thrillers

Lifeboat (1944)

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Author John Steinbeck composed four narrative screenplays in his career. One was a fictionalization of real events, two were adaptations of his own previous work (The Pearl and The Red Pony), but the first was drafted upon request from director Alfred Hitchcock himself. The resultant script became Lifeboat, which joins Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur as Hitch’s only wartime espionage thrillers (Sabotage, The 39 Steps, and The Lady Vanishes all involve international spycraft in the prelude to war, but do not explicitly name the Axis or any of its member nations as the antagonists, while Notorious follows a post-war sting on an escaped Nazi scientist). While Foreign Correspondent functioned as a call to arms and Saboteur is about refusing to give in to fascism on the home front, Lifeboat is a survival story about a group of castaways from a freighter that is sunk by a German U-boat and is more interested in the way that seemingly decent people can become bloodthirsty when faced with war, hunger, disease, and death. Steinbeck’s more commonly remembered body of work is mostly about people in the interbellum period dealing with the fallout of the Great Depression. When most people think of him, they remember reading The Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men (or both) in high school, while fewer people are likely to recall Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, or The Moon is Down. (The last of these is, like Lifeboat, an anti-fascist text, about a rebellion against Nazi occupation; if you read it for your book club, it would pair well with a screening of Went the Day Well?) How does Lifeboat compare? 

Lifeboat opens by skipping to the concluding moments of one of Hitchcock’s trademark action setpiece spectacles, as the burning smokestack of a freighter sinks beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. The camera pans across detritus in the water—a deck of cards, a crate of bobbing apples from the American Red Cross, a chess board, a New Yorker with a Eustace Tilley cover—before we land on our lead, a reporter named Constance Porter (Tallulah Bankhead). She’s sitting pretty in a lifeboat with a smashed-up sail, untarnished in her mink coat, seemingly only bothered by a run in her stocking. When she sees another survivor, she immediately takes his picture, concerned only with capturing the moment for her inevitable front-page story. He makes it to the lifeboat and introduces himself as John Kovac (John Hodiak, Maisie’s sweetheart in Maisie Goes to Reno, which released the same year), one of the crewmen on the now-destroyed ship. One by one, they collect several other survivors: Gus Smith (William Bendix), whose leg was badly injured when the engine room exploded; Stanley Garrett (Hume Cronyn), the ship’s British radioman, C.J. Rittenhouse (Henry Hull), a wealthy American industrialist; an Army nurse named Alice MacKenzie (Mary Anderson); and Joe Spencer (Canada Lee, playing the largest role that any Black actor ever got in a Hitchcock picture), a steward. They discuss amongst themselves the war crime that was committed against them, as the German U-boat that sank their vessel also intentionally targeted and shelled many of the other lifeboats, just before they pull in one more survivor (Walter Slezak), who thanks them with a simple, straightforward “Danke schön.” 

This is the first of Hitchcock’s “limited setting” triptych, to be later followed by Rope and Rear Window, and is just as much of a technical achievement as either of his later career efforts. It’s certainly both paradoxically the most confined and the most open, as everything happens on the title craft itself, but also takes place in the biggest, emptiest space imaginable: the open ocean. The desperation of their situation hits early. When it’s just Constance and Kovac at the very start, a baby bottle floats by in the water and Constance immediately moves to take a picture of it, to capture the pathos of the moment, and Kovac calls her out on her macabre callousness, asking if she wouldn’t rather wait for the baby to float by so she photograph that instead. It’s only a matter of time before they rescue a woman and the infant she’s clutching to her, which didn’t survive. It’s grim, dark stuff, and isn’t shy about the hideous nature of war. The vessel itself is a microcosm, containing a couple of working class shipmen, a war nurse, an industrialist, and a steward, one who’s surprised to get a vote in what to do about the German soldier who’s technically their prisoner of war, despite the fact that they’re all trapped together and struggling to survive while waiting for rescue. 

At the time, the film was criticized for being insufficiently critical of the Nazi regime, embodied in Willi, the man they rescue who eventually manages to commandeer the lifeboat, especially with regards to the fact that he retains his physical strength longer than the other characters (which is because he’s been hoarding his own provisions). Other pieces I’ve read take the film’s final moments, in which the survivors unanimously agree that all Germans have to be wiped out, as a strong finale that overcomes the film’s apparent “soft” treatment of Willi. I was a bit surprised by this, since I found the film to be utterly condemnatory of both Willi (as a person and a representation of Nazis as a whole) and also of the radicalization that the characters feel in the end, becoming as filled with hate as their enemy. When I first started to compose this review, one of the notes I made was that the film tackles the alien and inhuman nature of the Nazi mind, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was more important to acknowledge that the evils of fascism aren’t alien, they’re very, very human. The enemy in this film, of which Willi becomes the face, is monstrously evil, but not dependably so; they target civilian vessels and even shell the lifeboats as they depart in violation of international law, they lie to protect themselves while stealing shared resources to maintain their strength while others suffer, and they kill those they perceive as weaker than themselves as a matter of course. 

Yet, while Willi is responsible for all of those things, in whole or in part, he also makes an attempt to save Gus’s life by performing the operation to amputate the man’s leg before his gangrene can spread. He also possesses his own warped sense of honor, demanding that Gus remember that his name is not the Anglicized Smith that he changed it to because of anti-German sentiment but Schmidt, a name to take pride in … moments before he pushes the amputee overboard while the others sleep. His occasional demonstrations of apparent compromise and conciliation are all part of the greater act that he’s putting on, and he has a sociopathic sense of righteousness in his nationalistic pride. Even though he ends up dead before the credits roll, any catharsis we might get from it is undermined by the fact that the characters we’ve spent all this time getting to know are capable of being reduced to the same animalistic cruelty as their enemies. My interpretation of this text is that it’s a warning not to become the thing one hates, and not the uplifting ending that others have found it to be. We must not be cruel, must not let the barbaric things our enemies enact upon us cause us to become them. It might be easier to denounce the mind of the fascist as alien to distance ourselves from it, but we may all be a few missed meals and a lack of fresh water away from violence, we just don’t think that we are because we’ve never been stranded on the ocean. 

Lifeboat is very strong. As the master of suspense’s final WWII era feature, it fits in nicely with Foreign Correspondent, a piece that demands the world not look away while fascism swallows Europe, and Saboteur, which serves to remind that fascism at home supports evil elsewhere that will come home to roost eventually. Lifeboat is the story where we get to spend the most time with the face of evil, to look deep into it and see that it looks like us. Truly excellent stuff. Bankhead is an absolute marvel here in her first return to film acting in over a decade, and her casting is pitch perfect. This one isn’t readily streaming anywhere outside of Amazon, but wait around a while and it’ll pop up on Tubi, TCM, or Criterion sooner or later; it always floats up somewhere. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

New Rose Hotel (1998)

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The key to understanding the erotic thriller genre is recognizing that its main objective is not to rehabilitate narrative pornography for mainstream sensibilities, but to update noir for contemporary sensibilities. With only a few outlier exceptions like David Cronenberg’s Crash, most 80s & 90s erotic thrillers play as noir pastiche, now updated with more onscreen nudity than would’ve been allowed in the 40s & 50s. It’s just another wave of scruffy antiheroes getting in over their heads chasing the skirts of femmes fatale, ripping a few cigs and enjoying a few orgasms before their inevitable early demise. That’s why the genre’s swerve into cyberpunk aesthetics as it approached the new millennium is so difficult to fully comprehend. The tech-obsessed noirs of the late 1990s & early 2000s look forward to the genre’s cyberfuture but still speak the cinematic language of the distant past. Take, for instance, Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel: an erotic thriller about corporate espionage, in which a mysterious femme fatale (Asia Argento) dupes & dumps two doomed schemers (Christopher Walken & Willem Dafoe) who don’t recognize her as a threat until it’s too late, distracted by her movie-star hotness. Those dopes trade in corporate secrets, smuggled floppy discs, and long-distance camcorder surveillance tactics that suggest a far-out futurism, but they’re stuck reliving age-old patterns of Noir Hero archetypes from decades before their time.

Ferrara’s digicam noir strains to find old-fashioned elegance & sophistication in aughts-era techno sleaze. It’s neither the worst attempt at that kind of genre update (Swordfish) nor the best (Demonlover), but it is admirably early to the game. Walken & Dafoe’s amoral mercenaries manipulate corporate power structures by fucking with their personnel, helping R&D scientists defect from their violently territorial employers without being assassinated. Their latest target is a genius Japanese scientist they’ve been paid to convince to leave his family & job for another country, to the benefit of his employer’s competitors. It sounds like a confusing—and maybe even boring—way to make a living, but it does prove lucrative, and it affords the men a hedonistic lifestyle in all the international brothels their aging genitals can handle. At night, they are bathed in cherry-red nightclub lighting, swarmed by the chic prostitutes they both partner with & patron. During the day, they navigate monochrome beige boardrooms, scheming uncouth HR actions in a series of walk-and-talks from one skyscraper to another. These two color-coded professional spheres are linked by the voyeuristic digicam footage of their latest, greatest target in montages that look like country-hopping episodes of Cheaters. They’re also livened up by the two reliably entertaining actors, who play goofily bizarre (Walken) & bizarrely sexy (Dafoe) as convincingly as anybody.

It’s Asia Argento’s role as the sex worker recruited to woo this coveted R&D scientist away from his happy life that actually makes New Rose Hotel about something thematically, rather than aesthetically. Dafoe believes he is training his newest, hottest partner in crime to convince a foolish businessman that she loves him, but it turns out she’s already quite skilled at that. Argento is never afforded a juicy gotcha moment where she gloats over Dafoe’s duped husk, having wooed & destroyed him instead of her assigned target. Instead, she disappears halfway into the runtime, leaving him hollowed & heartbroken, confused about what happened. The back half of New Rose Hotel is one long, recursive montage, in which Dafoe’s corporate spy attempts to revisit & recontextualize his most intimate moments with Argento’s trickster vamp. Alone, he can’t decide whether to masturbate to her memory or to kill himself in despair, which just about sums up the femme fatale experience. As a standalone piece of filmmaking, this third-act rewind to previous events of the plot can be baffling in its redundancy & aimlessness. As a new mutation of noir storytelling, however, there’s something compellingly of-the-moment about its approach, especially once you consider that most of the contemporary audience would be accessing the film via VCR — which comes with its own rewind button and fuzzily worn-out sex scene memories.

As with noir pictures of any age, New Rose Hotel is mostly an exercise in stylistic cool. With a trip-hop score from Schoolly D, a hip Cat Power needle drop, state-of-the-art camcorder tech, and Walken’s jazz-jive deliveries of lines like “He’s as happy as a clam in linguine,” the entire project is all about tracking what’s cool and of-the-moment off the screen, not necessarily what’s happening from scene to scene. Those stylistic indulgences help root it firmly in its era despite its broader noir-throwback tropes, but they also make the film a little vaporous and difficult to hold onto. After its techno-futuristic novelty wears off, the audience spends an alarming amount of time trying to piece together what, exactly, is going on and whether any of it ultimately means anything. To be fair, that’s exactly the state the movie leaves Dafoe’s confused & heartbroken protagonist in, so the effect is presumably somewhat intentional.

-Brandon Ledet

Number Seventeen (1932)

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The last fifteen minutes of Number Seventeen are representative of Alfred Hitchcock at his finest: tense, thrilling, laden with spectacle, and very fun. It’s unfortunate that for a film with such a short runtime (under 65 minutes!), it spends its first three quarters treading water in a sloppy, lousy, mishmash of an Agatha Christie locked room mystery and an Oscar Wilde farce. 

The titular location is a seemingly abandoned house where a number of figures converge over the course of a dark and stormy night. There’s an awful lot of farting about during which the difficulty in telling all of the characters apart is made even more complicated by the fact that a lot of proper names are thrown around—Fordyce, Sheldrake, Brant, Barton, etc—among four of the five men, but the characters give false identities at different times and swap them about between each other. Two of the men even have matching hats and identical moustaches! The gist is that a very expensive diamond necklace has been stolen, some number of the men are criminals, one of them is probably a detective, a seemingly dead body is actually alive (twice!), and one of the criminals is accompanied by a woman named Nora (Anne Grey) who is pretending to be deaf and mute, for reasons that are never entirely clear. The only man who seems to be what he presents himself to be is a squatter named Ben (Leon St. Lion, who had previously appeared in the stage version), an alcoholic who has a much-abused sausage in his pocket. It’s all even less thrilling than it sounds. 

The plot gets going at last when the necklace turns up and it’s revealed that the house sits atop an access hatch that allows one to descend to a set of railroad tracks that eventually lead to a train ferry. A few of the criminals manage to board it with Nora in tow believing that the necklace is in their possession despite it having been picked from one of their pockets by Ben, while the man who introduced himself as Fordyce attempts to head off their getaway by commandeering a public bus. This is when things finally get interesting, as the thieves crawl around on the outside of the train to take out its various crew when they refuse to accommodate their demands, leaving a few petty burglars at the helm of a runaway locomotive that they don’t know how to stop. This is intercut with the rapid approach of the bus, as we watch the riders’ initial thrill of it all before they start to get tossed around a bit, and there are even brief moments when it appears that the bus and the train will collide, only for the engine to divert to an overpass while the bus passes through a tunnel that goes under the tracks. All the while, peacefully and inexorably, the ferry ship is coming into port. 

All of this is done with miniature work that most modern viewers would find laughable, but which I find utterly charming. That’s come to be one of my favorite things about revisiting his earlier films of late, from the impressive opening sequence of The Lady Vanishes to Young and Innocent’s delightful trainyard sequences. This was also a young director who just absolutely loved a train derailment, and Number Seventeen has one that involves smashing through a series of gates and crashing into a ship, with the train car bearing characters I presume we are supposed to care about are slowly sinking beneath the surface of the water like one of those convenient submarine air pockets that the photogenic leads on Baywatch were always finding themselves trapped in. It’s a delight, and it’s almost enough to save the film, but not quite. The final fifteen minutes alone in isolation are worth the ticket price, but if you can, just skip to that ending and don’t worry about the plot at all. Hitchcock didn’t. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #260: The 39 Steps (1935) & Hitchcock’s British Spy Thrillers

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Welcome to Episode #260 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Boomer & Brandon discuss a sampling of espionage thrillers Alfred Hitchcock directed in his early British period, starting with The 39 Steps (1935).

00:00 Welcome
01:03 By Design (2026)
08:01 Videoheaven (2026)
11:03 The Forbidden City (2026)
16:06 Flesh Eating Mothers (1988)
23:41 Self-Service Pumps (2025)

26:55 Hitchcock Quiz
42:30 The 39 Steps (1935)
1:23:03 Sabotage (1936)
1:50:11 Secret Agent (1936)

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

Bunny (2025)

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2025’s Bunny is the directorial debut of Ben Jacobson, who also plays one of the lead roles alongside first-billed actor Mo Stark, who is also credited with Jacobson and Stefan Marolachakis for writing the film’s screenplay. Stark plays the titular Bunny, a sex worker who provides for his wife Bobbie (Liza Colby) by hustling, and who also acts as the de facto leader of his apartment building and its array of kooks. He looks after the elderly Ian, who lost most of the use of one of his arms in a youthful motorcycle accident, and Ian in turn looks after the voluntarily bedbound Franklin, who spends all of his waking hours watching his VHS recordings of the David Carradine series Kung Fu. There’s also Linda (Linda Rong Mei Chen), the landlady who’s part of the fun, Bunny’s somewhat dimwitted friend Dino (Jacobson), a trio of partying girls who live downstairs, and a couple of douchey young bros who round out the rest of the cramped, claustrophobic tenement that they all inhabit. On Bunny’s birthday, he runs home in a heightened state and covered in blood, which he attempts to hide from his wife, and into this chaos several other characters enter: their short term rental guest Chana (Genevieve Hudson-Price), a rabbi (Henry Czerny) Chana summons to ensure that her temporary occupancy is in compliance with her extremely orthodox requirements, Bobbie’s estranged father Loren (Anthony Drazan), and two cops called in by Linda, who struggles through her limited English to explain to them that she fears one of her tenants has died in his apartment. These two cops (Ajay Naidu and Liz Caribel Sierra) end up spending much of the day lurking around Bunny’s front door, which complicates things when the employee of a spurned john appears and tries to murder him, forcing Bunny to kill him in self-defense. 

In our recent discussion of The Beast Pageant, Brandon and I talked about how there are two ways to respond to a cheaply made but nonetheless impressive piece of independent film: “I could make this” (derogatory, denigrating), and “I could make this!” (appreciative, inspired). Jacobson feels like a filmmaker who saw the works of directors like Sean Baker and had the latter reaction. In particular, the choice of making the film’s protagonist a sex worker, setting the film over a single day-long period, handheld guerilla shooting in cramped, real world locations, and focusing on a few intersectional stories with a small cast of mostly unknowns all call Tangerine to mind. The other things that the film feels like it’s borrowing from are both genre products of the nineties: stoner comedies and post-Pulp Fiction dialogue-driven crime capers. For the former, the film is mostly populated with potheads — Dino most obviously, as he smokes incessantly and also gets Bobbie’s father Loren high when he arrives unannounced while Bobbie and Bunny are away. For the latter, the film is a constant wirewalk of trying to figure out how to deal with the body in the hallway and the various lengths that the characters must go to in order to keep the police from finding a pretense to come inside. Where these two ideas intersect is in the constant poor decisions that Bunny and Dino make; when a second dead body is found inside (the tenant Linda was concerned about did, in fact, overdose in his bedroom), the gang quickly comes up with the idea to get rid of that body rather than the man Bunny killed, resulting in a lot of wacky hijinks surrounding getting the corpse into a suitcase and outside. There’s absolutely no reason to get involved with the neighbor’s body, but everyone’s so intoxicant-addled and dim-witted that they just keep making things worse for themselves. 

The film keeps itself from feeling too monotonous despite its single-location setting by threading in a parade of fun characters and letting them bounce off of one another. I was particularly fond of Chana, who defiantly notes that she must be called either “Happy Chana” or by her full name, “never just ‘Chana,’” and whose orthodoxy considerations throw a wrench into the already malfunctioning machine that is Linda’s tenement house. Bobbie leaves the apartment in a huff before Chana arrives, meaning that when their guest arrives to find that she is “alone” with Bunny, she demands that either Bunny leave his own home or that there be at least two other women present since “two women equals one wife.” It’s good stuff, reminiscent of the “Ski Lift” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and her presence is a fun complication when having to navigate keeping the cops outside while keeping her from discovering the body (later bodies) that are moved from apartment to apartment. I also appreciated the presence of Loren, whose absurdly self-serving nature is made apparent when he admits that he’s found himself at a loss when his wife finally leaves him—he’s left her before, of course, many times, but now that he’s on the other end of it he feels remorse for ditching his daughter. Loren is on a different journey, like he’s entered this picture from a completely different film in which he’s a deadbeat dad finally trying to make good, but everyone here finds him to be an eye-rolling dick until he actually comes in handy. In a lesser (and more racist) movie, Linda would be used as a comedic punching bag, but here she gets to be a part of the fun, which I enjoyed immensely after some initial skepticism about how respectfully she would be treated. 

With a necessary content warning for this film and its (respectful) treatment of sexual violence, I’d recommend it for anyone looking for something to scratch that Sean Baker-ish itch.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Blackmail (1929)

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There’s an awkward transition period between silent and sound pictures, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail sits right in the middle of it. In fact, it straddles the line between the two. If you look up the film online and click the first streaming link that your search results present, you’ll find yourself watching the film in sound, but this was actually a late-breaking change made well into production. The Kino Lorber DVD release that my library has contains both the silent and the talkie versions of the film, and the silent one was actually more financially successful in its day than the other — largely due to the fact that most British cinemas didn’t have sound technology installed yet, reducing the talkie Blackmail’s overall box office. Blackmail stands at this crux in the leap in film technology, and so we must give it some grace for its issues. 

Flapper Alice White (Anny Ondra) is dating Scotland Yard detective Frank Webber (John Longden), although she finds him a bit of a bore. On the side, she’s also occasionally going on dates with a painter named Crewe (Cyril Ritchard). After an argument at a tea house, Frank storms out, allowing Crewe to offer to take Alice out, and Frank sees the two leaving together. Crewe takes Alice to his artist’s loft and the two flirt for a bit before Alice volunteers to wear a (for the time) racy dancing costume and model for Crewe; he hides her clothes while she’s changing and his personality drastically changes as he attempts to force himself on her. Alice manages to grab a nearby knife and kill Crewe in self-defense, but she goes home in a state of shock. The following day, reminders of Crewe’s death are all around her, and a gossipy neighbor standing about in her father’s newsstand recounting the grisly details doesn’t help. Frank visits the scene of the killing and finds one of Alice’s gloves, pocketing the evidence before anyone else sees it and bringing it to her, where she wants to tell him everything but can’t verbalize the horror of her situation the previous night. Unfortunately, Alice’s exit from Crewe’s building was witnessed by career criminal Tracy (Donald Calthrop), who arrives with Alice’s other glove and announces his intent to extort both Alice and Frank. 

I’m not entirely certain that calling this film a “thriller” accurately reflects the content. The title act of blackmail doesn’t really enter the narrative until quite late in the game, and although the film’s energy picks up in its final act, the first three quarters of its eighty-five-minute runtime is fairly slow-paced. If anything, the film is more of a character study of Alice White than anything else. The film follows her almost entirely and spends a great deal more time on extended examinations of her face as she reacts to things that happen around her. Ondra has the perfect features for this era of filmmaking, with the big eyes and pouty lips that were best suited to convey the outsized emotions that dialogue-free performance required. Her English was so accented, however, that Hitchcock had another actress (Joan Barry) say Alice’s lines off-camera while Ondra lip-synced the dialogue, and the result is a little uncanny. (This was a technological limitation of the time; in Murder!, released the following year, the main character’s internal monologue while listening to the radio was accomplished by having the actor record his lines and then act along to his own voice on the tape, all while a live orchestra played the music that was supposedly playing on his radio.) That slight awkwardness as a result of this method is a little strange, but it unintentionally adds another layer to the performance, as if Alice’s experiences have left her so out of sorts that she’s not entirely in sync with her own mind. 

This is Alice’s story: she’s just a girl wanting to have fun, and she’s bored of her cop boyfriend always taking her to the movies. Crewe, a mysterious artist, shows an interest in her and invites her back to his place, where he shows off his work and even lets Alice express herself on a canvas as well, and it’s all fun and games before he reveals his true intentions. She defends herself but kills him in the process and returns home to wash his blood out of her clothes. On the street, the positions of people at rest remind her too much of the state she left Crewe’s body in, and when she’s trying to have breakfast with her family, she can’t get any peace. Her boyfriend arrives with evidence that she’s been two-timing him and she can’t even speak about the kind of danger that she defended herself from. All of this is before Tracy even enters the picture. This isn’t a thriller, really; it’s a noir, one with an inciting incident that would appear in noirs for decades to come, at least into the fifties with titles like The Blue Gardenia. How much you’re going to be invested in the film depends on how much you like Alice, and although I did, I can see her characterization being a harder pill to swallow for others, even before getting into the strange lip syncing issue that may further turn some viewers off. In the end, Tracy is sought for questioning purely as a matter of having a criminal record and having been in the area, and he flees the police, leading to a chase that winds through the British Museum before he falls from the building’s roof to his death. This leads to Crewe’s death being pinned on Tracy and Alice being free to go, but the film lingers on her face in its final moments in a way that makes it plain that although she may be legally absolved, she’s been forever changed by having to slay a man in order to protect herself from his sexual assault. 

As to the elements that make the film memorable as a Hitchcock text, the final fourth of the film sees Tracy being chased by the police, presaging several images and ideas that would go on to be reliable tricks in the director’s bag. In the British Museum, Tracy descends a rope to escape his pursuers past a giant bust of presumably Egyptian origin. There’s a distinct visual genealogy between this and the finale of North by Northwest: 

The Mount Rushmore sequence is also part of another one of Hitchcock’s trademarks, which was to have the film’s final action scenes lead to a rooftop climax, most famously in Vertigo but also To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, and Foreign Correspondent, just to name a few (although for the last two of these Jimmy Stewart is dangled out of a window rather than off of a rooftop and the fall from Westminster Cathedral tower happens at the beginning of the third act rather than its end, respectively). The chase scene through the museum is also clearly echoed in the protracted sequence that concludes I Confess, although this one is stronger and Hitchcock is already demonstrating his strong eye for composition when it comes to setting up the most interesting version of a shot, sticking the camera in the vertices of an oddly shaped room or taking on an overhead view of a large reading area. He’s also already inserting his sly sense of humor into the proceedings. Despite the relative novelty of the art form, the characters within the film are already talking about movies as if the whole enterprise is old hat; Frank seemingly only wants to go to detective flicks which Alice finds boring and predictable, and Frank admits he’s still excited to see the latest one about Scotland Yard, even if “they’re bound to get most things wrong.” Hitchcock’s lack of respect for the institution of the police overall is on display as well, since the entirety of Scotland Yard does, in fact, get most things wrong; they latch onto Tracy based on circumstantial evidence and chase him to his death, unknowingly doing so in order to cover for a killing (albeit a legally defensible one) committed by the girlfriend of one of their own members. 

It’s all good stuff, but I doubt that Blackmail remains of much interest even to most film-lovers who don’t have an unhealthy interest in Hitchcock’s body of work. Narratively, it’s not in conversation with his other texts, at least not those we think of as the canonical forty thrillers. Insofar as it’s useful as an interpretative tool for his filmography as a whole, this film feels like an attempt at experimenting with techniques and images that he would perfect later and is fascinating in that right, but I once again fear that this fascination extends only to real Hitch-heads. The Lodger is a much more engaging film if you’re interested in what the director’s silent and silent-adjacent work was like, and for experiments with the artform that sound introduced into the medium, Murder! has more fascinating production trivia and smoother tone overall, although I’d go to bat for Blackmail’s value as a noir character study before I’d recommend the 1930 film. This is in the public domain, so hopefully it’s not too hard for you to find if I’ve sold you on it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: The Men Who Knew Too Much

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss two different films that share the same title and director: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and its loose remake The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

00:00 The Soup
02:50 KPop Demon Hunters (2025)
8:02 The Blue Gardenia (1953)
13:25 Erica’s First Holy Sh!t (2022)
20:06 Cloud (2025)
26:40 The Mastermind (2025)
30:54 Eephus (2025)
37:00 Frankenstein (2025)
44:47 Predator – Badlands (2025)
52:32 Keeper (2025)
1:04:36 Materialists (2025)
1:10:15 Die My Love (2025)
1:14:12 Reflections in a Dead Diamond (2025)
1:17:48 Mr. Melvin (2025)
1:22:12 Sirāt (2025)
1:26:37 Twinless (2025)

1:33:00 The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, 1956)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Spies (1928)

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I am excited to watch what’s being marketed as the final chapter in the Mission: Impossible saga later this week, but I’m not sure exactly when I’m going to be able to clear an entire evening for it. Clocking in at 169 minutes of Hollywood action spectacle, The Final Reckoning is easily the longest Mission: Impossible sequel to date. Likewise, the most recent James Bond sequel, 2021’s No Time to Die, clocked in at 163 minutes as the longest of its own decades-spanning franchise. The Fast and Furious series is following the same trend, with both 2021’s F9 and 2023’s Fast X breaking the 140min barrier because two hours is no longer enough space to tell the epic story of black-market street-racers who found a second life as international superspies. I have no doubt that its own upcoming finale, Fast 11, will be even longer. It’s clear that these decades-running espionage thriller series have become bloated through the virtue of their success, racking up enough international box office to earn a blank-check approval for every imaginable indulgence, supercharged by the egos of Hollywood Elite freaks like Tom Cruise & Vin Diesel. In a roundabout way, though, their exponentially expanding runtimes do call back to the earliest days of spy-thriller cinema, both in the episodic “Until next time…” storytelling of pre-show serials and in the epic scale of Fritz Lang’s 1928 genre landmark Spies (aka Spione), which in its original exhibition ran for an impressive 178 minutes, putting all of its modern decedents to shame. Even its incomplete, surviving prints stretch past the 140 minute mark, trimmed down by half an hour but still meeting the modern Hollywood standard.

Despite its near-three-hour runtime, Spies is not an especially self-serious or prestigious work. Lang sets his espionage saga against the same kind of impossible, expressionist backdrops crafted for his sci-fi epic Metropolis the previous year, but it’s all in service of telling a low-brow, pulpy romance between undercover spies. If the film has earned any historical or artistic prestige outside the typically masterful imagery of Lang’s monocled eye, it’s all due to the fact that it is almost a century old. Co-written with his wife & collaborator Thea von Harbou, Spies pioneers a long list of genre tropes both big (referring to the protagonist only by his agent number, 326) and small (comically tiny cameras, disappearing ink, etc). As a result, it now plays heavily tropey, taking three hours to tell a fairly simple love story between two spies who work for opposing agencies. Our somewhat heroic Agent No. 326 (Willy Fritsch) is employed by the German Secret Service to thwart the criminal-mastermind plans of Haghi (Rudolf “Dr. Mabuse” Klien-Rogge) to intercept a top secret British-Japanese peace treaty. Not nearly as suave nor as talented as he thinks, No. 326 is already on the Russian enemy’s radar at the start of his mission, and he’s assigned to be taken down by the femme fatale counterspy Sonja (Gerda Maurus), who’s always two steps ahead of his plan. Only, Sonja is secretly a bit of a softie, blackmailed by Haghi to commit evil deeds. Naturally, she immediately falls in love with No. 326, constantly saving his ass in times of crisis and engineering a scheme to free them both from their professional obligations so they can spend the rest of their lives in each other’s arms.

This airport paperback plot doesn’t sound especially substantial in the abstract, at least not when compared to other, juicier Fritz Lang triumphs of its era like Metropolis, Destiny, and M. It’s illustrated with the same German Expressionist gloom & grandeur as those more infamous works, however, finding Lang at the height of his powers (long before he sleepwalked through late-career studio noirs like Beyond a Reasonable Doubt). The opening prologue and explosive climax are especially stunning, kicking things off with a rapid-fire montage of espionage action and closing things out with a literal circus of violence. It’s at those bookends where Lang crafts isolated images in inserts that rival the beauty of any individual frame of classic cinema: a spy posing atop the rubble of an exploded bank wall, a low-angle close-up of an assassin on a motorcycle, a woman’s hands posed with gun & cigarette. There are a few other scenes sprinkled throughout the sprawling runtime that rival those images (namely, the makeup rituals of a creepy secret agent named Nemo the Clown and a boxing ring encircled by ballroom dancers), but much of the drama between those spectacular bookends takes on stage-play feel. Whereas Ernst Lubitsch would’ve turned No. 326 & Sonja’s ill-advised romance into a perverse romp (see: Trouble in Paradise), Lang & von Harbou craft a fairly somber story rife with blackmail, prostitution, opium addiction, and suicide. The old-fashioned sweetness of the central romance can’t help but be marred by the grim practicalities of spy work, which sometimes leads to bursts of violent visual poetry but often leads to conflicted players clawing their own faces in agony over who to be loyal to – lover or employer.

Even the relatively shortened Restored Cut of Spies was a little trying on my 21st Century attention span, which began to waver any time Lang strayed from grand German Expressionist spectacle to stage-bound melodrama. At the same time, I’ve seen plenty of Ethan Hunt, James Bond, and Dom Toretto spy thrillers in recent years that are just as long but not half as cool. It would’ve taken the same time commitment for me to catch up with the most recent Fast & Furious film, which I never got around to because nothing from the previous, even-longer one lingered with me past the end credits; they even found a way to make a forgettably dull image out of the Fast Family finally launching a car into space. Meanwhile, there are at least a dozen individual frames from Spies that will be burned into the back of my skull forever, even if it’s telling an equally inconsequential story as most of its modern equivalents. All that these bloated spy-thriller sequels need to do to earn their ever-expanding runtimes is take a page from Fritz Lang’s book and craft some of the most fantastic, gorgeously composed images in the history of cinema. It’s that simple.

-Brandon Ledet

The Spiral Staircase (1946)

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I’ve brought up in previous reviews that, for many of my teenage years, Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat: The 100 Greatest Movie Thrillers was a treasury of knowledge for me. I’ve had the book for decades, making notes in it that go back to 2003 about when I watched a film on the list, what my personal rating was, that sort of thing. I’m still working my way through it, having seen about half of them. Some of these were fairly recent, like The Conversation (#60) and The Last of Sheila (#88), with my Roger Corman Poe adaptation journey meaning that The Pit and the Pendulum (#61) soon to be added to that list. Just ahead of that one and The Conversation, at #59, is 1946’s The Spiral Staircase, and I’m delighted to report that it does not disappoint. Just as a forewarning to anyone who may be interested and has access to Brode’s book, however, please note that the film’s synopsis does spoil the identity of the killer, so make sure to view the film before reading that section. 

Set some years before the film’s actual production date (more on that later), the film opens on Helen (Dorothy McGuire) attending a screening of the silent 1896 film The Kiss, although the movie treats this as a feature rather than the 18 second featurette that it really is. The screening is being held just off of the lobby of a hotel, and upstairs, a woman is strangled to death. The constable (James Bell) arrives and speaks with Dr. Parry (Kent Smith), a relative newcomer in town who wishes to offer his opinion, even though the town’s primary physician is already on-site. Parry then offers to give Helen a ride home in his horse-and-buggy, and it becomes apparent that Helen is mute, and Parry regards her with some affection and has attempted to interest her in seeing a Bostonian doctor friend of his about treatment for her condition. He’s pulled away by a medical emergency before getting her all the way home, but she’s fine to walk the rest of the way, at least until a sudden thunderstorm occurs. As Helen races back to the mansion in which she is employed as a servant, we see that she is being watched by a rain-drenched man in a slicker and hat. There’s great concern that Helen may be the killer’s next victim, as each of the previous killings were of women with some kind of disability. 

The mansion itself is a great set, with the spiral staircase that Helen ascends and descends throughout taking center stage. Even though we spend an unbroken hour within its walls, the house’s expansiveness means that it never becomes boring visually, and we learn the place’s general layout fairly quickly, which makes the breakneck pace of the final act easy to follow as Helen rushes about, pursued by her would-be killer. It also means that there’s plenty of room for a smorgasbord of characters, any one of which could be the murderer. There’s Dr. Parry, of course, whose recent arrival to the community marks him as a kind of outsider, and whose interest in Helen could be more than merely medical or social. The house’s matriarch is Mrs. Warren (Ethel Barrymore), apparently bedridden and requiring nursing care, but who prefers the ministrations of Helen, although she warns the girl several times that she should flee the house and never come back, if she can. The house is also occupied by Professor Albert Warren (George Brent), Mrs. Warren’s stepson, an upstanding member of the community who nonetheless has some resentment for his stepbrother Steven (Gordon Oliver), who has all but abandoned his mother to Albert’s care while he lives prodigally on the family’s money, only taking time from philandering around Europe with loose women when he needs to return home to refresh his accounts. This means that he, too, has only recently returned, and his arrival’s overlap with the sudden rash of killings makes him suspicious, and although he tells the constable that he didn’t leave the house the whole of that day, Professor Warren notes that his shoes are muddied, and questions why he would lie. Of course, one wonders when he would have time to get away when he’s so smitten with Blanche (Rhonda Fleming), the professor’s assistant/secretary. For the most part, the women are above suspicion, except for Mrs. Warren’s nurse, Barker (Sara Allgood, just a few years after her Best Support Actress win for How Green Was My Valley), whom one character refers to as being just as good as a man in a fight. Also not a likely suspect is Mrs. Oates (the Bride of Frankenstein herself Elsa Lanchester), the housekeeper, although her groundskeeper husband, Mr. Oates has suspicion cast upon him from the moment he appears, as he enters the house wearing a raincoat and hat just like the person stalking Helen in the yard. 

It’s a decent cast for a mystery that takes place over the course of a single evening in a single locale, creating a great sense of suspense. Clues are planted throughout (like the early foreshadowing of the use of ether as a medicine for Mrs. Warren), doubts are raised about everyone’s activities (like who has the missing ether), and characters are given good reasons to be leave the vicinity just long enough to be suspicious (like Mr. Oates being sent to the next town over to get more ether; it’s a rather ether heavy plot). We learn fairly early on that Mrs. Warren is a crack shot and may be less enfeebled than she lets on, as she keeps a gun next to her bed that Helen is unable to wrest from her grasp, and she boasts about having slain the tiger that gave its life for her bedroom rug. She even notes that her late husband used to tell her that although she was not as pretty as his first wife, she was a much better shot. That late Mr. Warren, though long passed, cast a pall over the house that is still very much in effect. A man of much machismo, he resented that neither of his sons had much interest in sport or riflery as he did, and thought little of both of them as they instead chose academia and ribaldry as their passions instead. That paternal disappointment is at play in the behavior of both living Warren men, and a revelation that a woman was murdered at the house years before casts further suspicion on them both. It’s great character work that effectively keeps you guessing until the moment that the killer is revealed. 

We often talk about Psycho as the sort of decades-early prototype of the slasher genre, but there are a lot of novel, modern elements here that are also clearly part of that same genealogy, and even earlier to boot. Images of the slicker-wearing killer hiding just where Helen cannot see him, framed from the back, have a very slasher vibe, with the first image that comes to mind being the hook-wielding killer in exactly the same outfit in I Know What You Did Last Summer. As Dario Argento later would, director Robert Siodmak used himself to represent the killer before the reveal, most notably in several moments where there is an extreme close up of the killer’s eye. Sometimes, we get to see the reflection of a victim in said eye, which is not something I expected to see in a film produced in 1945. It’s so modern that it feels almost too far ahead of its time. We even get several first-person shots from the killer as he snuffs out his victims. In the first, they attack the woman when she’s changing clothes and is halfway through getting her dress on, her arms pinned in an overhead position, her long-nailed hands grasping at the air as she struggles; in the second, the victim plays the old “Oh! It’s you! You scared me!” routine until the killer lunges and strangles her in a chiaroscuro-lit cellar, with the actual murder happening in the darkened, unlit center of the frame, her seemingly disembodied hands likewise clawing at nothing from opposite sides of the image. 

The imagery is potent, and the film isn’t afraid to occasionally go for the surreal. When Helen first returns to the Warren estate and is making her way up the grand central staircase, she stops for a moment to look into the mirror mounted on the landing (which will later make for some very cool angles in the chase scenes), and the camera crawls along the floor of the upstairs to reveal a pair of feet, letting us know that the killer is already in the house and is watching. As the killer watches, we see from their perspective that Helen has no mouth, and although the effect is rather limited, it’s still very creepy. Later still, when Parry has convinced Helen to run away with him, we get to see her imagine a brief, sweet courtship that leads right up to a wedding, the daydream turning into a nightmare when she is unable to say “I do,” as even in her fantasy she is unable to speak. 

Helen is a very cool final girl, and McGuire imbues a character who has no lines before the film’s final moment with a great deal of life and vivaciousness, conveying a lot through her body language and expressions. In one of the film’s most exciting moments, Helen is alone in the house with the killer as everyone else is dead, gone, imprisoned, or bedbound, and the constable comes to relay that Dr. Parry will not be returning that evening as he is attending a medical emergency, and Helen, in an upstairs room, beats against the window to get the lawman’s attention to no avail, and her desperation and frustration as he leaves are palpable. We see her playfulness with Mrs. Warren, her professionalism with Professor Warren, and her warmth and affection with Mr. and Mrs. Oates, and there’s a tangible difference in the way that she “speaks” to each of them. It’s damn fine acting work. The two best on-screen pairings are McGuire with Barrymore and McGuire with Lanchester. For the former, there’s an authentic sense of maternal warmth and protectiveness that Mrs. Warren has for Helen, and Helen seems to be the only person in the house whose company Mrs. Warren genuinely enjoys. With the latter, a lot of that is simply that Mrs. Oates is my favorite character here, and she was a delight every moment that she was present. Her rambling to Helen when she first returns home is quite fun, as is her antipathy toward her husband’s lazy dog. There’s a very fun bit in which she goes for her hidden brandy and finds it empty, to which Mr. Oates replies that he got rid of it because of her temperament. Later, when Professor Warren needs her help retrieving a bottle of brandy from the cellar, she fakes dropping the candle in order to steal another bottle for herself. It’s a helpful addition of some physical comedy to the proceedings while also setting up a scene later in which Helen locks her potential killer in the same underground room (and also a scene in which Helen is unable to rouse Mrs. Oates to help her with the killer as the older woman is passed out drunk). 

One thing that seems to be a point of contention is exactly when the film is supposed to be set. It’s clearly some time before the actual production date, as there is not a single automobile in sight, with characters riding around in horses and buggies. There’s no on-screen confirmation of an exact year, but Wikipedia lists it as 1906, as does TVTropes (although I assume the latter gets this from the former). Brode’s book lists it as 1916, and in fact makes some hay with the fact that this would have been right in the middle of the Great War, at a time when Freudian theory was becoming somewhat mainstream and that the film’s text is about Freudian themes of suppression and desire. It doesn’t really matter in the end, but thought it was worth mentioning, as I sometimes wonder where we get these “facts” about movies, and the way that something you might only learn in a now long-lost press kit have somehow been passed down as paratext and become unclear over time. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #237: Combat Shock (1986) & Vetsploitation

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Welcome to Episode #237 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of vintage genre films about Vietnam War vets suffering from PTSD, starting with the violent exploitation thriller Combat Shock (1986).

00:00 The Pope of Trash
08:50 Bastard Out of Carolina (1996)
13:00 Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)
17:12 Under the Sand (2000)
24:15 Warfare (2025)

33:00 Combat Shock (1986)
52:15 Dead of Night (1974)
1:03:42 Backfire (1988)
1:17:10 Savage Dawn (1985)

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