Category Archives: Heist Caper

Blu-ray reissue: Bellman and True (***1/2)

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on July 6, 2019)

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Bellman and True – Indicator Series Blu-ray (Region “B”)

This 1987 sleeper is an off-beat heist caper from eclectic writer-director Richard Loncraine (Brimstone & Treacle, The Missionary, Richard III, et.al.). Bernard Hill stars as a computer system engineer named Hiller who finds himself reluctantly beholden to a criminal gang he had briefly fallen in with previously. They have kidnapped his teenage son and threaten to do him harm if Hiller doesn’t help them disable the alarm system at the bank they’re planning to rob.

The one advantage he holds over his “partners” is his intelligence and technical know-how, but the big question is whether he gets an opportunity to turn the tables in time without endangering himself or his son. A unique, character-driven crime film, with cheeky dialog and surprising twists (Desmond Lowden co-adapted the screenplay from his own novel with Loncraine and Michael Wearing).

Indicator’s limited edition boasts a nice hi-def remaster and includes both the 122-minute pre-release version that premiered at the 1987 London Film Festival and original 114-minute UK theatrical cut of the film.

Screen capture: Stockholm (**)

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on April 27, 2019)

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I’m sure you have heard the term “Stockholm syndrome”? In the event you’re a hypochondriac who may lay awake tonight worrying you’ve “caught” it, let me put your mind at ease…unless you are currently a hostage, exhibiting all the following indications:

1. A development of positive feelings towards your captor.

2. There has been no previous relationship between you and your captor.

3. You’re refusing to cooperate with police forces and other government authorities.

4. You no longer feel threatened, as you’ve adapted your captor’s world view.

Granted, if you ticked all those boxes it could also indicate you’re a Trump supporter; but that discussion is for another time. This is (purportedly) a “movie review”, which I assume is what you came here for (and you’re free to leave…I’m not forcing you to stay).

Like the phrase “drinking the Kool-aid” (now routinely applied to any behavior felt to be analogous to the mass suicide of Jim Jones’ followers at the People’s Temple compound in Jonestown) “Stockholm syndrome” has an etymology that was torn from the headlines.

In 1973, Jan-Erik Olsson, a Swedish convict on leave from prison (Sweden’s penal system is a bit different from ours) held up a bank in Stockholm. What began as a run-of-the-mill “take the money and run” operation escalated once Olsson impulsively took hostages following a shoot-out with cops, who arrived before he could make his getaway.

Olsson’s behavior was eccentric; after wounding one of the two officers who made their way into the bank, he ordered the other to sit in a chair and “sing something” (the officer promptly launched into “Lonesome Cowboy”). Olsson himself was reportedly a tuneful fellow; frequently warbling Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly” throughout the incident.

His first demand was that his friend Clark Olofsson be released from prison and brought in to join him at the bank. The authorities agreed; hoping to utilize Olofsson as a liaison for negotiation with police. That plan went nowhere fast; resulting in the two cohorts retreating into the bank’s vault with the four hostages and barricading themselves there.

Any leverage that the authorities may have had at the outset was compromised when the incident became a media circus; it was covered on live television, marking the first time that Swedish viewers had been offered a ringside seat to an unfolding crime-in-progress.

In the course of the 6-day incident, something unique occurred regarding the relationship between the hostages and their captors. After a phone call Olsson made to Prime Minister Olaf Palme threatening to kill a hostage if his demands to be given safe passage from the bank were not met by a deadline failed to yield results, hostage Kristin Enmark placed her own follow-up call to express her disapproval; she chastised Palme for his “attitude”. This bonding between captors and captives led to the coining of “Stockholm syndrome.”

You couldn’t make this shit up, right? Sounds like perfect fodder for a slam-bang seriocomic heist-gone-awry true-crime thriller a la Dog Day Afternoon. Unfortunately, writer-director Robert Budreau’s Stockholm is not that film. Which is a real shame when you’ve got excellent actors like Ethan Hawke, Noomi Rapace and Mark Strong on board.

As in the aforementioned Dog Day Afternoon, principal character’s names have been changed to protect the guilty; Jan-Erik Olsson is “Lars Nystrom” (Hawke), Clark Olofsson is “Gunnar Sorensson” (Strong) and Kristin Enmark is “Bianca Lind” (Rapace).

Hawke’s costuming makes him a ringer for Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider (now that I think about it, I could swear he was consciously channeling Hopper’s idiosyncratic tics and mannerisms). His performance dances on the edge of hammy, as if he wasn’t quite sure whether to play it for comedic or dramatic effect; although that may attributable to the bathos in Budreau’s script (which I feel fails to reveal the humanity of the characters).

The most glaring hole in the script is the writer’s apparent lack of interest in the biggest question: “why” did the hostages side with their captors? What turned them? There is nothing in the actions of the characters themselves that suggests exactly when this pivotal moment has occurred; we only know that this has “happened” when the head police negotiator wonders aloud why the hostages have allied themselves with their captors.

Good question, as we in the audience would kind of like to know why this happened too.

Desperate housewife: Criterion reissues Barbara Loden’s Wanda (****)

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on March 23, 2019)

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Wanda Goronski: I don’t have anything. I never did have anything. Never will have anything.

 Norman Dennis: You’re stupid.

 Wanda Goronski: I’m stupid?

 Norman Dennis: If you don’t want anything, you won’t have anything, and if you don’t have anything, you’re nothing. You may as well be dead. You’re not even a citizen of the United States.

 Wanda Goronski: I guess I’m dead, then.

That remarkable exchange is from the 1970 character study/road movie/crime drama Wanda, an underseen indie gem written and directed by its star Barbara Loden. Previously hard-to-find, a restored edition of the film is newly available from Criterion.

Wanda (Loden) is an unemployed working-class housewife. It’s clear that her life is the pits…and not just figuratively. She’s recently left her husband and two infants and has been crashing at her sister’s house, which is within spitting distance of a yawning mining pit, nestled in the heart of Pennsylvania’s coal country. We don’t have an opportunity to get a sense of her home life, because as the film opens, she’s on her way to family court.

A protracted long shot of Wanda daintily traipsing through the bleak obsidian moonscape of the coal pit as she heads for court with hair in curlers, white tennis shoes, white stretch pants, white floral blouse and carrying a white purse is…not something you see every day. It’s also an indication you’re in for a narrative with deeply existential subtexts.

When the judge scolds her for being late, the oddly detached Wanda shrugs it off, telling His Honor that if her husband wants a divorce, that’s OK by her; adding their kids are probably “better off” being taken care of by their father. Shortly afterward, Wanda splits her sister’s house and hits the road (hair still in curlers), carrying no more than that white purse. This suggests that either a.) she’s a dim bulb, or b.) freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

The first third of the film is episodic; Wanda wanders aimlessly, stopping at a tavern for a drink. A traveling salesman with a Vista Cruiser buys her a beer, she sleeps with him at a cheap motel. She busts him trying to sneak out the next morning, and just makes it into his station wagon. When they stop for an ice cream cone, he peels out and abandons her.

Nonplussed, Wanda kicks around some dull burg and drifts into a movie theater for a matinee and a nap. When she awakens, the auditorium is empty, and she discovers someone has rifled through her purse and stolen what little money she had been carrying.

Now officially broke, Wanda heads for the nearest tavern. The suspiciously furtive man behind the bar is less than friendly; he tells her to beat it, they’re closed. Nonetheless, Wanda asks him for food and drink. Giving her an incredulous look, he serves her (sort of). Through all of this, Wanda either doesn’t notice or doesn’t give second thought to the sight of the unconscious, bound and gagged man lying on the floor by the cash register.

Her “bartender” is a petty criminal (Michael Dennis) who has just knocked over the joint. His name (as we come to learn) is Norman Dennis, and the ever-malleable Wanda is soon on the lam with “Mr. Dennis”. The couple become a sort of low-rent Bonnie and Clyde.

Wanda is Terrance Malick’s Badlands meets Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA; like Malick’s film it was inspired by a true crime story and features a strangely passive female protagonist with no discernible identity of her own, and like Koppel’s documentary it offers a gritty portrait of rural working-class America using unadorned 16 mm photography.

The verité feel of the film (mostly shot using available light) was no accident; in a 1980 documentary by Katja Raganelli included on the Criterion Blu-ray/DVD, Loden explains why she ultimately decided on cinematographer/editor Nicholas T. Proferes (who had worked with documentary film maker D.A. Pennebaker). Of the various cinematographers’ work she had been looking at, Loden felt “[Proferes] really has some feelings for people, and he knows how to show ugly things without it appearing ugly…the ugly side of life.”

In that same interview, Loden also discusses how the project had been percolating for some time strictly as a script, and why she ended up deciding to direct it herself. “I sent it to some directors who liked it,” she recalls, “…they were all men, which wouldn’t necessarily make a difference, but they didn’t seem to understand what this woman was about. I would not take it to studios […] I wanted to make it my own way.” So…she did.

Although she could not have known it then, that decision has been since acknowledged as a groundbreaking move. The number of female auteurs in American film at that time could have been counted on one hand (Ida Lupino is the only one I can think of ).

Wanda also bridges an interesting cusp of second wave feminism’s effect on early-to-mid 70s American cinema. While its protagonist shares characteristics with Shirley Knight’s runaway housewife in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People (1969), Ellen Burstyn’s widowed single mother in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), and (in a more tangential sense) the steadily unraveling suburban housewives played by Carrie Snodgrass in Frank Perry’s Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) and Gena Rowlands in John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence (1974), I could see how modern audiences might scratch their heads over how such a passive character who allows men to objectify her and generally treat her like shit could possibly qualify as a feminist heroine.

In a 2003 issue of Cahiers du Cinéma, Marguerite Duras interviewed director Elia Kazan about Loden’s legacy (Kazan was married to Loden from 1967 until her death from cancer at age 48 in 1980). Kazan offered some unique insight on her character in Wanda:

“In this movie she plays a character we have in America, and who I suppose exists in France and everywhere, that we call floating, a wanderer. A woman who floats on the surface of society, drifting here or there, with the currents. But in the story of this movie, for a few days the man she meets needs her; during these few days she has a direction […] Barbara Loden understood this character very, very well because when she was young she was a bit like that, she would go here and there. She once told me a very sad thing; she told me: ‘I have always needed a man to protect me.’ I will say that most women in our society are familiar with this, understand this, need this, but are not honest enough to say it. And she was saying it sadly”.

So perhaps the sense of empowerment emanates not from the protagonist, who simply “is who she is” (i.e. a character, portrayed by Loden the actor), but the act of creation itself by Loden the writer and director of the piece (and the very personal place it comes from).

In an essay included as a booklet with the disc, Amy Taubin offers this take:

I thought it remarkable [when Taubin saw it in 1972], in part for the very reason many in the audience dismissed it: Loden’s Wanda was anything but a feminist role model. Rather, she was a version of the characters Loden had been playing on and off Broadway, on television […] She had been typecast as the kind of all-American beauty who believes that male desire is the only measure of her value, and necessary to her survival. […] Responses to the film when it was first released were mixed, with two prominent critics (Pauline Kael and Rex Reed) referring to Wanda as a slut and expressing their annoyance at having to spend time on a movie with such a negligible protagonist. […] Thanks to the feminist energy that has continued to evolve as it has seeped into the culture in the decades since the film’s release, Wanda can now be appreciated as a portrait of a kind of woman who, being no man’s fantasy, had almost never been seen on the screen before.

Hopefully, this release will help give this fine film the wider appreciation that it deserves.

The sundown kid: The Old Man and the Gun (***)

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on October 20, 2018)

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I have no idea what kind of box office The Old Man and the Gun will do its opening weekend, but if my unscientific head count of approximately 10 fellow patrons at the Friday matinee I attended is any indicator, I’d say Venom is in scant danger of usurpation.

Not that you asked, but there were more indicators of lowered expectations. For one, I noted I was the youngest person in the auditorium (I’m 62). Granted, the star of the film just blew out 82 candles this summer. And of course, a film with “old man” in the title is obviously not targeting a young demographic. It’s no secret Hollywood is all about the youth audience. This may be why the film’s leading man Robert Redford has intuited it’s better to burn out than to fade away; insisting that this role is his “farewell” performance.

This informs the elegiac tone throughout writer-director David Lowery’s leisurely-paced character study, based on the true story of career criminal Forrest Tucker (Redford). Tucker was a slippery devil; during his “career” he escaped from prison “18 times successfully, 12 times unsuccessfully” (his words). Like Redford himself, Tucker pursued his chosen profession well into his golden years, earning a reputation as a “gentleman bandit” (he committed armed robberies, but was courteous to all his victims).

Truth be told, Tucker’s relatively benign bio (well, for a felon) doesn’t have the inherent makings of a riveting crime thriller; but luckily Lowery is smart enough to know that. This is mostly about Bob Redford playing…well, Bob Redford. For one last time. So Lowery doesn’t go for film school flash; utilizing mostly close-ups and two shots, he lets his camera linger on his star, while he exudes that effortless Redford charm and charisma. Both the subject matter and Redford’s naturalistic, low-key portrayal recalls Phillip Borsos’ wonderful 1982 sleeper The Grey Fox, which starred Richard Farnsworth as turn-of-the-century “gentleman bandit” Bill Miner (which is also based on a true story).

Redford is supported by some ace players. Danny Glover and Tom Waits play Tucker’s partners-in-crime (who were dubbed “The Over-the-Hill Gang” by law enforcement). Waits’ character has a great monolog explaining why he hates Christmas that makes you wish he’d been given some more screen time. Sissy Spacek is a welcome presence as a widow Tucker romances (I swear she gets more radiant as she ages). Casey Affleck is effective as a rumpled police detective who plays cat and mouse with Tucker for a spell.

While this is may not be the most memorable film Redford has done over a long, illustrious career, there are worse ways to go. And Bob? We’ll keep the light on for you.

Blu-ray reissue: The Killers ****

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on December 5, 2015)

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The Killers (1946 & 1964) – The Criterion Collection Blu-ray

Criterion has given the HD bump to their already fabulous “twofer” package presentation of Robert Siodmak’s classic 1946 B&W film noir and the pulpy color 1964 remake by Don Siegel. Both films are adaptations from the Ernest Hemingway short story about a pair of hit men and the enigmatic man they are stalking. Hemingway’s minimalist narrative lends a fair leeway of creative license to the respective filmmakers, and each runs with it in his own fashion.

To noir purists, of course Siodmak’s original is the preferred version, with a young and impossibly handsome Burt Lancaster as the hit men’s target/classic noir sap and the equally charismatic Ava Gardner as the femme fatale of the piece.

Still, the 1964 version has its merits; Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager are the epitome of 60s “cool” as the nihilistic killers, and it’s a hoot watching Ronald Reagan (quite convincingly) play a vile and vicious heavy in a film that came out the very same year he made his (politically) star-making speech at the 1964 Republican Convention.

 

SIFF 2015: The Price of Fame **

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on May 23, 2015)

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Well, this one looked good on paper (I had anticipated something along the lines of Melvin and Howard), but after a promising start, writer-director Xavier Beauvois’ “true crime” dramedy about a pair of bumbling, would-be extortionists falls curiously flat, despite earnest performances from an affable cast.

The story is based on a late ‘70s incident in Switzerland in which two down-on-their-luck pals (played in the film by Benoit Poelvoorde and Roschdy Zem) cooked up a bizarre and ill-advised plan to dig up the coffin of the recently interred Charlie Chaplin and then hit his family up for money to have the body returned.

The caper itself takes a relative backseat to the main thrust of the film, which is ostensibly a character study. Therein lies the crux of the problem; these aren’t particularly interesting characters (at least as written). And the third act is nearly destroyed by that most dreaded of movie archetypes: the Maudlin Circus Clown. Beauvois’ idea to use Chaplin’s compositions for the soundtrack is clever, but he overdoes it. Peter Coyote does add an interesting turn as Chaplin’s longtime assistant.

Prisoners of love: The Dog ***1/2

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on August 23, 2014)

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And all he got was this stupid T-shirt: The Dog

On a sultry August afternoon back in 1972, a botched Brooklyn bank robbery morphed into a tense hostage drama that played out on live TV; and once rumors began to circulate that the ringleader, a Vietnam vet named John Wojtowicz, had engineered the heist in a desperate attempt to raise funds for his lover’s sex reassignment surgery, it became a full-blown media circus.

Wojtowicz’s accomplice didn’t survive the day (he was shot dead by FBI agents) and he earned a 5 year-long stretch in the pen for his troubles. The incident inspired Sidney Lumet’s classic 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon. Al Pacino’s iconic turn as Wojtowicz added shelf life to the robber-turned folk hero’s initial 15 minutes of fame.

Of course, Hollywood rarely gets it 100% right, even with stories purported to be “ripped from the headlines”. In a new documentary from co-directors Alison Berg and Frank Keraudren called The Dog, none other than John Wojtowicz himself appears onscreen to set the record straight. The first thing he wants us to know is that he’s “a pervert.” Okay then. But it’s also important for us to understand that he is “a lover” as well, because after all, in his lifetime he has had “4 wives, and 23 girlfriends.” Are we supposed to be taking notes?

Many unexpected twists and turns ensue. While it’s well established from the get-go that Wojtowicz (who died in 2006) was a riotously profane, unexpectedly engaging (if deeply weird) raconteur…he is not the only star of this show. The scene stealer? His dear (late) mother, who insists that “half of what (John) says is bullshit.”

Nonetheless, this is an absorbing film (a decade in the making) that works on multiple levels. It can be viewed as a “true crime” documentary, a social history (there are surprising tie-ins with NYC’s early 70s gay activist scene), a meditation on America’s peculiar fetish with fame whores, or (on a purely popcorn level) as a perversely compelling family freak show along the lines of Grey Gardens or Crumb. I’m giving it a three and a half out of four “Atticas!” rating:

Attica! Attica! Attica!”

Blu-ray reissue: That Sinking Feeling ***1/2

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on December 6, 2014)

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That SInking Feeling – BFI Blu-ray (Region “B”)

This relatively obscure, low-budget 1979 wonder marked the debut for quirky Scottish writer-director Bill Forsyth (Gregory’s Girl, Local Hero). Sort of a Glaswegian version of Big Deal on Madonna Street, it’s the story of an impoverished teenager, tired of eating cornflakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner, who comes up with a scheme to make him and his underemployed pals rich beyond their wildest dreams-knocking over a plumbing supply warehouse full of stainless steel sinks. Funny as hell, imbued with the director’s unique brand of low-key anarchy and a poignant undercurrent of working class Weltschmerz. BFI’s region “B” Blu-ray* is packed with extras, and sports the cleanest transfer I’ve seen of this previously hard-to-find gem (*please note that this region “B”-encoded disc requires a region-free Blu-ray player for playback).

London’s burning: The Sweeney ***1/2

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on March 3, 2013)

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If there’s anything I’ve learned from watching hundreds of crime thrillers over the years, it’s this: if you’re a bad guy, be wary of any police team that is known on the street as the “(insert nickname here) Squad”. Consider “The Hat Squad” in Mulholland Falls, Lee Tamahori’s 1996 neo-noir concerning the exploits of a merry crew of thuggish cops (led by growling fireplug Nick Nolte) barely distinguishable in thought or action from the criminals they chase.

The latest example is writer-director Nick Love’s new film, The Sweeney, which centers on “The Flying Squad”, a modern-day team of London coppers who share similarities with their fedora-wearing American counterparts. For one, they’re led by a growly fireplug (Brit-noir veteran Ray Winstone). He’s DI Jack Regan, a “cop on the edge” who swears by the adage: “To catch a criminal-you have to think like one”. You also apparently have to act like one; Regan and his clannish unit bend the rules (as they violate 57 civil liberties) on a daily basis. But they always get their man, sealing every take down with the catchphrase “We’re the Sweeney…and you’re nicked!”

Regan’s questionable methods have put him at loggerheads with his supervisor (Damian Lewis), and with head of internal affairs DCI Lewis (Steven Mackintosh). Lewis and Regan have a history of mutual animosity, which would likely turn into open warfare should Lewis ever discover Regan has been playing bangers and mashers with his estranged wife (Hayley Atwell) who is an officer in Regan’s squad.

However, office politics soon takes a back seat to Regan’s obsession with nailing his criminal nemesis (Paul Anderson), who Regan suspects as the mastermind behind a series of bold, military-style robberies. The squad intercepts the heavily-armed robbers in the middle of a bank score, but after a pitched gun battle on the busy London streets, they elude capture (set in Trafalgar Square, it’s the most tense and excitingly mounted cops ’n’ robbers shootout since Michael Mann’s Heat). Regan’s superiors are not pleased with his disregard for public safety, so they ask for his badge and gun; however with some clandestine help from his protégé (Ben Drew) he is soon “unofficially” back on the case.

Love’s film is based on a British TV series of the same name, which ran from 1975-1979. One needn’t be familiar with the TV version to enjoy this film, which I did immensely. The screenplay was co-written by John Hodge (Trainspotting), and is chock-a-block with crackling dialogue and amusing insult humor. Performances are excellent throughout; Winstone is perfectly cast, and I was impressed with Drew’s convincing performance as a reformed petty street criminal turned cop (you may know him as  rap artist “Plan B”).

Interestingly, while it has a number of similarities to the Mann film referenced earlier, there is one classic neo-noir that Love’s film particularly evoked, and that is William Friedkin’s 1971 thriller, The French Connection. Winstone’s character is a kindred spirit to Gene Hackman’s “Popeye” Doyle.

Both bachelors, they are slovenly and bereft of social skills, but on the job, they are a force to be reckoned with; driven, focused and relentless in their desire to catch the bad guys. And like Doyle’s obsession with “the Frenchman” in Friedkin’s film, Regan’s pursuit of his quarry becomes his raison d’etre; all else falls by the wayside.

Most significantly, both characters see themselves as working-class heroes of a sort. The criminals they seek to take down are living high off their ill-begotten gains; they are cleverly elusive, yet so confident in their abilities to cover their tracks that they seem to take perverse pleasure in taunting their pursuers. This is film noir as class warfare. Or, this could just be a well-made cops and robbers flick with cool chase scenes.

Blu-ray reissue: To Catch a Thief ***1/2

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on June 30, 2012)

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To Catch a Thief – MGM Blu-ray

This is one of those Hitchcock films that’s more about the romance, scenery and clever repartee than the chills and thrills, but that makes it no less entertaining.

Cary Grant is “retired” cat burglar John Robie, an American ex-pat and former Resistance fighter living on the French Riviera. A string of high-end jewel thefts (resembling his M.O.) put the police on Robie’s back and raise the ire of some of his old war buddies. As Robie tries to clear his name and find the real culprit, his life becomes more complicated when a love interest enters the picture (Grace Kelly).

To be sure, it’s fairly lightweight Hitchcock, but holds up well to repeated viewings, thanks to the  chemistry between Grant and Kelly, intoxicating location filming and the delightful supporting performances (particularly from Jessie Royce Landis, as Kelly’s mother).

The witty, urbane screenplay is by John Michael Hayes (who also scripted Hitchcock’s Rear Window, The Trouble with Harry and the 1956 The Man Who Knew Too Much remake). MGM’s Blu-ray transfer is sparkling, doing justice to Robert Burks’ colorful, Oscar-winning cinematography.