Time Out says
Hitchcock breezes through a tongue-in-cheek, nightmarish plot with a lightness of touch that’s equalled by a charming performance from Grant (below), who copes effortlessly with the script’s dash between claustrophobia and intrigue on one hand and romance and comedy on the other. The story is a pass-the-parcel of escalating threats, all of them interior fears turned inside-out: doubting mothers, untrustworthy lovers, vague government handlers, corrupt cops. Within minutes of the film’s opening, shady strangers in a hotel lobby mistake Thornhill for a ‘George Caplin’ and from there we sprint from country house to the United Nations, from the ticket hall of Grand Central Station to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Thornhill’s ignorance of his fate and complete lack of control offer Hitchcock a brilliant blank canvas on which to experiment with a story that would sound ludicrous on paper, yet it feels like anything’s possible in Lehman’s playful script. ‘I’m an advertising man, not a red herring,’ says Thornhill. He couldn’t be more mistaken.
Release Details
- Release date:Friday 19 June 2009
- Duration:136 mins
Cast and crew
- Director:Alfred Hitchcock
- Screenwriter:Ernest Lehman
- Cast:
- Cary Grant
- Eva Marie Saint
- James Mason
- Leo G Carroll
- Jessie Royce Landis
- Josephine Hutchinson
- Philip Ober
- Martin Landau
- Adam Williams
- Ed Platt
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