The Paradine Case (1947)

Director Hitchcock and Producer Selznick's third collaboration, the rather conventional courtroom thriller The Paradine Case, based on a Robert H Hitchens book, may not soar to the heights that Rebecca and Spellbound did (their previous works together) but it is a grand and engrossing melodrama, so well-acted, directed, and staged that you can revel in it despite the ludicrousness of the central court case and despite the fact climactic scenes of Gregory Peck's lawyer's reckoning don't quite hit the nail on the head.

★★★★☆

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Cape Fear (1991)

Because another auteur, Francis Ford Coppola, released his Bram Stoker's Dracula just a year later, I've always had this fanciful notion that Gary Oldman's Count is Scorsese's hideous, half-melted Max Cady, the monstrous-on-a-mythological-scale psychotic rapist, first played in 1962 by Robert Mitchum but immortalised here by Robert de Niro in 1991 and in my mind forever to rise, psychotic eyes first, from the depths of Cape Fear, that terrifyingly named nexus of his revenge plot against Nick Nolte's Sam Bowden, the lawyer who wronged him and whose unfortunate family members, Jessica Lange as Bowden's wife and Juliette Lewis in the performance of her career as the terrified but electrified daughter, Danielle, unfortunate pawns in Cady's game of bloodlust.

★★★★☆

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Cape Fear (1962)

Dischordant Psycho strings and jazz piano help ratchet up the tension in this twisted 1962 suspense thriller which has Robert 'Night of the Hunter' Mitchum playing Max Cady, a hideous paedophile and psychopathic stalker, fresh out of jail and hellbent on vengeance against the lawyer, Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck) who helped put him away, and of course where else would you flee with your terrified wife and daughter in such circumstances but to your houseboat on Lake Psychopathic Rapist, oops I mean, Cape Fear.

★★★★☆

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Mirage (1965)

An entire skyscraper goes dark in a blackout and while the occupants are moving about by torchlight, there is a suicide of a prominent world peace campaigner from one of the upper floors, and when the lights come back on, Gregory Peck discovers he has no memory of who he is or what he does and can't work out how the woman he was with during the blackout disappeared down four flights of stairs which in the daylight no longer exist, is just the first five minutes of this quirky suspense thriller in the vein of Spellbound only less sophisticated, more kitsch (it is the 60s afterall), and this movie only just holds itself and all its psychobabble together.

★★★☆☆

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Spellbound (1945)

The solution to the mystery relies on far too pat "dream detective" work and Ingrid Bergman's psychoanalyst's flight from police with a mentally ill stranger is a subplot rehashed from previous Hitchcock successes presumably as a counterbalance to this film's otherwise psychobabble plot, but Spellbound is still a joy full of humour, some tongue-in-cheek sexism (and some not) and is great fun with a Dali dream sequence and an intriguing Freudian mystery.

★★★★☆

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