Alfred Hitchcock's "stunt", another of his confined space thrillers, is a cinematic stage play - based on a stage play and filmed like one with ten-minute long takes that had to be painstakingly choreographed on a purpose-built set of shifting walls to allow the camera to swing around main characters Phillip Morgan and Brandon Shaw's Manhattan apartment - in a manner of a cat, Vincent Camby perfectly described it in his review in the New York Times in 1984 - and just like Camby's wandering cat, the audience is an uninvolved, apathetic observer of the story of murder, one obviously influenced by the Loeb and Leopold case of 1924 (but embellished distastefully with theatrical flourishes and unlikely speeches) about private schoolboy toffs Phillip and Brandon, the killers who stage a party around the body they have concealed in a chest - a thoroughly disturbing idea and terrific basis for an icy Hitchcock thriller were it not for the fact the focus is not on the plot or the characters or the situation or the factual basis but on the set and the single takes, the director's self-references, the scene-stealing blown-glass clouds and recognisable buildings outside the apartment's windows..
★★★★☆
CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS
