![]() ![]() ![]() It's a carefully played and psychologically persuasive story of betrayal in a small, apple–pie-wholesome American town – an uncharacteristic setting for him, also. Shadow of a Doubt (1943) Once thought to be Hitchcock's personal favourite among his films, though he demurred on that when quizzed by Truffaut, this plays out in more of a minor key than most of his Forties entertainments. A winking British vulgarity helps ironise the tawdriness: as one pub patron puts it, "We haven't had a good sex murderer since Christie".Picture: SNAP / Rex Features Credit: SNAP / Rex Featuresġ3. Reviews at the time ranged from the famously hard–to–please Leslie Halliwell's verdict ("an old man's sex suspenser") to Vincent Canby's New York Times rave ("dazzling, lucid"). It was certainly a return to Hitchcock's comfort zone, if not perhaps wholly to form. Earlier, the on–camera throttling of Barbara Leigh–Hunt counts as the most explicitly gruesome demise in this whole oeuvre. ![]() Having grown up as the son of a Covent Garden market trader, he was keen to use this setting in its dying days, but you could hardly call this a nostalgic tribute: one of the key sequences has the so–called Necktie Killer, Rusk (Barry Foster), scrabbling around amid sacks of potatoes, trying to find Anna Massey's corpse, whose fingers he then has to break to retrieve his tie pin. Frenzy (1972) The director's return to London took him right back to the sex–attack terrors of Blackmail and The Lodger as if nothing in his home city had changed, though he tackled this story with the more ghoulish flair expected in the post– Psycho era. ![]()
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