Starts slowly, but Hitchcock's mastery emerges

I think the film is under-rated. It can’t stand comparison with the two supreme Hitchcock films with James Stewart two years before and two years after it (“Rear Window” and “Vertigo”), and its mechanism is less tightly wound than the 1934 original, but once Stewart and Doris Day get into London, the film is gripping and witty. The scene in which Stewart makes a phone-call with the room swirling with Day's old theater acquaintances is wrenching. The struggle in the taxidermist’s shop is hilarious, and the church service scene is brilliantly subtle.watching Doris Day weighing what to do in the Royal Albert Hall is not subtle, but shows she could rise to challenges rarely presented her in her film career. And the famous song that she sings (twice) has a much more important function that establishing her character as a retired singer. (That is, it is not decorative. It is also nicely ironic that the song is used in way that entirely counters the resignation to fate that is its content.)

That Stewart’s character, an Indianapolis physician, is married to the dynamo Doris Day made it impossible for Hitchcock to try to develop the kind of erotic charge that makes Stewart’s scenes with Grace Kelly and Kim Novak so edgy in “Rear Window” and “Vertigo.” Nonetheless,Stewart still has occasion for obsessiveness in this film. Moreover, already in the early scenes he is as cranky as I remember him being during the 1950s in the string of Anthony Mann Westerns.

Although blonde, Day does not seem a Hitchcock kind of actress. He makes her do hysteria, and not entirely unconvincingly, but the passivity of Novak or Janet Leigh or Tippi Hedren (or Ingrid Bergman) could not be expected from Day. Hitchcock wisely fashioned the film to her strengths instead.

The main problem with the film is the slow setup in Marrakech. Even after three viewings, I don’t understand why any of the characters most important to the plot happened to be there. Most Hoosiers--indeed, most foreign visitors--who happen to be in Paris think of other places to drop into (Giverny or the Loire Valley or Monte Carlo, Rome or Venice, or even Tangier). And the main plot takes place in London. The exoticism and the shtick of clumsy Americans in a radically alien culture delays getting the tension going more than it accomplishes anything else. In contrast, the second hour is rich in character and intrigue but moves right along.