Hitchcock Film or Fairy Tale?
Once upon a crime…
Published in
2 min readJul 1, 2023
- An ordinary object drives the plot in an extraordinary direction.
- Good and evil are delineated in stark, stylized black and white.
- The cleft-chinned hero wins in the end, but the body count is high.
- Themes of sex and death are intimately intertwined — just in case you’re into that sort of thing.
- The portrayal of women is problematic. Still, the gowns are gorgeous.
- The mother is either dead, domineering, or diabolical.
- It’s a field day for Freudians.
- The story is cathartic — in the same way that waking from a nightmare is cathartic.
- At any given moment, somebody, somewhere is writing their dissertation on it.
- Many a Halloween costume is inspired by it.
- The romantic rival has her eyes pecked out by birds.
- There’s a lot of intrigue surrounding an allegedly cursed ruby necklace.
- A predatory male cross-dresses as an old woman in order to assault the heroine.
- It ignites a debate about high art vs. lowbrow entertainment.
- The hero must scale a tall tower to save a beautiful blonde in distress.
