"The Steel Trap" is an unusual caper film in that the caper itself is over and done with very quickly; it's the escaping the country that proves far trickier than expected. Writer-director Andrew Stone has fun with many Hitchcockian details which place the film somewhere between a thriller and a black comedy, as things go alternately very right and (more often) very wrong for our "hero". Speaking of Hitchcock, the film reunites the two leads of his 1943 "Shadow Of A Doubt", but it is really mostly Joseph Cotten's show; Teresa Wright has little to do except follow her husband around and look worried at his increasingly frantic antics, but she does give a fine performance. Dimitri Tiomkin goes a little overboard with the music score sometimes, but the film is gripping, entertaining, and breathlessly paced. *** out of 4.
Review of The Steel Trap
