Getting There

Rating: 8/10 (20 February 2008)

This has to be one of the better Hitchcock movies despite inconsistencies. I find Hitchcock vastly overrated which is not the same as incompetent; basically he's a first-rate journeyman with a first-rate press agent but here he wisely cast Cary Grant in the lead and supplied him with a worthy villain in the talented shape of James Mason. Given that pairing you could practically cast Marjorie Main as the love interest and get away with it. For an average man in the street Grant is urbanity personified in the face of real, life-threatening danger and witty with it. It defies credence that someone who'd just been force fed an entire fifth of Bourbon would be able to sit up straight in a car let alone negotiate a winding road in the face of oncoming traffic and if you swallow this then nothing that follows will faze you. Enjoyable, Yes; Credible, No, but what the hey, it's only a movie, Ingrid.