Johnny Jones is an action reporter on a New York newspaper. The editor appoints him European correspondent because he is fed up with the dry, reports he currently gets. Jones' first assignment is to get the inside story on a secret treaty agreed between two European countries by the famous diplomat, Mr. Van Meer. However things don't go to plan and Jones enlists the help of a young woman to help track down a group of spies.

"One of the great espionage films" - TV Guide

Actors: Joel McCrea, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall, George Sanders, Albert Bassermann

Hitchcock despised authority, so his WWII propaganda films did little to advance the war effort. This story is about a wrongly accused man on the run from the US Government who is sheltered by supposedly patriotic citizens who continually favor their own sense of native democracy to adherence to the government line in wartime. The government is blaring on the radio that this man is a Nazi saboteur, but everyone he meets in the American heartland has such an innate aversion to centralized government they decide to make up their own minds as to whether he seems like a Nazi to them. Sometimes they even take a vote! I assume Hitchcock was troubled by the fact that every time a nation enters a war to safeguard her freedoms the first step is to shit-can those same freedoms. (The oxymoron of "democracy at war" is also explored throughout LIFEBOAT).

"A forerunner to Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST, SABOTEUR is the story of defense plant worker Barry Kane (Robert Cummings), who stands falsely accused of planning a factory explosion that killed his good friend. Recognizing that he has been set up and that no one is likely to believe his story, Kane is forced to piece together the little information he can recall from the event to find the true leader of a spy ring. The film carries themes later explored more deeply in other Hitchcock films. The lone hero escapes and races cross country, searching desperately for proof of his innocence. Kane has the good fortune to win the trust of a blind musician and later the affection of the musician's daughter, Patricia Martin (Priscilla Lane). Over the course of a series of explosive scenes Kane, both the pursuer and the pursued, approaches the inner circle of agents. Among the hairpin plot twists and near misses are the traditional absurd Hitchcockian touches-such as when the lovers seek refuge in a train car filled with circus misfits. The ultimate climax, the clash on the Statue of Liberty, is one of Hitchcock s most famous scenes."

"Young Charlie Newton (Teresa Wright) lies on her bed in Santa Rosa, California, bored with her small-town life and family. Meanwhile, her namesake, Uncle Charlie, lies on another bed thousands of miles away in Philadelphia surrounded by discarded bills, deep in secret thoughts. The two are linked, psychic twins, and when Charlie goes to send for her uncle, she finds a telegram announcing his visit already waiting for her. Uncle Charlie brings happiness into the Newton home and a special pleasure to Mother. Yet Charlie feels a tension-as if her double, played with razor-thin menace by the mild-mannered Joseph Cotten, has brought violence into her home as well. Subtle clues add weight to Charlie's vague doubts. This growing knowledge shocks her out of the warm sense of safety that she held in her small world. However, her intuitive understanding is a long way from allowing the young niece to challenge her uncle, and the tense cat-and-mouse play between the two is powerfully dramatized, showing Hitchcock in his best form."

She has many purses, one for each identity, and there's no shortage of potential employers of such a beautiful girl (whatever her hair color at the time). She periodically returns to her mother's house in Baltimore to try to buy maternal love with plfered cash. (Mom's street is a large strikingly unrealistic constructed set that was almost surely inspired by the paintings of Italian surrealist Giorgio de Chirico) Only being raped by an adoring Sean Connery (really. there's no other way to describe it)shows her the true love that empowers her to delve into her repressed past, and discover why she cannot stand lightning or the color red.

Made following PSYCHO and THE BIRDS, MARNIE is so aggressively surreal it flopped, and was originally dismissed as an embarassing mis-step by the master, but forty years later can be seen as one of Hitch's greatest films. Tippi Hedren was the last of Hitchcock's blonde protegees, all being pathological attempts to replace the irreplaceable Grace Kelly. Though frighteningly pretty, Ms. Hedren always seemed too cold or mentally deficient to be sexy. Her daughter Melanie Griffith, though less pretty, has always seemed clever, vivacious, and sexy as hell, so we can assume that Peter Griffith was a charismatic guy.

It's really interesting how he married his classic style with the lewdness, violence and jumpy naturalism of the 1970s. FRENZY uses a lot more location shooting than most Hitchcock. And no other Hitchcock movie has this kind of nudity, cussing or "frank" discussion of clues like a potato stuffed in a victim's vagina. But in THE WRONG MAN Hitch relied on gritty location shooting. And nothing in FRENZY was as far outside the 1972 mainstream as PSYCHO was outside the 1961 mainstream. It's just a less romantic version of the Hitchcock we all adore. (There's certainly harsh naturalism in his choices of plausibly homely, by movie standards, sex-crime victims.)

FRENZY contains a famous tracking shot where the camera follows a killer up stairs but, seemingly unable to bear to follow him into his victims flat, retreats backward down flights of stairs and outside, fleeing across the street until we see the whole block of flats. Only then a scream rings out. (With the steady-cam we've become acustomed to such things, but this was a reamrkable accomplishment in 1972.) It's the same effect of god-like voyeuristic distance he used with the famous ariel shot of the burning gas station in THE BIRDS. There's a fine line between artistic distance and infantile indifference to others. Hitchcock had plenty of both. I didn't like Hitchcock devotee M. Night Shyamalan's SIGNS, but I loved him casting himself as the errant driver who killed Mel Gibson's wife because as author he (Shyamalan) DID kill Gibson's wife. The misery in stories is an obstacle course the omnipotent artist devises for his helpless creations.

"Based on an Arthur La Bern novel and focuses on many of the same motifs that Hitchcock had obsessively examined throughout his life's work: the wrong man theme, the doubling theme (in which one person acts out the repressed violence of another), and the general public's thirst for sex and violence. Hitchcock had made films featuring Jack the Ripper-type killers before, including THE LODGER in 1926, a silent movie about a series of murders in London and a mysterious man who appears to be guilty of the crimes. In FRENZY, Hitchcock goes mod with this blackly comic story about a sex criminal-the Necktie Killer-plaguing post-Carnaby London. An innocent man who is suspected by police as the murderer must fight to nab the real perpetrator and clear his name. Though lesser known, FRENZY marked a striking return to form for the famed director. It was also his first R-rated picture. Anthony Shaffer's script is excellent, and Jon Finch brings distinctive qualities to his role as the classic Hitchcock man-accused hero."