BEFORE: Somehow in the midst of everything going on, I fell behind one day. A busy social calendar, combined with the troubles with the cable company, combined with this annoying need to sleep every once in a while forced me to spread this film out over two nights. I think maybe I'm too comfortable on the couch, because once I close my eyes, I'm lost. Maybe I need to go back to watching films in my basement mancave, which had the benefit of being a bit less comfortable.
Hitchcock carries over for his last cameo appearance, here he appears in silhouette in an office.
THE PLOT: A phony psychic/con artist and her taxi driver/private investigator boyfriend encounter a pair of serial kidnappers while trailing a missing heir in California.
AFTER: So, this is the way the Hitchcock chain ends - not with a bang, but with a "WTF?" Part of the reason I wasn't able to stay awake is that this film is such a confusing mess - and not even an interesting one.
There are two couples engaged in shady dealings - one couple is a weird combination of kidnappers and jewel thieves - they kidnap people and demand jewels as ransom, which seems like a long way to go to get what they want. The other couple is a psychic and a limo driver, assigned to track someone down. It's like some weird ABC sitcom from the 1970's - he's an astronaut, she's a fashion model, they're married and they fight crime!
Hitchcock seemed to want to make some salient point about class struggle, but it's just lost somewhere in the mix. Where "Frenzy" seemed to be a collection of all the famous Hitchcock tropes, this is very atypical for him. Where's the person falsely accused of a crime? Where are the well-intentioned but ultimately useless police? Where's the foreign agent falling off of an iconic American landmark?
There is one revelatory twist, but it comes so far into the picture, and has so little impact or meaning, that it's almost an afterthought, except that it does bring all the characters together and set up the final conflict. It's almost too concise the way it ties everything together in a simplistic way.
Hitchcock was supposedly in ill-health while making this film, although he didn't necessarily think this would be his last picture. It's an odd choice to try and make a screwball comedy with thieves and kidnappers - just thinking about the tone, that seems like it would be hard to strike the right balance. You have to look at films like "A Fish Called Wanda" or "Ruthless People" to find rare examples of movies that were able to pull that off.
Also starring Bruce Dern (last seen in "Marnie"), Karen Black (last seen in "Five Easy Pieces"), William Devane (last seen in "Payback"), Barbara Harris (last seen in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels"), Katharine Helmond (last heard in "Cars 2"), Ed Lauter, with a cameo from Nicholas "Coach" Colasanto.
RATING: 3 out of 10 Adamsons
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