Just watched this film, part of it while I worked actually, and felt various levels of confusion.
It looked like your run-of-the-mill noir; but the music grabbed me. I thought “That’s Herrmann; or someone imitating him, because this sure as hell ain’t Hitchcock.”
I raced to imdb to look it up. Naturally I looked to see what others had to say about it.
While I sense what those speaking as devotees of the film mean to impart about the film if I had to express what’s wrong with it, in short, it would probably be that the city portion is too long and the country portion too short.
The most annoying thing about this film is that you feel it has everything it needs — great director, top-shelf actors, (even the character roles), the best (arguably) film score composer of the period, even the story has promise — but it feels like ground beef that’s been too quickly overcooked to produce a burger that takes too long to chew while threatening to crumble at every bite.
The only thing that places this film in the noir genre, in the commonly understood sense, is that we’re mired in an ugly city for most of it. We get to experience, ad nauseum, various forms of the thoughtless urban hub-bub that can make city life alternately exciting and dangerous. We understand — It’s a difficult environment for a cop who harbors aspirations to make it a better world than it ever could be.
About a half hour of that would’ve been more than enough to get across the idea of what’s happening to Ryan’s character.
But the second, rural setting, portion of the movie, the part where the hardened city cop is placed outside his normal life; down home plainspoken folk who’re short on patience with the pseudo-scientific by-the-book approach of a city cop; a poor little blind girl love interest, etc., is just too much squeezed into too little time.
Are we really supposed to believe that he becomes entirely smitten with this woman, or she with him, basically overnight?
I don’t think so.
How come city tough Ryan can’t kick the crap out of the over-zealous father out for revenge at the end of a shotgun? Is this allowed so that we could have that ridiculous mountain scape chase scene… where the murderer… I mean suspect… I mean poor misguided kid slips and falls… As in falls short of any usefulness whatsoever to the story save as a quickie ending to what was a relatively half-hearted chase to begin with.
And exactly why are we being put through this ‘poor kid isn’t really a killer. He’s just out of his gourd due to lack of oversight because his sister is blind and he feels guilt ridden about it, so he’s apt to do some quirky things… like kill someone’ routine? Is this noir, or the East Side Kids? How the hell did this scary addlepated child find his way to commit such a serious crime anyway? Why is he vicious and cunning enough to murder a stranger and elude police, but also so out of touch that he drifts off to memory lane at the drop of a hat?
It’s got the ingredients of greatness, but it opens too hard, phases sloppily, then ends too soft.
Finally, the Herrmann music felt like a pastiche of the music used throughout several Hickcock films. As a longtime Hitch fan I found it difficult to put that out of my mind while watching this film. The movie itself seemed weaker than the score. There seemed to be too much of it altogether and too much that didn’t quite fit the activity on the screen.
“Your thinking is untidy, like most so-called thinking today.” (Murder, My Sweet)
reply
share