Not one of the master's best

Rating: Null/10 (21 June 2004)

***MEDIUM SPOILERS***
It's definitely a B effort, mostly because of the casting. As many others have mentioned, Cummings is wrong, wrong, wrong. If you've already seen North by Northwest (and if not, what's wrong with ya?), you'll immediately notice the hole that's left without a strong, charismatic, attractive male lead (i.e., Mr. Leach) in a very similar story.
It was also odd that so many people, after hearing bits of Cummings' story, would immediately side with him. Frankly, the blind guy's daughter is right, why automatically assume this guy isn't guilty just because you think he's kind of nice? It would have helped if there was one cop or detective who was determined to bring this guy to justice and was always just a step or two behind, frankly there's not much suspense or sense that apprehension lurks around every corner. Also as noted, that speech about the long blonde curls is kinda creepy and borderline homophobic. Are Hitch and the gang trying to say that gays can't be trusted to be real Americans?
The patriotic speeches were obviously pasted in and can only be forgiven being overblown because of the situation at the time. But Kreuger's long speech about why he's doing what he's doing almost struck me as being pro-Communist, all about how swell the average working Joe is and how evil the tuxedoed capitalist is and how bad power is.
I'm trying to work my way through the body of Hitch's work so now I can add this notch to my belt, but it wasn't 2 hours well spent.