Vertigo (1958)

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Brandon & I recently recorded a podcast episode about our major Alfred Hitchcock oversights; Brandon had never seen North by Northwest, and I had never seen Rebecca, but perhaps the greatest oversight on my part was that I had never seen Vertigo. Vertigo had a lukewarm reception upon release in 1958, but has in more recent decades been re-evaluated and come to be considered not only Hitch’s greatest film, but in the Sight & Sound poll for 2012, it was considered the greatest film of all time (the 2022 re-draft put Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels at number one). I’ve done some reading about the 2012 voting, and it seems there is some suspicion that several of the participants simply wanted to dethrone Citizen Kane from the number one spot and seemed to rally around Vertigo more for contrarian purposes than genuine belief that it’s the greatest film ever made. I didn’t go into this project with the expectation that I would compose a ranked list of Hitchcock’s work that would greatly upset the commonly accepted wisdom, but now having seen all but one of the director’s thriller films (I’m saving his final film, Family Plot, for last), I must put forward my most controversial opinion here; Vertigo is “merely” good, not exceptional.

The film opens with Detective John “Scottie” Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) and a fellow police officer in the middle of a rooftop chase of a suspect. Scottie loses his footing and finds himself clinging to a gutter over a fatal drop into an alley. When his partner attempts to rescue him, the man slips himself and falls to his death. Sometime later, Scottie has retired from the force when he receives a request from college acquaintance Gavin Helster (Tom Helmore) to put his skills to use by following his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak). Gavin does not suspect her of infidelity, but instead fears that she may come to some harm as the result of her connection to a long-dead woman named Carlotta Valdes, Madeleine’s great-grandmother who killed herself at the age of twenty-six, the same age Madeleine now is. As Scottie follows her around, he learns that Madeleine occasionally seems to enter a fugue state where she takes flowers to Carlotta’s grave, spends hours staring at a portrait of the woman in a local museum, and even rents a room in the hotel that was once Carlotta’s house. Over time, Scottie falls in love with Madeleine, and after he rescues her from an apparent suicide attempt when she leaps into San Francisco Bay, she seems to reciprocate these feelings. Madeleine’s apparent haunting/possession by Carlotta seems to be hurtling toward a tragic end, but when something unthinkable does happen, that’s only the beginning of many more twists and turns.

I can see why this is as popular as it is. Like Psycho, Spellbound, and Marnie, Vertigo reflects Hitchcock’s fascination with contemporary psychology, even if the science was very Freudian and of its time. It’s also the only Hitchcock thriller that, at least for a time, presents itself as being a more traditional, supernaturally-influenced horror story, as the presumably skeptical audience is led to wonder whether Madeleine is, in fact, being possessed by her great-grandmother’s ghost. Other than the possibly preternatural link that Young Charlie and Uncle Charlie share in Shadow of a Doubt, this is the only Hitchcock thriller that contains that element, and even though there is a logical explanation for what happens, I understand the appeal that the plot line holds. If Kim Novak is your cup of tea, then you’re in luck, as the film spends long periods of time gazing at her or at a painting of her; I don’t personally find her performance here to be very strong, and learning that Hitch wanted either Vera Miles or Eva Marie Saint for the role makes a lot more sense. Arguably this is the point, as her tabula rasa nature allows Scottie to obsess over her without anything pesky like a personality getting in the way (presumably the only reason that he doesn’t go for the available, lively, spunky, adorable Midge), so I can make an allowance for it, but imagining either Miles or Saint in the role is frustrating, since I can only see either of them improving my personal absorption in the narrative. Stewart’s character here is largely indistinguishable, personality-wise, from Jeff in Rear Window, which is well within his wheelhouse, even if it feels like he’s doing an impression of himself rather than really trying to make Scottie feel real.

If one were to judge the film on its visual merits alone, it’s virtually peerless and its reputation is unassailable. The film is definitively one of the director’s most beautiful; Helster’s office is one of the most sumptuous sets I’ve ever seen, and it’s not a surprise that Hitchcock was so taken with it that he had his own real life office redecorated to imitate it. Ernie’s Restaurant is likewise a gorgeous locale, with crimson damask wallpaper and matching carpeting that make one feel as if they are looking at the interior of a heart, all that red making Madeleine’s green dress stand out all the more. In the scene where Scottie follows Madeleine to a floral shop, the way that the bounty of flowers frames the grey-suited Madeleine is simply gorgeous, and the reverse shot of her reflected in a mirrored door as Scottie peers out from a gap is one of the best compositions of Hitchcock’s career. There are excellent counter-compositions as well, as we move from the rundown McKittrick Hotel, which still retains all of its dark, ornate woodwork and its now-faded wallpaper, to Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes)’s modern apartment with her drawing desk and cluttered supplies and artworks, then to the beautifully appointed Argosy Bookstore. Exterior shots capture some of the best American architectural feats of the early twentieth century as we visit the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (where Carlotta’s painting is kept), spend some time on the Presidio marveling at the Golden Gate Bridge, and gaze at the distant Coit Tower Madeleine uses as a landmark to retrace her steps back to Scottie’s home. We even spend some time in a forest of sequoia trees, and the effect is magical, and there’s not a single window in the film that doesn’t feature a gorgeous view of San Francisco. Every frame is perfect, and I haven’t even mentioned the bizarre, perfect acid-dream nightmare sequence that Scottie has at roughly the 2/3rds mark, which is a perfect piece of cinema unto itself.

The narrative has a lot of potential, but it falls apart under scrutiny. Spoilers (for a nearly seventy-year-old film) through the end of this paragraph. The twist that the “Madeleine” Scottie has followed for so much of the film is really a woman named Judy Barton whom Helster hired to play the role of Madeleine while his wife is away in the country, so that Scottie can witness her slowly deteriorating mental state and testify to it, is a solid one. Knowing that Scottie’s acrophobia will prevent him from following “Madeleine” to the top of a tower in an old Spanish mission, Helster is already there, and he throws the real Madeleine’s already murdered corpse from the top, seemingly committing the perfect crime. Things start to fall apart when Scottie sees Judy some time later and begins to court her in an attempt to recreate “Madeleine” without realizing that they are the same woman, which stretches the bounds of credulity a bit too far. The mystery is decently maintained until the moment that the audience learns what Helster did, as it carries that same maybe-supernatural element through since it appears that Madeleine has a doppelganger, but once we learn the truth about Judy, the film plods along for far too long before it reaches its conclusion. To relate this to Hitchcock’s famous discussion about the tension that is created by telling the audience that there is a bomb under a table and how that tension is diffused the moment that the bomb goes off, this is like telling us that the bomb under the table has already been defused, with half an hour left to go. The sequence of events also leads to audience confusion as well; Scottie witnesses “Madeleine’s” death, then attends the coroner’s inquest, then has the nightmare sequence that seems to render him catatonic when Midge leaves him in a recovery facility, then immediately cuts to Scottie walking down the street, where he thinks he sees Madeleine. Watching this, I had to ask my viewing companion: “Wait a second, when did he recover?” before I decided to just go with it. Since I was in that state of mind, it didn’t even occur to me that Scottie wasn’t aware that Judy was Madeleine until he has his epiphanic moment when she puts on Madeleine/Carlotta’s necklace.

I’m sorry to say that I was largely disappointed in Vertigo. I understand the appeal, and I even understand the acclaim, but I was left fairly cold by the film overall. It’s a visual feast, but the narrative is convoluted in a way that’s more frustrating than fun and the performances are merely adequate. I did appreciate that the reveal explains some things about Helster’s performance. In his initial meeting with Scottie, he jumps straight to the “It’s not what you think” explanation of his hiring of the man to follow his wife without waiting for Scottie to react to the initial overture, which makes sense in retrospect given that he had likely rehearsed the monologue to death. It also explains some of his dialogue choices from the coroner’s inquest, but it doesn’t gel with his other poor line deliveries in other scenes. The effectiveness of Kim Novak’s performance will vary from person to person depending upon how much one is willing to accept that her monotony is intentional. In doing some light research about the film, I can see that it has been the subject of great academic criticism, and I can understand that as well, since this is a very mood-oriented piece and thus gives itself over to style over substance in a way that invites dissection. I’ve also seen that there are a great number of people who argue that the film is an extended dream sequence, in whole or in part, beginning either in the wake of the animated dream sequence, immediately following the first bell tower scene, or (An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge style) all the way back at the five-minute mark when Scottie is dangling from a gutter. I don’t usually think too highly of any flavor of extratextual “it was all a dream” explanation, but I have to admit that I might adopt that belief for myself, as it does improve the text for me as an audience member, at least this time (and it would explain why we spend so much of this film watching Scottie slooooowly drive from place to place). Maybe I was simply too excited for this one, and the movie itself was never going to be able to live up to my expectations. It’s still a good picture, just not (for me) a great one.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Torn Curtain (1966)

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In discussions about my upcoming plans to rank all of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, I’ve mentioned the number “forty” several times, but that’s because I am simply not that interested in his non-thriller films. Even among those that theoretically count as thrillers as a secondary genre, like the comedy The Trouble With Harry and the period piece melodrama Under Capricorn, those have turned out to be the ones that I like least of all. There are about a dozen inarguably non-thrillers that Hitch directed, mostly in his early career, and as such, the 1966 release of Torn Curtain was a landmark, as it was the director’s fiftieth film. Ultimately, it was one that really only pleased the studio due to its financial success, as contemporary audiences and critics as well as the stars and the director himself weren’t terribly pleased with it. 

Torn Curtain opens aboard a passenger ship experiencing heating problems while traversing the European fjords, bearing several dozen scientists to Copenhagen for a physics conference. At lunch, two people are conspicuously absent: Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) and his assistant and fiancée, Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews), as they are canoodling together in his cabin, where they make pillow talk about his recent departure from D.C. following the ending of funding for an anti-missile program in which he was involved. Armstrong receives a radiogram that he conspicuously denies is for him, only to later retrieve it from the ship’s radio room. There, he runs into East German physicist Gerhard (Hansjörg Felmy), who was expecting to have a lunch date with Sarah. Upon arrival in Denmark, Sarah takes it upon herself to retrieve a book that is being held for Armstrong at a nearby shop, and Gerhard tags along. Later, alone, Armstrong decodes a passage in the book that directs him to make contact with someone or something calling themself Pi (as in π). Growing more suspicious as to why Armstrong tried to keep her from joining him on this trip, Sarah watches as he retrieves a ticket from a concierge that he claims is for a quick side trip to Stockholm. When she learns that he is actually going to East Berlin, she follows him and boards the same plane, arriving alongside him behind the Iron Curtain just in time to watch him publicly defect to the Soviet Union.

Hitchcock’s espionage thrillers in the lead up to (Sabotage, The Lady Vanishes), during (Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Lifeboat), and immediately following (Notorious) WWII are all explicitly political. For the most part, his Cold War era spy features, of which there are only four, are not. The Stewart/Day version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which was the first espionage thriller since Notorious a decade earlier, foregoes any real inspection of the foreign “other” that made the Peter Lorre version a much more exciting film. Other than a line from Leo G. Carroll’s professor character in North by Northwest in which he tells Cary Grant, “War is hell, Mr. Thornhill, even when it’s a cold one,” the film is politically vague. Hitch’s output in the back half of his career shows that he wasn’t terribly interested in cloak-and-dagger flicks anymore, and cared even less about politicizing them; if anything, one could argue that the “spying on one’s neighbor” politics of Rear Window are more politically conscious than his two 1950s espionage pictures. That changed in the 60s. By 1965, Eon Productions had released four James Bond films: Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball, and all of them had been inspired in some way by North by Northwest. With a fifth Bond on the horizon, Hitchcock took two attempts at making his own version: 1966’s Torn Curtain and Topaz, the latter of which would premiere in 1967, the same year as You Only Live Twice.

Topaz is fine, if a little overlong, and it’s more clearly evocative of the Bond format; the main character is a career spy, has a lot of gadgets, and has sexual encounters with morally dubious women on both sides. Torn Curtain is a better film because it adheres more closely to Hitchcock’s strengths: strong character work, an “everyman” protagonist, an appropriate level of comic relief, the occasional breathtakingly gorgeous shot composition, and multiple scenes of excellent tension. Unfortunately, it also features some of the director’s late-career shortcomings, notably some lazy shortcuts with some visuals. The most unconvincing is a scene in Copenhagen where Armstrong and Sarah are at an outdoor cafe where he behaves like a total ass in an attempt to get her to stop following him (and thus avoid potentially being trapped in East Germany for the rest of her life). Inexplicably, the sequence is shot not on location or even on a soundstage, but with Andrews and Newman sitting across from each other at a table while the street, the restaurant, and the other patrons are rear-projected behind them. 

To its credit, however, it also uses some of Hitch’s ideas from his other end-of-career films in the best possible way. I’ve fretted quite a lot about what the gratuitous, provocative, mean-spirited sexpolitick and violence of Frenzy (and to a lesser extent, Marnie) might imply about the man’s entire filmography, but this film perfectly combines the cheekiness of the underplayed sexuality in North by Northwest with the more liberal attitude toward sex (and violence) that Frenzy had. While the censor boards prevented him from showing Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint climbing into bed together at the end of Northwest despite them explicitly being married by that point, this film opens with Newman and Andrews under the sheets (and a pile of coats) together. In the features on this film’s Blu-ray, they include and highlight an on-set production photo showing a bra lying in the open in a shot that doesn’t appear in the film, which is more suggestive than the director would have been able to get away with at an earlier point, and when Newman gets out of bed, he’s topless. In a reversal of the mainstream tendency for a film to ogle its female characters, Hitchcock also clearly understood Newman’s wide sex appeal, as he is slutting this man out. In addition to climbing out of bed with Andrews shirtless in the first scene, he’s shot head to toe in a shower in a Danish hotel with only a frosted shower curtain to leave something to the imagination, and Newman’s top comes off again in the back half in a doctor’s office to wake up anyone in the audience who might have started to zone out at that point. In contrast, although Andrews is gorgeous, the Edith Head costumes that she wears throughout are sharply tailored and fabulous, but also conservative in their coverage. (It’s also worth noting that the hairstyle she has here is not flattering; one assumes it’s her actual hair, still growing out from the short style she wore in the previous year’s The Sound of Music, but the two-toned highlights make her appear greying in a manner that ages her in such a way that you would believe it if someone told you that film and this one were a decade apart.) 

The production was a mess behind the scenes. One of Hitchcock’s most famous quotes is that “Actors should be treated like cattle,” and Newman was a younger performer who had studied method performance at the Actor’s Studio. The director didn’t care for this, and is quoted as having responded to Newman’s question about what his motivation was in one scene by telling the actor “Your salary.” Hitchcock may have burned a bridge with longtime collaborator Bernard Herrmann, who composed several of his films, including Psycho and The Birds. All sources note that they “never worked together again,” but Hitch only made three more movies after this, one of them after Herrmann’s death, so it’s unclear how long-term that enmity might have been if either of them hadn’t been quite old at this point. Andrews’s sudden ascendancy to superstar meant that she was cast at the studio’s insistence, even though her brief window of availability also meant that the film had to be rushed into production despite Hitchcock not feeling that the script was ready. Of the experience, she has said that she took the opportunity because she wanted to work with the famous director, “and that’s what [she] got out of it,” since she “did not have to act in Torn Curtain. [She] merely went along for the ride.” 

To be honest, all of these seams are apparent in the final product, but this is nonetheless a decently captivating motion picture, especially if you are someone familiar with Hitchcock’s work. Contemporary reviews criticized the film’s pacing, cited a disappointing second half once the twist becomes clear (especially so since, although Sarah believes Armstrong’s defection is in earnest, no one in the audience will), and criticized what they felt was an old-fashioned film. To that last point, they may not be wrong. As noted before, this was the man’s fiftieth feature, and he had been doing this for four decades; he was now in direct box office competition with two generations of directors who had been inspired by his work, while he was a 67-year-old man with only a few films left in him. Nevertheless, this might not be hitting it out of the park, but he’s still making it to second base. The most well-remembered scene finds Armstrong grappling to death with his Stasi tail, Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling), in a farmhouse kitchen when Gromek tracks the supposed defector to a farm where he finds the π symbol scratched in the dirt. This is where the looser restrictions around violence in the 1960s work better than in Frenzy. Hitchcock wanted it to be clear that killing a man is difficult work, rather than the quick and easy slayings that James Bond dished out, and so the scene lasts a long time. The academic Armstrong is no match for the man, and it takes help from a farmer’s wife to take Gromek down, in a fight that involves a knife, a shovel, and a pot of cabbage soup. 

It’s excellent stuff, but the sequence that stood out the most to me was one in which Armstrong and Sarah are escorted onto a bus full of other members of the secret π organization. The bus is a decoy that runs ten minutes ahead of schedule of the real bus that goes from Leipzig to East Berlin, and everyone aboard is a member of the resistance. It’s fantastically tense, as the audience first experiences relief when it seems like Sarah and Armstrong are finally en route to the next step in their homeward journey, then anxiety when they meet the first police barricade, then relief when they pass, then suspense when they encounter a second barricade, only to find that they now have to deal with army deserters who act as highwaymen. It’s a great ride. Once they get to East Berlin, they also find themselves assisted by a Polish expat, Countess Kuczynska (Lila Kedrova), who hopes to escape to America with their help, and she adds a lot of heart to the film. Despite her late arrival, she’s third billed, and it’s well deserved.

Time has not been kind to Torn Curtain, but its categorization as a lesser Hitchcock is largely undeserved. It doesn’t reach the director’s heights, but it’s also much more engaging and exciting than its reputation would indicate.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Wild Horse Nine (2026)

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It’s 1973, and Salvador Allende is in the third year of his presidency of Chile as the first elected socialist leader, which, of course, western imperialists cannot abide. CIA operatives Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) and his mentor Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich) have been living in the capital of Santiago for over a year, covertly working with the Chilean military in the lead up to the devastating coup that will overthrow Allende. Carlisle is a veteran of several previous U.S.-led destabilization campaigns both at home and abroad, about which he has no remorse despite his deeply ingrained Catholicism, although a recent cancer diagnosis has thrown him into something of an existential quandary in which he worries what awaits him in the afterlife. Either because of his advanced age or as the result of his constant self-medication with morphine, he’s become too loose-lipped for CIA bureau chief MJ (Steve Buscemi)’s liking, and he tasks Lee with ensuring that Carlisle doesn’t complete his meandering memoir, which could threaten their current disruption efforts and open up old wounds back home. Lee and Carlisle make their way to Rapa Nui (aka Easter Island) for a final vacation before Carlisle’s impending death, but their trip is complicated when Carlisle develops a soft spot for Monica (Mariana di Girolamo), a Chilean college student that the pair keeps running into over and over again, putting a face on the future victims of Augusto Pinochet’s coup.

There’s something troubling about Wild Horse Nine’s humanization of some truly monstrous people, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a fun and entertaining watch. Carlisle is a friendless man whose adversarial responses to being corrected when he refers to things by their colonized names and whose careless, period-accurate usage of slurs ensure that we understand he is not someone we would like to know. I wasn’t sure how to feel about the extent to which the film traffics in developing empathy for him, as there were points in the film where it felt as if it was laundering the likeability of the racist uncle who darkens every family gathering by having him played so avuncularly by Malkovich. It’s an excellent, nuanced performance, and Carlisle’s fixation on his potential for damnation feels like the screenplay, like that of The Phoenician Scheme, took inspiration from a certain political figure’s own (well founded) doubts about the final destination for his eternal soul. If the film were to make that point of similarity more explicit or connected, I don’t think that this would be something stomachable, but Malkovich makes Carlisle such a fascinating figure that one has no choice but to overlook that. I’ve heard early buzz that this might garner a best actor nomination for Malkovich, and if it does, it would not only be well deserved, it also won’t be the only one in the feature. Parker Posey is third-billed in all of the film’s advertising despite only appearing in two scenes, but she makes a meal out of both of them, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see her get a best supporting actress nomination this year for her appearance here. Rockwell also demonstrates a lot of pathos as well, with some excellent comedic timing mixed into a performance that effectively captures all the ways that he is caught between rocks and hard places. 

Visually, Wild Horse Nine is sumptuous, with sprawling vistas that would feel right at home in a Rapa Nui tourism video. Cinematographer Ben Davis has a fairly mixed record; Hannibal Rising is one of the ugliest pictures that I’ve ever seen, his MCU work runs the gamut from Guardians of the Galaxy (good) to Eternals (awful), and it’s hard to imagine that the same man photographed The Banshees of Inisherin and Kraven the Hunter. Here, he’s operating at the top of his game as the camera captures gorgeous landscapes, handsome architectural profiles, and detailed, colorful period clothing all at once, and it’s a treat for the eyes. Longtime Coen Brothers collaborator Carter Burwell does excellent work with the music here, and the film cleverly follows up on a conversation in which Carlisle talks about the various national origins of cheeses and how every place that has been destabilized by American interference must settle for with Kraft slices by playing the most banal music on the radio (minus Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”) in Rapa Nui. After months of seeing this trailer, the jokes present therein didn’t work on viewing (the “Who were you talking to, your mom?” line from Carlisle landed with a particular thud), but there are plenty more to enjoy before the two hours are up. The narrative has plenty of twists and turns to propel that comedy along, and this is a strong showing for all involved.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Joybubbles (2026)

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I am writing this review in a modestly sized, concerningly musty hotel room in Hot Springs, Arkansas, which still feels like the height of modern luxury in the way that all hotel rooms do. We are staying at the century-old resort hotel The Arlington, which overlooks the main stretch of the city’s historic bathhouse spas, towering above the punier tourist traps below as a monument to the timeless joys of a hotel getaway. Unbeknownst to me when booking this vacation, The Arlington is also the central screening hub for the longest-running documentary film festival in the United States, which happened to overlap with our stay. The one film in this year’s program that I was able to squeeze into my busy schedule of resting & relaxing around town also happened to be about the one person who could credibly claim to love mediocre hotel rooms more than anyone else who ever lived: Joe Engressia, whose unmatched obsession with the Holiday Inn hotel chain somehow doesn’t rank among his top ten most eccentric character quirks. Engressia was a man of many quirks, just as he was a man of many names: High-Rise Joe, The Whistler, and—most notably—Joybubbles, the last of which provided the eponymous name of his documentary profile that just screened at the 35th annual Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (after premiering at Sundance earlier this year).

Joybubbles first earned fame as The Whistler in his college years, when his uncannily perfect whistling pitch enabled him to bypass telephone system infrastructure to make expensive long-distance phone calls free of charge. He was a naturally gifted pioneer of the practice, which made him a legend among other Phone Phreakers of the 1960s & 70s, who later went on to become the earliest computer hacker subculture of note. His own whistling hack was an innovation inspired more by loneliness than by mischief, though. Joybubbles was born blind and spent long childhood hours isolated indoors, with only the telephone connecting him to the outside world. By listening to the equipment’s clicks & whirs and pestering the phone operators on the other end of the dial tone, he gradually figured out how to extend the reach of his phone line even further, which is how he earned the Batmanesque moniker The Whistler.  Even when arrested for these violations of phone-company policy, Joybubbles always used his national notoriety as a means of expanding his social network so he’d have more people to talk to on the phone. He played the media’s bottomless hunger for “human interest” stories by becoming a human of great, continual interest — not to hack the planet but to just feel less alone.

Before he legally changed his name to Joybubbles, this first-wave phone phreaker was also known as High-Rise Joe, named after his lifelong goal of living independently in his own high-rise apartment. Being visually disabled a half-century ago made that goal a lot more daunting than it sounds now, as most people in Joe’s life attempted to limit his independence & mobility for their convenience, in the guise of ensuring his safety. He learned independence in his early 20s by booking extended stays at Holiday Inns, however, which he had to treat with the same problem-solving bravery of mankind traveling to the moon as he worked his way up to full-time high-rise living. As a result, Joybubbles ends up playing as a celebration of mundane hotel getaways just as much as it is a celebration of humanity’s intimate relationships with mundane technology. Joybubbles loved Holiday Inns and high-rise apartments with the same childlike wonder which he loved rotary-dial telephones. As interviewees put it, he made a lifelong mission out of maintaining that childlike wonder with the mundane in a commitment to “staying 5-years-old forever.” His resulting personality fell somewhere between Daniel Johnston & Mister Rogers — half age-regression as art-project coping mechanism and half age-regression as defiance against an increasingly crass & cruel modern world.

As a documentary, Joybubbles mostly functions as a feature-length human interest story akin to the news clippings that profiled its subject while he was alive. These news reports & televised interviews from Joe’s phone phreaker days are helpful in providing some visual archival material of interest, while the rest of the runtime is padded out with vintage industrial footage, modern animation, and still photographs. With a few changes to how its interviewees are introduced via chyron, the whole project could be easily reworked into a podcast instead of a feature film, which would be just as well for a documentary about a blind man. In an especially telling segment, one of Joybubbles’s friends relates his age-regressed personality to Tom Hanks’s character in Big, as he recalls describing the imagery of the film to Joybubbles in real time at the movies, since he otherwise only had the sounds of the dialogue to go by. Oddly enough, this segment includes footage of the “Zoltar” fortune teller machine that grants Hanks’s wish to become “big” in the first place, and there are multiple replicas of that machine decorating the tourist-packed sidewalks of downtown Hot Springs, just outside of the festival. Stepping outside of my own city to breathe some crisp mountain air, enjoy a couple late-night beers in my overly air-conditioned hotel bed, and meet some sweetheart strangers along the way has been a truly restorative experience for my soul. And I owe the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival for introducing me to the biggest, quirkiest sweetheart of them all.

-Brandon Ledet 

Verity (2026)

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A couple of months ago, when writing about The End of Oak Street, I mentioned that Anne Hathaway has a generational talent for delivering dialogue that is overwritten, overwrought, and trite. And she does! Alas, she seems to have finally met her match in Colleen Hoover. 

A young writer with the far-fetched name of Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) gets a call from her agent after an in-store reading that only a couple of people attend, letting her know about an opportunity that has arisen and advising her to appear for a meeting the following day. Walking to the appointment, Lowen narrowly misses being hit by a car, although an ill-fated bike messenger is not so lucky, and she ends up covered in his blood. A handsome bystander (Josh Hartnett) leads her away to get cleaned up and even gives her his shirt to replace her own ruined one. When she arrives to Hachette Publishing, Lowen learns that the man is Jeremy, husband to best-selling author Verity Crawford (Hathaway), and that Verity’s publisher is seeking someone to ghost write the last three books in Verity’s ongoing series, per some unexplained tragedy that has befallen the Crawford family. Initially resistant, Lowen eventually accepts the job, and the invitation to stay at Verity’s home and work from her office there. Upon arrival, she meets Verity and Jeremy’s young son Crew, as well as Anna (Irina Dvorovenko), who is now nurse to the completely catatonic Verity. But all may not be as it seems . . .

I had a lot of fun watching this, but make no mistake, it is a bad movie. I was hoping that all of its negative reviews would prove to be untrue, that there would be something really enjoyable and noteworthy here, but I’m sorry to say that this was simply not good. I’ve never read any of Hoover’s books in their entirety, but I’ve read enough samples (and been subjected to enough trailers of adaptations of her films) to realize that I should have known better than to think this cast and this director would be able to make a good film out of her source material. I’m no stranger to Dakota Johnson’s acting, and in fact, I’m a fan. I gave Madame Web a 5-star review and forced my fellow podcasters to watch it so I would have someone to talk to about it. I’m so charmed by her that I was tricked into enjoying The Materialists, for goodness’s sake. Josh Hartnett’s career resurgence has been a source of delight for me, and I was also excited to see him and Hathaway on screen; they’re both great performers who rarely let me down, even in mediocre flicks. Unfortunately, Johnson’s charm only shines through in rare moments, Hartnett is stiff and wooden at the best of times and has zero chemistry with Johnson, and Hathaway is mostly reduced to reciting passages from her own (read: Hoover’s) work, which has less literary merit than the “1 gallon / 1.78 liters per flush” sticker on the urinal at the megaplex where I witnessed Verity in all of its “glory.”

Verity bears more than a passing resemblance to Hitchcock’s Rebecca; a working-class woman who has recently lost her mother is given the opportunity to live in a gorgeous, remote home with a man who is rich, charming, and handsome, and the film’s primary conflict revolves around a drowning that may be more than it seems. There are other borrowings from Hitch’s filmography as well, most tellingly in the superimposition of images over one another as in The Wrong Man and Spellbound, which run the gamut from somewhat inspired (Lowen puffs on her vape reading Verity’s work while Verity smokes a cigarette as she composes it) to absurd (a scene wherein Lowen looks out over the house’s view is poorly composited to look like she’s reflected in the glass rather than doing so in camera, for reasons I cannot fathom). Unlike the first Mrs. de Winter, Verity is still alive, but only in the most technical sense, and thus she haunts the house in a much more literal way than Rebecca did Manderly, but the connections are there. You can imagine my disappointment when the apparent Mrs. Danvers stand-in, Anna, ultimately ends up having very little to do with the plot; she doesn’t even do enough to function as a red herring. Instead, the narrative hinges on Lowen’s discovery of a concealed manuscript entitled So Be It, an autobiography in which Verity confesses that she was jealous of the portion of Jeremy’s affection that her twin children took from her, and that she despised them for it even before they were born. In it, Verity paints herself as a monstrous sociopath devoid of all but one recognizable human emotion (unquenchable lust for Jeremy) and admits to taking several criminal actions. Lowen briefly asks Jeremy how he and Verity met, and when it matches the manuscript, she believes everything else found within it, which leads her down a path where she begins to suspect that Verity may be feigning her incapacitation.

Reading a summary of the source novel indicates that there were some wise excisions and some baffling changes. In the novel, the Crawfords actually have two deceased children, while the film condenses these two characters down to a single dead daughter; that’s a smart choice to make this a cleaner narrative and makes the film less oriented toward a literary genre we might call “tragedy porn.” Other changes are less coherent. There’s a murder in both texts that the characters intend to make appear to be an accident, but the novel’s version will hold up to some scrutiny while the film’s will not (asphyxiation is unlikely to be confused for drowning by any medical examiner). I also get the feeling that Lowen’s mother’s passing is a more important plot element in the book, given that this would create more opportunities for her to connect Verity’s catatonia to her mother’s lingering illness in her mind, but I’m also not about to give the novel credit for cleverness in that regard, even without having read it. In this film, Lowen says that she “[doesn’t] read books you can buy at the airport,” which feels like a dig at Hoover’s own widespread, lowest common denominator of reader appeal, but we don’t get to hear or read enough of Lowen’s own work to see if she’s actually any more talented than Verity. Worse, the examples of Verity’s work that we get are virtually indistinguishable from Hoover excerpts I’ve seen. There’s a version of this story that might work, but not as written here.

Writers writing about writing is a cliché, but it’s also a forgivable one given that most academic compositional instruction directs students to “write what you know.” What’s unforgivable here, however, is that there’s a fundamental lack of curiosity about literature on display that hollows out a narrative that’s already basic and noncontemplative. We get very little idea of what drives Lowen’s own writing other than her pretentions about being better than airport novelists. She never talks about how her writing allowed her an outlet for her frustrations over having to care for her ailing mother or navigate the complexity of her emotions about said caretaking relationship. What little information we get about her, in her opening voiceover, indicates that she prefers living in a large city and the anonymity that provides over the nature of her small town, where everyone knows everyone else’s business, but this doesn’t hold up under any kind of scrutiny. How did she and her mother come to live in New York, then? Did she move to the city when she became an adult and then her mother moved in with her? We don’t get any clue about that, and at the end of the film she seems completely comfortable moving to a small town in North Carolina without even paying lip service to how her desires may have changed because of her time in the Crawford home. There’s a scene in which Lowen comes into the dining room while Jeremy is reading, and there’s a perfect opportunity for the two of them to have a conversation about the book, perhaps discussing its themes in a way that deepens one or both characters, but any chance that the narrative might comment on itself goes out of the window since we never even find out what book was in Jeremy’s hands. It’s a story in which the characters’ reading habits are irrelevant other than in the performance of being a reader. Verity wants you to know that it’s a story about literary people, but cares very little for what they might be ingesting or meditating on, what any given text might mean to them, or anything else that might give us an idea of their internal lives. I have no doubt that the source text was airport slop, and this film will end up being the same: suitable to put on a small screen on the back of an airplane seat to distract you for a couple of unchallenging hours between points A and B, and nothing more.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #275: The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974) & Giallo Deep Cuts

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Welcome to Episode #275 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of lesser-seen giallo flicks, starting with 1974’s The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974).

00:00 Welcome
01:15 Onslaught (2026)
02:22 Resident Evil (2026)
07:53 The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)
10:30 The Last Boy Scout (1991)
13:47 sMOTHERed (2026)
16:00 Miracle Mile (1988)
19:42 Shadows in Paradise (1986)

24:30 The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974)
45:48 The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971)
55:15 What Have You Done to Solange? (1972)
1:13:34 Footprints on the Moon (1975)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Hitchcock Quickies

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At the beginning of the year, I had three major projects in mind to guide my film-viewing for 2026. The first was to watch all of the films that had made Swampflix’s annual collaborative top-ten lists that I had not yet seen for myself (which resulted in the publications found here and here); the second was to watch and write about all of Ann Sothern’s Maisie films; and the third was to get the site to a place where all forty (give or take) of the thriller films directed by Alfred Hitchcock had some kind of coverage, in the lead up to an overall Hitchcock ranking. Because the uptown Prytania in New Orleans programs a great deal of classic Hitchcock, Brandon had already seen and reviewed many of them, but I still needed to watch (or re-watch) all of them in order to complete my “best Hitchcocks” list, which sometimes left me without an outlet to talk much about them, and we didn’t always agree. So, I’ve collected my thoughts on the Hitchcock films already covered by Swampflix below.

Suspicion (1941)

When compiling the document for us to keep track of what had and hadn’t already been covered, Suspicion was a film that I noted I hadn’t seen, because once you get into that period of Hitchcock’s work where he had a high density of films beginning with S— (Sabotage, Suspicion, Saboteur, Spellbound, Stage Fright), they tend to blur together somewhat. To my surprise, when I went to my notes in the margins of Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat, I discovered that I had given this one a rating that was quite high, with no date associated. As I watched the film, I slowly began to recall the general outline of the plot, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how a younger, even less patient version of myself was able to get through this film in a single sitting, let alone enjoy it so much. In general, I find Hitchcock’s domestic dramas less interesting than his espionage plots. For every exhilarating Shadow of a Doubt, there’s a plodding I Confess. Suspicion is a film that I felt had a lot in common with Hitchcock’s very early work Number Seventeen, in that it’s repetitive and tiresome for most of its runtime, until it suddenly whips into gear in its final fifteen minutes. No wonder I forgot that I had already seen it; I can now vaguely recall a TCM screening that was so unmemorable that I had long ago assumed that images from it were things that I had dismissed as incorrect recollections of Notorious, most notably the scenes of Cary Grant in a poorly driven car.

Most viewers’ issues with Suspicion stem from what many considered to be a rushed, cop-out ending. Supposedly, the film was intended to end more like the book on which it was based, with Lina (Joan Fontaine)’s suspicions about her husband Johnnie (Grant)’s plans to murder being revealed to be well-founded. Apocryphally, Hitchcock lost a fight with the studio about this ending, as there were concerns that Grant’s performance as a murderous cad would tarnish his marketability as a leading man. I can say with certainty that this is not my issue with the film because the last-minute revelation that Johnnie is innocent in the deaths of his friend Beaky and was only picking the brain of a local Agatha Christie-esque mystery author to find a way to commit suicide is, in my interpretation, an utter fabrication. He was very clearly going to murder Lina, and his sudden apology for his behavior after all of his sinister machinations is yet another in a long line of Johnnie’s fibs that Lina naively falls for. After several rinse-and-repeat scenes of Johnnie being caught in a lie and then having to backtrack out of it, the audience has the understanding that no matter how many times Lina finds one of her family heirlooms at the antique store or someone stops her on the street to “Oh, honey,” her about the fact that her loser husband is not at work as he claims but is instead a frequent fixture at the race track, she’s just going to fall for it again. I don’t understand how the film’s final scene could be read any other way. She’s just getting back on the carousel again, and the next time Johnnie takes her on a dangerously fast coastal drive, he’s going to successfully push her out of the vehicle because she’ll be lulled into a false sense of security. This is not a happy ending by any stretch of the imagination, and that’s almost enough to save it, but not quite. The image of an enshadowed Grant summiting the stairs while carrying a possibly poisoned glass of milk is striking, but it comes far too late in a meandering plot to make much of a difference.

Saboteur (1942)

When we talked about The 39 Steps, one of the things that I mentioned was that ingesting so many Hitchcock films in rapid succession highlighted the fact that North by Northwest was assembled from various ideas, images, frameworks, iconography, and archetypes that he had been sharpening and honing for decades at that point in his career. Specifically, I cited that North by Northwest was all but a remake of 39 Steps in structure and character, with the Hitch staple of an innocent man on the run featuring a similar romantic entanglement and similar climactic finale taking place in a landmark location (although the director was using the last of these tropes as early as 1929’s Blackmail). As it turns out, there was (at least) one link in the chain of Hitchcock’s evolution of this concept that I hadn’t seen at that time, 1942’s Saboteur. In the midst of the U.S.’s involvement in WWII, a domestic terrorist sabotages a California aircraft manufacturing facility, and blame falls on factory worker Barry Kane (Robert Cummings), who goes looking for the real culprit based on a piece of mail that he saw the saboteur carrying. Just as in The 39 Steps, this results in our reluctant hero falling into the hands of a fascist-supporting man who takes advantage of his status as a well-respected member of the community, being forced to take a hostile woman hostage, escaping from police custody on a bridge, and even being forced into turning himself over to the antagonists when his love interest is threatened just when he has the opportunity to expose their nefarious deeds to a large audience. Presaging his eventual use of Six Grandfathers Mountain in North by Northwest, the film’s nail-biting climax takes place at the top of the Statue of Liberty.

What sets this one apart is both how jingoistic it is about America while remaining frank about and critical of its institutions. As always, Hitchcock’s police officer characters are inept, corrupt, and easily-duped, but the series of characters that Kane meets along the way who aren’t surreptitiously fascists are a broad spectrum of kindly strangers who help him evade detection and stay one step ahead of the police. Blind pianists, bearded ladies, long-haul truckers: they are all united in their belief in Kane’s innocence, and each independently contributes more to the successful capture of the titular saboteur than the combined efforts of the systems in place. The system itself is the enemy of the people, whether embodied in the wealthy—composed of coastal urban socialites and wealthy rural land men alike—or in the passive collaboration of a law enforcement which does the bidding of the wealthy and ignores the innocence of the common man. It’s interesting subtext, and although a lot of critics found the performance of Cummings as Kane underwhelming, I found myself rather taken with him in this film. Not as well remembered as either of the films that it serves as the link between, but an exceptional picture nonetheless.

Stage Fright (1950)

One of the many unintended tragic consequences of the “improvement” of search engines over time is that the recommendations for related searches can sometimes pop up and spoil something for you before you get the chance to get to what you were trying to find. This film is not often in discussion as a major work in Hitchcock’s canon, despite the fact that it’s quite good, and is instead only remembered as one of the films that featured an element that Hitchcock regretted. I won’t get into what or why (I’m kinder to you that the Google landing page in that way), but I will say that, just as the director was strongarmed into feigning apologizing for the shocking act of violence that is (for many) the most memorable thing about Sabotage, the public “I’m sorry” that Hitchcock made in later years for breaking the audience’s trust by subverting a narrative convention here should never have come to be. It’s an artist’s job to challenge the observer, and although the outcry from the masses in response to one of this film’s twists must have weighed heavily on his mind for many years, Hitchcock didn’t owe us an apology. Even as early as 1950, the audience presumed that they came to a Hitchcock picture with the expectation that they would be shocked, surprised, and entertained, and they got what they paid for. When I hear about the people who whined about Hitchcock “breaking their trust,” they all look like Annie Wilkes in my mind’s eye.

Dial M for Murder (1954)

This is an oddity in the Hitchcock film canon for a few reasons. Firstly, a lot of the man’s films are either sprawling odysseys that take a character from London to the Highlands or from Madison Avenue to Six Grandfathers Mountain, while he drew attention to his “limited setting” pictures (namely Lifeboat, Rope, and Rear Window) by confining their location. Dial M for Murder is often left out of discussions of the latter, largely because it isn’t confined to precisely one location, but it is noteworthy in that it’s limited to no more than three sets and some rear-projected street scenes. Despite this, it doesn’t do any of the fancy camera work that Rear Window did (that same year, no less). Even when a character is facing trial for a murder, instead of the standard courtroom scene, we get a more expressionistic image of said character standing before a colorful void that reflects their inner turmoil while the charges are read and the sentence is pronounced, all in barely a minute of screentime. It further differentiates itself from the larger repertoire in that, when Hitchcock followed a traditional mystery structure, he usually stuck to the age-old whodunit scaffolding. Dial M for Murder is a howcatchem (like Columbo or Poker Face) feature and it was released theatrically (in 3D!), it more neatly intersects with the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The anthology series began airing the year after this film was released and continued for a total of ten seasons (with the last three featuring episodes of an hour in length rather than the thirty minutes they had spanned in previous years, much to the detriment of the renamed Alfred Hitchcock Hour). Hitch didn’t direct every episode himself, of course (in total, he directed 18 of 361), but the series did have a symbiotic relationship with his film career. The most obvious impact came with Psycho, which Hitchcock shot quickly between seasons of the show and using the show’s crew, which is why it was his first film since Strangers on a Train to be shot in black and white instead of color (other than The Wrong Man, where the monochrome nature is deliberate due to the movie’s docudrama nature). When he did direct episodes of the show, Hitchcock would use the show’s resources to work on proofs of concept for his features, essentially treating the series as an incubator for test runs of certain techniques. The season-two episode “One More Mile to Go” is perhaps the most apparent in this respect, as one can draw a direct visual line from that episode’s use of a dashboard point of view of a traffic stop and the sequence in Psycho where Marion Crane is pulled over by a motorcycle cop. This film also features an appearance from John Williams, who appeared in eight separate Hitchcock Presents narratives (one of which was a three-parter, so he technically was in ten episodes), many of them Hitchcock-directed installments, which goes to show how much the two got along.

This is a lot of information about the technical elements of the movie and where it fits into the oeuvre, which overlooks that, on the whole, this is a delightful little reverse mystery. Ray Milland, the man with the x-ray eyes himself, discovers that his wife (Grace Kelly) has been having an affair with a handsome young tennis star (Robert Cummings) and sets out to have her murdered, but when she manages to kill her would-be-killer in self-defense, he allows her to go to trial for murder, hoping that the justice system will solve all his problems. Small scale and domestic, but still quite good.

To Catch a Thief (1955)

Retired catburglar and jewel thief John Robie (Cary Grant), alias “The Cat,” lives a life of quiet leisure in a French villa, having been paroled for his work in the French Resistance during WWII. When a string of high profile jewelry burglaries is reported along the French Riviera, Robie knows that he’ll be questioned, and fears the loss of his reputation as a reformed man. When investigators do come for him, Robie escapes and makes his way to the restaurant of his friend Bertani, whose staff consists almost entirely of the old gang of thieves, all making an attempt at an honest life. Bertani directs the daughter of the restaurant’s wine steward to take Robie by boat and drop him off at a nearby beach club. Unbeknownst to him, it’s here that he’s first noticed by Frances Stevens (Grace Kelly), an American traveling with her nouveau riche mother, Jessie (Jessie Royce Landis). Robie also encounters a man named Hughson (John Williams again), an insurance specialist with Lloyd’s of London, who is in the area due to many of the recent thefts having been insured by his employer. Reluctantly, he agrees to help Robie try to find the copycat “Cat” by providing information about another set of insured clients in the area, which just so happens to include Mrs. Stevens and her daughter.

I watched this one shortly after seeing both the striking The Lady Vanishes and the non-Hitchcock noir classic Dark Passage, and it couldn’t help but feel a little lackluster in comparison. Reportedly, Hitchcock decided to direct this picture because he wanted to take a vacation in France, and if that’s true, I’d have to admit that it shows. There are glorious, lovely sweeping vistas throughout, but there’s nothing in the film with the inspiration of, say, the zoom in from across a great chessboard-tiled entry hall to a tiny key in someone’s hand in Notorious. When Hitchcock pulls out one of his trademarks, like a climactic rooftop scene at the end, it feels less like he’s playing the hits and more like he’s spinning his wheels. Kelly is magnetic as always, but Grant fails to inspire.

Psycho (1960)

What is there left to say about Psycho? It’s one of the greatest films of all time? That it’s full of unexpected twists and turns that were so famous that they’re no longer unexpected? It was so iconoclastic that it became iconic? My most recent rewatch (of many) was at a repertory screening at my local megaplex, accompanied by a younger friend who had no concept of what the movie was beyond obliquely recognizing the title, but he had some sense of what was going to happen because of his familiarity with the AMC prequel series Bates Motel; there’s something about horseshoe theory and pop cultural penetration to be mined from that, I’m sure. Sixty-six years later, the score is still so iconic that it was used in Primetime. It’s Psycho. You already know everything there is to know about it.

The Birds (1963)

The Birds is my mom’s favorite Hitchcock, but I still never managed to see it until I was an adult. It’s hard to describe the film without sounding like you’re talking about a B-grade schlocky horror, because in many ways, it is one, but like Psycho before it, it was also a genre definer. Tippi Hedren is a socialite who has risen to notoriety after a practical joke got out of hand and resulted in a widely publicized court appearance. She has a meet-cute with a handsome lawyer who is trying to buy a couple of lovebirds for his sister’s eleventh birthday. Hedren, believing that she’s in a romcom, buys the birds and tracks him down to Bodega Bay, where she learns that her new love interest has an overbearing mother (Jessica Tandy) who ruins all of her son’s potential relationships. Were it not for the ominous lack of sound (other than cawing corvids) that played over the film’s opening credits, one could mistake this for any other period romantic comedy, right down to Hedren’s character being a comically bad “woman driver” and her getting a mild injury (via divebombing seagull) that her love interest can tenderly tend. Other than a typically an offhand mention of the lawyer’s mother’s chickens refusing to eat, nothing seems truly amiss until the birds turn on mankind in full force, and we’re suddenly in a very different kind of movie.

(Tippi Hedren is iconic in this part. I remember commercial parodies of her taking refuge in a phone booth airing well into early aughts, and we probably only stopped seeing them because those are a thing that don’t exist anymore; and that didn’t stop a bird figurine based on her from selling out just two years ago.)

The Birds is not as shocking a swerve as the mid-film shake-up of Psycho, but the shot of one of the residents of the small town being discovered with his eyes completely pecked out is a major departure from an otherwise charming story so far, and things only get more exciting from there. There’s a scene in the diner in town that feels like it became a direct inspiration for so many similar tableaux in a great many of Stephen King’s works, where the residents of a coastal village argue and turn on one another when faced with some external evil force. All hell breaks loose moments later when a man gassing up his car is attacked by the birds, causing him to spill a trail of gasoline that ignites and sets off chaos. The final twenty minutes feature an all-out attack on the farmhouse by screeching fowl, and it’s terrifying. A master lesson in classing up a schlocky idea.

Frenzy (1972)

Not just a bad movie because it’s ugly, cruel, and nasty (although it certainly is all of those things), Frenzy is a film that I can’t help but detest for the shadow that it casts over the rest of Hitchcock’s career. Gone are the subtleties and nuances with regards to sex and violence. Instead of the provocative image of stockings being dried near a fireplace in The 39 Steps or fireworks going off over the water outside of a hotel window when Cary Grant and Grace Kelly kiss in To Catch a Thief, we get a graphic rape sequence. In place of the implication of violence in Psycho, where we never actually see a knife penetrating flesh, but the sequence tricks you into thinking you have, we witness stomach-churning violence. When the ending of North by Northwest was considered too risqué for its implication that Grant and Eva Marie Saint are about to consummate their marriage, Hitchcock cheekily thumbed his nose at the censor board by ending the film on the metaphorically graphic image of a train entering a tunnel. Frenzy shows the director in a different moral era, one in which he can get away with more salacious and explicit images and content, and he goes full bore into it at the end of his career.

Frenzy raises the question of whether or not all of the sly playfulness and clever directorial handiwork in Hitchcock’s oeuvre would have existed if he hadn’t had to outwit and circumnavigate contemporary censorship, ratings boards, and public sentiment. We remember Hitchcock as a master of the discipline because of the subtleties of his work, his deft hand at misleading you via cinematic trickery into thinking you’ve seen something that you didn’t, his impudent impishness at pushing the envelope. Even at the height of his career and amidst nigh-universal acclaim for his work during his golden era, Hitchcock had to be cleverer than the people who could (and would) try to stop his vision, and that made him sharper as a filmmaker. Frenzy’s very existence implies that, with those strictures loosened, an unbridled Hitchcock is craven, schlocky, and base. This is the film that fans the flames of those who argue Hitch was a misogynistic asshole. If there was nothing else left of his body of work but Frenzy, there could be no counterclaim.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Rear Window (1954)

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When we discussed the two Men Who Knew Too Much, Brandon and I commiserated that the updated 1950s version starring James Stewart could not hold a candle to the original Peter Lorre-centered film, but he posited that one could list off Alfred Hitchcock’s three other collaborations with Stewart—Rope, Rear Window, and Vertigo—and confidently call them the director’s masterworks without that being much of a hot take. Rear Window was the first Hitchcock film I ever saw, and I immediately fell in love with it. Through viewings of several others, it remained at the top of that list, until sometime in my late teens I fell head over heels for Notorious. I hadn’t revisited it in a very long time, possibly because I became too familiar with it, but after returning to the well after such a long absence, the water is even sweeter than I remembered.

L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (Stewart) is a WWII vet and photographer who is in the sixth of seven weeks of recuperation after a daring shot at a racetrack that resulted in a broken leg. He is attended every day by wisecracking insurance nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter), who encourages him to settle down with his fashionista girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) before she finds someone better than him. Accustomed to a faster pace of living, Jeff fears that Lisa would be ill-equipped for a life of adventure with him in the often dangerous places that he finds himself on assignment, while Lisa hopes that, as he’s getting older, he’ll be willing to take a more stationary position with his magazine in New York, where they can be together. His only entertainment during his medical imprisonment is voyeuristically observing the neighbors whose windows face the same courtyard as his: Miss Hearing Aid, a sculptor; Miss Lonelyhearts, a woman who can’t seem to find a good man; Miss Torso, a dancer; the songwriter, who can’t seem to get his latest composition just right; and two married couples, one with a little dog that they let down into the courtyard with a basket and the other composed of a supposedly invalid wife and the salesman husband (Raymond Burr) who supports her. When he believes that he has witnessed a murder in one of the apartments, Lisa and Stella become his sidekicks in determining if one of his neighbors is a murderer, or if his mind has gotten so bored in his semi-isolation that it’s begun to play tricks on him.

This is an all-time classic for a reason. Although he struggled with the contradictions of his character in Rope, Stewart shines in this performance, as Jeff is a character who’s rough around the edges and a bit of a jerk, but with whom we remain nonetheless empathetic and sympathetic. At this point in his relationship with Lisa, they are explicitly chaste, as Jeff’s cast has immobilized him in more ways than one, and one gets the feeling that without being able to be intimate with one another and mistake passion for love, he’s come to realize that he doesn’t feel like he and Lisa are actually all that compatible. Unconsciously, he’s pushing her away and making up excuses for why, drawing barriers between them in the form of their class differences (she “belongs to the rarefied atmosphere of Park Avenue” while he lives in Greenwich Village with the other poor, starving artists) and trying to warn her away from joining him in his life of wandering by making it seem unsuitable to her. It isn’t until he sees that she gets the same thrills that he does when they leave a note for the possible murderer to see their reaction that he actually sees her and realizes that they could have a potential future together. Since he only comes to this realization when he sees how she could fit into his life, combined with the fact that he doesn’t cry out for help or try to distract the killer when Lisa falls into their clutches, one could find him difficult to like, and it only really works with Stewart in the role. What I see in that scene is that his realization of his helplessness paralyzes him far more than being injured did, and for the first time he has some concept that a life of adventure could actually be dangerous to her, in reality and not just as a fiction to keep them apart, and understands that he’d rather be with her than not.

More academic critics than I have spilled a great deal of ink over the film’s use of Jeff as the audience surrogate, as his viewpoints into his neighbors’ lives are metaphorically like us watching the movie. There’s also been a great deal of writing about the film’s sexual connotations, especially with regards to the prurience of voyeurism and the phallic nature of Jeff’s telescopic lens. One thing that I haven’t seen discussed is the way that each of the vignettes that Jeff observes has only a partial, fragmented view of the participants, to which he ascribes narratives that he has essentially made up, without realizing that they are all reflective of him. Miss Hearing Aid is nosey, just as he is, as demonstrated when she gets into Mr. Thorwald’s business about how much he’s watering his plants, and when she is frustrated by Miss Torso’s loud music and footfalls, she turns her hearing aid down, just as Jeff tunes out what he doesn’t want to hear. The songwriter is a frustrated artist who is blocked creatively while Jeff is a photographer temporarily caged, and Miss Lonelyhearts is a reflection of what Lisa could become if Jeff continues to waste her youth without commitment; Lonelyhearts changes her mind about overdosing when the songwriter finishes his piece and the two of them listen to it together, in perfect time for Jeff and Lisa to (maybe) commit to one another fully. Miss Torso’s similarities to Lisa are textual, as there is a conversation between Lisa and Jeff one night when she has a few men in her apartment and Jeff compares the two directly, only for Lisa to declare that the woman across the way is “juggling wolves” and that she doesn’t love any of her suitors. When Jeff asks her how she knows, she says “You said it’s just like my apartment, didn’t you?” This proves true in the end, when the dancer’s beloved, a short nerd named Stanley, returns from the war and she takes him passionately into her arms, just as Lisa, who could do a lot better than grumpy old Jeff, really does love her flawed man. It also leaves the open question of which of the couples the two will end up like: the happy newlyweds (whose cracks start to appear in the end), the unhappy Thornwalds (with their one bedbound party), or the dog-owning couple, who only seem to need one another. That’s left for the viewer to ponder.

Every performance here is delightful. Thelma Ritter really shines as the take-no-guff nurse with sharp instincts. One of my favorite jokes in the picture is when she’s trying to advise Jeff, who still sees himself as the young flyboy in a photo taken while he was in the service, that he needs to marry the glamorous, youthful Lisa before it’s too late. She does so in the middle of massaging the gray-haired forty-six year old and calling him “young” also, presumably facetiously. Grace Kelly (25 at the time) looks just about as beautiful as a human being possibly can as she lounges around in gorgeous fashions and gets excited about breaking and entering, and she’s a delight. The limited setting for this one also means a limited main cast, as only five characters ever pass through Jeff’s apartment, where all of the film takes place, although the extended cast does a lot with the little pieces of their lives that we get to see, and the fact that this whole thing was done on a soundstage is also unbelievable. The complexity of it all looks so simple, and it’s pure movie magic. Rear Window is a top-tier Hitchcock and a classic picture in its own right.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

We Come to This Place for the Magic: An October Ode to Nicole Kidman

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Attention, Swampflix readers in the Austin area! Our very own Mark “Boomer” Redmond has programmed a series of free public screenings celebrating Nicole Kidman’s horror & thriller work all this month at Barrett’s Too.

Check out the schedule below, with the following programming note: the Dead Calm screening originally scheduled for October 2 has been moved to Friday, November 6 due to rain.

-The Swampflix Crew

Digger (2026)

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This one’s going to be difficult to discuss without giving away too much, given the nature of the film itself and the misleading marketing campaign that has led up to its release. For anyone who has heard that Digger is a musical and hoped that was true, I must disappoint you, but the amount of work that has gone into preventing the real shape of this film from being known before you enter the theater is roughly the same as what went into disguising that the recent film adaptation of Mean Girls was a musical. This bait-and-switch marketing technique obviously hasn’t resulted in the Digger landing for everyone, given that it is currently doing worse in the critical rankings than the latest Coleen Hoover adaptation, Verity, but I’m also going to have to talk around the things that really make it work in order for you to know if it’s going to be worth your time.

On at least some level, as the trailers have indicated, “Tom Cruise is Digger,” aka Digger Rockwell, the third generation of a family of oil tycoons. He lives in a house filled with corpses, surrounded by stuffed and mounted fauna, fowl, and fish; one shot finds him standing between two mirrors that are each framed by dozens of sets of deer antlers, so that there is only Digger Rockwell and death into infinity. The only living thing that he cares for is a dying cat named Maggie, whom he is continuing to try to keep alive despite her thirty-year life span clearly having led her to a place of misery. In an establishing character moment, he sends away the world’s leading veterinarian despite the man’s honesty because he would rather deal with someone whose fear of disappointing Digger is greater than their intelligence. Just before his half-sister Emma (Sandra Hüller) is set to announce the establishment of her subset company to the greater Rockwell oil empire, a clean energy initiative, a Rockwell Inc. drilling facility in Greenland explodes due to a buildup of methane, resulting in imminent disaster for most of Europe. This results in the gathering of Digger’s long-ignored climate safety scientist Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), the United States President (John Goodman), and his various attendant prayer warriors and warhawks to discuss what has to happen next, Dr. Strangelove style. But this is only one level of the narrative and must necessarily be the only one that I’ll address in this review, since it’s the only one indicated by the marketing.

Digger is as funny as it is knowing; it is a version of Don’t Look Up where the satire actually works, one that understands that it is useless to turn the monsters who have created the world that we live in now and in which our children will live shorter lives than we will into figures of ridicule and mockery, but also that there is value in doing so even if it can change nothing. The demonstrably evil people who currently pull the strings of government are cancer-riddled, destructive, morally incomprehensible ghouls, and we are largely impotent to stop them from killing us. Even when they are gone, when all the wealth that they’ve amassed still doesn’t stop them from dying because death is inevitable, when they are beyond the reach of justice, the only thing that we will have is our ability to laugh at them, to turn the thieves of our future into clowns for us to mock and belittle for their small mindedness, arrogance, and ignorance. It is a very small thing, and laughing at the dead ghouls who stole the future isn’t going to change our material conditions, but when it is all that we have, we must nonetheless laugh, because if we don’t then we have nothing.

It’s often said that it is impossible for Tom Cruise to completely disappear into a role. No matter how hard you try, you are never watching Ethan Hunt or Frank Mackey or Lestat de Lioncourt; you are watching Tom Cruise. Although that argument has lessened in recent years, especially after his all-out charm campaign around the time of Tropic Thunder, this is perhaps the role that is so unlike the man’s public image (and looks, thanks to prosthetics, sufficiently different from him) that he’s able to give a layered performance without reminding you that this is one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Sandra Hüller is unfortunately given little to do, but it’s always good to see her. John Goodman gets a lot of mileage out of playing an incompetent president clinging to life and willing to destroy the whole world for no reason other than his vanity, but really, this is Cruise’s film. There was a lot of mockery online about the “his whole career has led to this” trailer that was produced for the film, but this is one of his all-time great performances, up there with Magnolia, Jerry Maguire, and Vanilla Sky.

Digger is currently a new release, so I won’t reveal any more about it, other than to say that it quickly shot up to being one of my favorite films of the year, based on its comedy alone. It’s not one that requires you run out to experience it on the big screen, although there are definitely visuals that will reward you if you do; you can wait for streaming (and you might have to, if you don’t act soon). You’ll laugh however you see it, and the laughter will feel both impotent and uplifting.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond