Awful garbage

Rating: 1/10 (4 March 2011)

The use of colour is probably the only good thing about this slow and boring, overlong, dated film. The first half is much too long and slow and the repetitive driving scenes quickly become very tiresome. Kim Novak was always a poor actress, and looks ridiculous with her bleached platinum blond hair and thick dark eyebrows. Far too many scenes take place in the studio on very fake looking sets with painted backdrops. The opening scene is ruined because it is so fake, not that cops would be chasing a criminal over rooftops anyway. By far the worst thing however is the dreadful miscasting of Grandfather Stewart as Scottie. Stewart was clearly far too old to be playing romantic leads at this point in his career and he was actually more than twice Kim Novak's age (she was 24 and he was 49, though he looked at least 55). His grey wig is laughably bad and he just looks like an ugly old man chasing after his granddaughter. With a younger, better looking actor like Marlon Brando the film might have at least been watchable.