tipping over into psychosis

Film There was a bit of gap between watching Stage Fright and Strangers on a Train; having seen the Patricia Highsmith adaptation before and found it uncomfortable I wasn’t looking forward to watching it again, even in sequence, so I kept setting it to one side. Parts of it make me physically ill; not because it isn’t a powerful, well directed piece of work, but because of Robert Walker’s presence. He reminds me of the bogeyman I used to conjure up as a child, that initial misanthropic kindness tipping over into psychosis. Sure enough, I found it extraordinarily difficult to sit through so I suppose it had the right effect, since the director often said that he was in the business of unsettling his audience and often he achieved that through performance alone.

Performances are also the key to I Confess, in which a young father of the religious kind, Montgomery Clift, who looks like Tom Cruise morphing into Mark Harmon, spends most of the film in mute contemplation as after taking confessional from a murderer, he’s fingered for the same crime. His religious conviction is shattered since he can’t speak up to defend himself without jeopardising his sacred compact. Shakespeare covered similar themes in Measure for Measure – to what extent should your faith interfere with your mortality? Some preview audience members were dissatisfied because they couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t talk, though that misses the point. The man has a code and he’s unwilling to break it, because it wouldn’t just reflect badly on him, but also the organisation he works for. Why would anyone else trust him with their secrets if he’s liable to blab them to everyone afterwards?