Dir: Alfred Hitchcock | Cast: Ray Milland Grace Kelly | Thriller 90’
Alfred Hitchcock doesn’t get sufficient credit for his technical enterprise which here comes into full play in his exploitation of colour and 3-D in what in less ambitious hands would have been a simple piece of canned theatre, whereas Hitchcock makes almost no attempt to open the action out; instead employing the third dimension to draw you into the action as the ten-minute take had done in ‘Rope’.
Despite his mercenary nature Ray Milland is a classic charming villain in the Hitchcock tradition who commands far greater sympathy than Grace Kelly who after all is cheating on him with Robert Cummings, whose desire to get her off the hook whose motivation is purely selfish, and John Williams – who plays an Anglo-Saxon Columbo – increasingly finds a nuisance.
Kudos too to Dimitri Tiomkin’s score, the last he wrote for a Hitchcock film. @RichardChatten