Swiss-cheese Hitchcock

Rating: Null/10 (31 March 2001)

For all its gloss and signature moments, this is surely among the dopiest of Hitchcock's American films. The fault lies not with the production design (slick, often striking) or the actors (the usually marzipan Robert Cummings is surprisingly credible), but with a script so preachy and unmoored that it sounds like it was written by the Minister of Propaganda during a helium overdose.
Even the editing-usually one of the glories of a Hitchcock film-is surprisingly sloppy. Example: The Cummings character is locked in a pantry of a Manhattan mansion. He cleverly melts a sprinkler head (his captors apparently having thought nothing of leaving him with matches and other mischief-making devices) and sets off the house's alarm system. There follows much scurrying among the servants, and the next thing we know, Cummings is out on the street in the crowd observing the `fire'. We can guess how he got there, but it's still as if he were teleported, and it's a cheat.
Some of the setpieces (the meeting with the handsome, refined `model citizen' who turns out to be Corruption itself, for example) are themes Hitchcock explored again and again, usually to better effect. And one encounter-with a kindly, effusive blind man in a remote cabin-is straight out of Bride of Frankenstein. Now that is one strange antecedent.
Still, there are rewards, chief among them the black-comedy shootout in Radio City Music Hall and, of course, the dazzling confrontation at the Statue of Liberty. And then there's Norman Lloyd's saboteur, surely one of the grandest creeps Hitchcock ever conjured.