Dir: Alfred Hitchcock | Cast: Jon Finch, Alec McCowen, Barry Foster, Billie Whitelaw, Anna Massey, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Bernard Cribbins, Vivien Merchant | UK Drama 1972
Reviewed by Richard Chatten
The film that marked Hitchcock’s return to Britain after over twenty years was far from his best but was unmistakably his work; although much more graphically violent in its tale of a serial killer whose method is to strangle his victims with a necktie.
Containing such archetypal Hitchcockian devices as one of his long slow cranes – this time in reverse emerging from a room were a murder is about to be committed – an ingratiating killer (a role believe it or not originally offered to Max Bygraves). And best of all, a dinner conservation that provides a comic variation on the classic Hitchcock situation in which the visuals tell a completely different story from the subject under discussion.
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