It's not a bad movie. If it had been made by a 21-year-old whom no one had ever heard of, the verdict would be something along the lines of, "Promising young director, obviously influenced by Hitchcock. May go on to distinguished career." However it was not made by a nobody. It was made by Hitchcock and it will be judged in the context of his entire ouevre.
The old chap seems to have shaken off whatever religious sense of guilt had been haunting him all those years. What Hitchcock's freedom finally let loose may or may not have been good for him but it was sure bad for the characters in his movies, particularly the women.
Basically and briefly, two men are friends -- Rusk (Foster) who runs a fruit and vegetable business in the now-defunct Covent Garden and who is a sadistic rapist and murderer when he's not fondling his grapes, and Blainey (Finch), an ex-RAF officer of reduced circumstances, broke, suspected of the murderers, and rapidly running out of friends one way or another.
Blainey has a sympathetic ex-wife (Leigh-Hunt) and a current squeeze (Anna Massey). The former is obviously middle-class and the latter is a sensible and devoted working-class barmaid. The two women are the most admirable characters in the film. The differences don't matter. Rusk does his abominable number on both of them.
Well -- that's one thing. But Hitchcock's treatment of the murders is anything but delicate and purposive. Leigh-Hunt's rape and murder is pretty explicit. She squeezes her crucifix and prays during the ordeal but her pleas are unanswered and the director gives us a shot of her dead body, her legs spread, a necktie twisted around her neck, and her tongue protruding in which some docs call "the Q sign." Hitchcock doesn't even give her the dignified distance of the death of Miriam, Farley Granger's whorish wife, in "Strangers on a Train." We don't get to see Anna Massey violated, but in some ways her death is even more distasteful. Late at night, Rusk stuffs her stiffened body into a burlap bag of potatoes and dumps it in the back of one of the trucks parked near his business. Later, when he realizes that the corpse has a personal item of his in her fist, he climbs into the back of the truck and extracts the stickpin, while the truck rumbles and bounces along the highway. Here it's as if the shower murder in "Psycho" had been played for laughs. Rusk fumbles and bumbles around, trying to untie the bag's drawstring, scrabbling around in the potatoes and the cold flesh, with Massey's stiff foot poking him repeatedly in the face. His head gets caught inside the bag while he curses. He must break her fingers to release the item. And finally the potatoes begin bouncing out of the open rear, all over the highway, to be followed by the nude body with its green face and agonized expression.
His attempts at humor do succeed, but not enough to overcome the general sense of unpleasantness. The humor has to do with the Detective's wife serving him inedible French delicacies such as pig's feet and a soup that seems to have been made out of the innards of the creature from "Alien." It's impossible not to watch the detective, poor Alec MaCowan, trying to be polite to his wife while sawing desperately at a sliver of meat from a roasted shrunken bird carcass the size of a canary. And I crack up every time I watch the detective's last attempt at a meal of pig's feet, carrying on a muffled conversation with some inedible piece of hoof tucked away in his cheek. This goes on for some minutes until at the first chance he manages to spit this malignancy out onto the plate, gets up and leaves at once.
The two women and the detective are okay. The detective's wife is harmless but dumb. Everyone else is, to say the least, unpleasant. They bark and snap at each other. The hero is especially obnoxious, smashing a wine glass in his hand at a fancy restaurant while shouting at his innocent partner. Rusk, Blainey's phony friend, played with slithering accuracy by Barry Foster, is unspeakable of course. Even the art that adorns his walls is unspeakable. There are two "portraits" of exotic women, the sort usually found on black velvet. There's a lurid and inept painting of what might have been a scene deleted from "The Rake's Progress" because it was so lousy. And then, capping it all, there's a photo of Rusk's Mum, who once told him that home is when you go there, they have to take you in. There ought to be a photo of Robert Frost rolling around in his grave.
There are two or three of Hitchcock's set pieces. One involves the camera movements while Anna Massey is being done in. The other is the potato sack scene in the back of the truck. Both are effective in their different ways.
But it's not any given scene that's disturbing. It's the tenor of the entire film. Cripes, what a view of humanity it embraces! Hitch may be right. People may in general be pretty lousy. It doesn't make the film less sad.
Well, I've kind of bombed the movie, I see, but taken as a thing in itself, it's not bad. It suffers mainly in comparison to Hitchcock's earlier work. If it's sad -- and it is -- it's sad in a way that life can sometimes be sad. Not all of our protagonists are heroic -- or even likable.
The old chap seems to have shaken off whatever religious sense of guilt had been haunting him all those years. What Hitchcock's freedom finally let loose may or may not have been good for him but it was sure bad for the characters in his movies, particularly the women.
Basically and briefly, two men are friends -- Rusk (Foster) who runs a fruit and vegetable business in the now-defunct Covent Garden and who is a sadistic rapist and murderer when he's not fondling his grapes, and Blainey (Finch), an ex-RAF officer of reduced circumstances, broke, suspected of the murderers, and rapidly running out of friends one way or another.
Blainey has a sympathetic ex-wife (Leigh-Hunt) and a current squeeze (Anna Massey). The former is obviously middle-class and the latter is a sensible and devoted working-class barmaid. The two women are the most admirable characters in the film. The differences don't matter. Rusk does his abominable number on both of them.
Well -- that's one thing. But Hitchcock's treatment of the murders is anything but delicate and purposive. Leigh-Hunt's rape and murder is pretty explicit. She squeezes her crucifix and prays during the ordeal but her pleas are unanswered and the director gives us a shot of her dead body, her legs spread, a necktie twisted around her neck, and her tongue protruding in which some docs call "the Q sign." Hitchcock doesn't even give her the dignified distance of the death of Miriam, Farley Granger's whorish wife, in "Strangers on a Train." We don't get to see Anna Massey violated, but in some ways her death is even more distasteful. Late at night, Rusk stuffs her stiffened body into a burlap bag of potatoes and dumps it in the back of one of the trucks parked near his business. Later, when he realizes that the corpse has a personal item of his in her fist, he climbs into the back of the truck and extracts the stickpin, while the truck rumbles and bounces along the highway. Here it's as if the shower murder in "Psycho" had been played for laughs. Rusk fumbles and bumbles around, trying to untie the bag's drawstring, scrabbling around in the potatoes and the cold flesh, with Massey's stiff foot poking him repeatedly in the face. His head gets caught inside the bag while he curses. He must break her fingers to release the item. And finally the potatoes begin bouncing out of the open rear, all over the highway, to be followed by the nude body with its green face and agonized expression.
His attempts at humor do succeed, but not enough to overcome the general sense of unpleasantness. The humor has to do with the Detective's wife serving him inedible French delicacies such as pig's feet and a soup that seems to have been made out of the innards of the creature from "Alien." It's impossible not to watch the detective, poor Alec MaCowan, trying to be polite to his wife while sawing desperately at a sliver of meat from a roasted shrunken bird carcass the size of a canary. And I crack up every time I watch the detective's last attempt at a meal of pig's feet, carrying on a muffled conversation with some inedible piece of hoof tucked away in his cheek. This goes on for some minutes until at the first chance he manages to spit this malignancy out onto the plate, gets up and leaves at once.
The two women and the detective are okay. The detective's wife is harmless but dumb. Everyone else is, to say the least, unpleasant. They bark and snap at each other. The hero is especially obnoxious, smashing a wine glass in his hand at a fancy restaurant while shouting at his innocent partner. Rusk, Blainey's phony friend, played with slithering accuracy by Barry Foster, is unspeakable of course. Even the art that adorns his walls is unspeakable. There are two "portraits" of exotic women, the sort usually found on black velvet. There's a lurid and inept painting of what might have been a scene deleted from "The Rake's Progress" because it was so lousy. And then, capping it all, there's a photo of Rusk's Mum, who once told him that home is when you go there, they have to take you in. There ought to be a photo of Robert Frost rolling around in his grave.
There are two or three of Hitchcock's set pieces. One involves the camera movements while Anna Massey is being done in. The other is the potato sack scene in the back of the truck. Both are effective in their different ways.
But it's not any given scene that's disturbing. It's the tenor of the entire film. Cripes, what a view of humanity it embraces! Hitch may be right. People may in general be pretty lousy. It doesn't make the film less sad.
Well, I've kind of bombed the movie, I see, but taken as a thing in itself, it's not bad. It suffers mainly in comparison to Hitchcock's earlier work. If it's sad -- and it is -- it's sad in a way that life can sometimes be sad. Not all of our protagonists are heroic -- or even likable.