads the police right to them, right? And Joe, the lead policeman, just happens to be the ex-boyfriend of the blonde woman who falls for the lodger. That's a pretty big coincidence, or perhaps it's a convenience. It also gives the cop a reason to rush to judgment, when the items found in the lodger's room could just as easily be murderer-tracking items, as they could also be murderer's tools and tokens.
Man, those were the days, right? When murderers left notes taking credit for their work? I'd like to know when exactly Hallmark discontinued their "serial killer" line. See, it didn't matter if you were a killer, people back in the day had MANNERS. The cops were then obligated to post a "thank you" note when the killer did his grisly business close to the police station, so they weren't inconvenienced.
Somebody remade this in 2009, but I'm not all that interested. I've already got style whiplash from watching a 2014 film (Captain America) and this in the same 24-hour period. Silent films, where half the time I can't understand what people are saying, and the other half I have to READ it - damn, movies today are just better, and a whole lot easier to watch. Besides, I already covered serial killers last year...
Starring Ivor Novello, June, Marie Ault, Arthur Chesney, Malcolm Keen, with a cameo from Alfred Hitchcock (who also appeared in a photo in last night's film, so that preserves my linking...)
RATING: 3 out of 10 chess pieces
No comments:
Post a Comment