Review of Stage Fright (1950) by Ian P — 17 Nov 2011

When I first started watching Alfred Hitchcock's movies, I would pretend I was part of an alien race that was going to pillage Planet Hitchcock. Not really, but go with it. I'd start with the classic major cities (Psycho, Vertigo, North By Northwest), then work my way out to the smaller but still happening cities (Rope, The Trouble With Harry, The Birds.

) But lately I'm sifting through the lesser cities. The dull ones that serve egg noodles with ketchup and try to pass it off as spaghetti with marinara sauce. The towns that close by six, have two traffic lights and are 40 miles from the nearest Wal-Mart.

I'm not going to go as far as to accuse Stage Fright of being the geographic equivalent of the armpit of the world, it sure as hell isn't a Fresno, CA! Stage Fright more or less wears into territory that Hitchcock spent a lot of time walking upon with the innocent being chased while trying to disprove their guilt.

Here he does so from a different perspective with a woman trying to prove the innocence of the object of her affection. Stage Fright's cast is pretty good (normally I can't stand Jane Wyman but she's not bad here) but Alastair Sim steals the show as Wyman's father and makes the movie pretty damn funny at points.

Stage Fright did little to make me wonder if the rest of Planet Hitchcock was worth conquering but it could always be worse. It could be Planet Bay or Planet Shyamalan. And we all know that the crappiest towns on Planet Hitchcock are still better than the meccas on those hellholes.