Hanging Thread

Rating: Null/10 (2 February 2004)

During Det. Scottie Ferguson's first day of tailing Madeleine Elster, she goes up the steps into the McKiptrick Hotel, after parking her car.
A few moments later she's clearly seen pulling up the shade in the corner room of the second floor.
When Ferguson goes in the hotel lobby within seconds, the hotel landlady insists she's been at the front desk all the while and that no one's entered the building.
To prove it, she takes Ferguson up to the room in question, to find no one there. He looks out the window to find Madeleine's parked car gone . . .

Intriguing stuff, to be sure. Trouble is, neither Writer Pierre Boileau nor Director Alfred Hitchcock come back to this perplexing point again. It's an incident never referred to, never explained, and treated like it never happened.
Yet it is important, in a good mystery writing, that all loose ends be tied together at some point. True, "red herrings" are sometimes employed, but they must make sense within themselves while cleverly throwing the viewer off.
But not like this. An ultimately serious flaw in an otherwise well constructed and executed script.