With two parallel plots running throughout, Alfred Hitchcock's final film is a brilliantly constructed mystery-thriller. Hired by elderly Miss Rainbird (Nesbitt) to locate a long-lost heir, phoney medium Blanche Tyler (Harris) and her cabbie boy friend George Lumley (Dern)--amiable
frauds-- begin their search with very few clues. Meanwhile another more sinister couple, jeweler Arthur Adamson (Devane) and his girlfriend Fran (Black) are engineering a kidnapping scheme in which the ransom is to be paid in valuable diamonds. The paths of all of these characters and their
respective "plots" eventually cross, in a comical directorial move, at a cemetery. Just when the mystery ends, however, the thrills begin--the most harrowing of which takes place along a curving mountainside road.
The film is a dense but extremely entertaining collection of symmetric patterns, doubles, and rhymes. The performances are first-rate (finally free of the casting constraints, Hitchcock displayed--in 1972's FRENZY as well--a deliciously offbeat taste in performers) and the screenplay by Ernest
Lehman (NORTH BY NORTHWEST) is a witty model of construction. The humor is more obvious and subversive than any of Hitchcock's films since THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY. Hitch's final, tongue-in-cheek wink at his audience was one of his most memorable cameos--a broad shadow obscured behind a glass door
on which may be read "Registrar of Births and Deaths." Based on a British novel by Victor Canning, the film was scripted under the title "One Plus One Equals One," and went into production as "Deceit," before a studio worker hit on the final title. leave a comment
