Slow, boring, ridiculous, and predictable

Rating: 1/10 (18 November 2015)

I finally watched this old chestnut. I read somewhere that it was a flop when it came out but later became recognized as a classic. Apparently Alfred Hitchcock blamed James Stewart's being too old for the part. The two never worked together again. Well, Stewart wasn't the problem. The problem was the script, which is simply asinine. The public was right the first time: the movie is terrible.
The hero falls in love with a woman who is supposed to be nuts and who gives him no reason at all to fall in love with her. She has a few mad scenes with him but never engages in any conversation of any substance on any topic, never does any activities with him, etc. On top of that, she is his old friend's wife. Her only attraction is that she is good looking, but lust for a pretty woman isn't love, which is what the hero is supposed to feel. Totally implausible.
The movie runs 2 hours. There is a great deal of boring driving around San Francisco and the nearby California coast in the first half of the movie. I started looking at my watch at around 1:15 into the movie. Was this thing ever going to end? At about 1:30 the main plot is revealed. It is pretty silly and quite routine. The remaining 1/2 hour is torture. The plot gets more and more ridiculous, all the while getting more and more predictable. My impatience got more and more intense. When the truly idiotic end finally came, I was both relieved (over at last!) and outraged (what a waste of 2 hours).