Go ahead, vote me down

Rating: Null/10 (19 December 2008)

My favourite film at age 10, I watched it again with mounting dismay. The whole thing now looks badly dated and Cary Grant is just too old and stiff for the part - his mother looked like his younger sister. Cotton or Holden would have done it better. The romance scenes are just horrible, and Hitch was never any good at comedy. The Technicolor (or whatever process it was) turns Grant's face bright orange and Eva Marie Saint's face bright pink, which is quite startling when they are in a clinch. Hermann's score helps but it's only James Mason who redeems things - he only has to speak to raise the quality a notch. But to be brutally frank, nothing was really working. The tension failed to mount. What action there was was arthritic. The gf actually fell asleep during the crop-duster scene - I kid not. Towards the end, the DVD jammed terminally, but I didn't mind. By then only the inertia of overfamiliarity was keeping me going. Sad, really.