One that doesn't quite age well

Rating: Null/10 (24 September 2010)

By general consensus Hitchcock reached the height of his powers from "Strangers on a Train"(1951) to "Marnie"(1964). Admittedly there were some splendid things before, "The 39 Steps", "Rebecca" and "Shadow of a Doubt" among them, and not everything in the great period was among his finest. What to make of "The Trouble with Harry" for instance! I have to admit that I don't share the universal admiration for "Rear Window" which I find somewhat contrived - a sort of textbook exercise in exploring from a limited viewpoint, which I know to be its purpose but which I find just a little bit dull. As this could well be one of my cinematic blindspots I am willing to respect the views of its admirers. I am also rather lukewarm about "North by Northwest" for reasons that I feel to be somewhat more valid. On first showing I found this to be a quite super thriller, witty, accomplished and stylish with some quite dazzling set pieces, not least the famous crop dusting sequence. But with each subsequent viewing my admiration has worn thinner. Again I feel it to be something of an exercise, an attempt to build a thriller out of all the successful ingredients of Hitchcock's earlier works. Thus, cliffhangers ("Saboteur", "To Catch a Thief" and "Vertigo"), cars driven at speed by drunken drivers ("Notorious"), talking oneself out of dangerous situations when trapped in public gatherings ("The 39 Steps" and "Saboteur").....I could go on.....Only the agoraphobic scene of the crop dusting, the best scene in the film, breaks new ground. The rest is a rehash of things gone before, albeit quite entertaining until the longueurs of the penultimate scene at the spy's house by Mount Rushmore and the technically rather dubiously constructed sequence on the mount itself which never quite conveys the vertigo it should. This is Hitch's longest feature and after the two-hour point it rather feels it. I suppose that for me it boils down to the fact that he made very much the same film in 1935 - "The 39 Steps"- lasting little more than half the time, so much better for its tremendous sense of pace and urgency. In 1956 he remade the 1934 "The Man Who Knew Too Much" taking nearly twice the time to tell the story. However on this occasion, he invested it with far greater depth of detail creating an infinitely more satisfying cinematic experience. Thus was Hitchcock forever unpredictable.