Starring: Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotton, Macdonald Carey
After years away from home, Charlie (Cotton) returns to the
sleepy town of Santa Rosa to his cosy family. But is he quite the man that he
seems?
This intriguing early American Hitchcock film finds the
auteur deep in familiar territory. The small town idyll, the humorous side
characters to relieve the tension (here played by two precociously intelligent
kids and a literary critic obsessed with murder-mysteries) and the mental
analysis of the darker instincts of man whilst also adding some unique flairs,
such as a brunette female lead in Teresa Wright (Hitchcock notoriously favoured
blondes) and a sweeping and beautiful score by Dmitri Tiomkin to contrast with
the more brooding scores of Bernard Hermann who worked more prolifically with
Hitchcock. It hasn’t aged as well as some of Hitchcock’s films, but Joseph
Cotton plays Charlie marvellously in a performance that owes comparisons with
Anthony Perkins’ performance in Hitchcock’s iconic, Psycho (1960).
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