AustLit

Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of a French novel, which follows an acrophobic former detective who is unwittingly drawn into a friend's plan to murder his wife and claim it as suicide.

'Twenty-five macabre tales to chill your blood.'

Set in the colony of New South Wales in the 1830s, this is a woman-centred melodrama set against colonial class divisions and involving two overlapping triangles (husband/wife/outsider and husband/wife/sinister housekeeper). The film is light on suspense but complex in emotional interplay, involving the long take (which precludes strict point of view) in shifting emotional identification intertwined with the guilt of the main characters. Robin Wood has also identified complex intertextual relationships: an early Hitchcock, The Manxman (a class-based triangle); Rebecca (the sinister housekeeper); Vertigo (the role of 'confession' and the reconstruction of the woman's image by the hero); and the stylised psychoanalytical romances Spellbound and Marnie. Along with Notorious and Gaslight, it is central to Ingrid Bergman's canon, in the tension in her persona between the active 'natural' woman and the vulnerable mentally and/or physically debilitated victim. (Source: Libraries Australia)

'Story of a successful novelist who undertakes an espionage commission to Switzerland.'

Source: British Film Institute. (Sighted: 17/9/2013)

Fred and Emily Hill are leading a boring life in London. When they receive a big inheritance from a rich relative, they see it as a way of realising all their dreams. They leave for a cruise, behaving like rich people, but soon find that being rich is not the answer to their problems.

An actor-manager sitting on the jury for the murder trial of actress Diana Baring becomes convinced of her innocence after she has been convicted and sentenced to hang: he works to uncover the real murderer before sentence is carried out.