Here's a film that feels absolutely Hitchcockian in setup: a young woman named Joyce notices two armed men get on her train. She alerts the conductor who signals ahead for a railway policeman to come to the scene when they arrive at their next station. The policeman initially brushes her aside, thinking that she was making things up. But they soon discover that the two men are not only criminals, but they had kidnapped the blind daughter of the man that Joyce worked for and are holding her for ransom. See what I mean? Hitchcock could have taken this screenplay and produced another monumental classic with it. Instead, the film was given to Rudolph Maté, an esteemed Polish cinematographer (he had shot Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr). While a case could be made that Maté was one of the greatest cinematographers who ever lived, his directorial skills were lackluster at best. The film plods along like a tired police procedural. The main villain is one of the most two-dimensional saps that I have ever encountered in a so-called "film noir," a genre that prides itself on psychological complexity and intrigue. Everything about this film screams mediocrity. Even Barry Fitzgerald, that old stalwart character actor with the warm Irish gleam in his eye, seems tired and bored. It's a stock story with stock characters that lead to a stock ending. And here's the kicker...the cinematography wasn't that good either.
5/10
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