Movie thoughts and fiction updates.
#51 in my Ranking of Alfred Hitchcock's films. By about the halfway point, Topaz had completely lost me and never got me back. The overstuffed and unfocused international spy story of Frederick Stafford's Andre Devereaux, French secret agent, lurches from one storyline to another with only tangential connective tissue, creating an overlong drag of a… Continue reading Topaz
#28 in my Ranking of Alfred Hitchcock's films. I apparently did not like this film the first time I saw it years ago. Revisiting it now, I was a bit surprised that I liked it as much as I did. It's a perfectly serviceable spy thriller with a good pair of performances at its center… Continue reading Torn Curtain
#37 in my Ranking of Alfred Hitchcock's films. It's a near miss, I think, a story that mostly gets it right until the end when things both go off the rails a bit and become simply too pat for comfort. Hitchcock's long history and deep knowledge of production makes it a slick affair on par… Continue reading Marnie
#13 in my Ranking of Alfred Hitchcock's films. This movie has no business working as well as it does. It’s a horror movie about birds that largely stops giving its characters room to grow at the halfway point to focus on pure survival. And yet, it’s got such a good build of tension over the… Continue reading The Birds
#4 in my Ranking of Alfred Hitchcock's films. This was one of Hitchcock’s experiment films. After the lavish productions of Vertigo and North by Northwest, and while noting the financial success of smaller and cheaper B-movies, he decided that he wanted to make a movie for less than a million dollars. He hired a lot… Continue reading Psycho
David Vining, Author 