Part of Romance Is Dead
When Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) meets tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) on a train, he believes he’s stumbled upon the perfect accomplice for his murderous scheme, an exchange of killings –– one adulterous wife for one despised father –– to which neither party can be connected. After hastily fleeing the conversation, Guy soon realizes that the stranger’s proposition was more than just idle conversation, and Guy must uphold his end of the bargain — or risk being tied to a murder he didn’t commit. Pitch-perfect direction and tense plotting deliver on the deliciously devilish murder swapping premise in this all-time great from master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock.
“This subject owes so little to anecdote or the picturesque, but is instead imbued with such lofty ambition, that probably only the cinema could handle it with so much dignity. I know no other recent film, in fact, which better conveys the condition of modern man, who must escape his fate without the help of the gods.” —Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers (Mar 1952) “It's intensely enjoyable — in some ways the best of Hitchcock's American films...with some of the best dialogue that ever graced a thriller.” —Pauline Kael, New Yorker “A plot made of ingenuity and amorality, based on the first novel by Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995), who in her Ripley novels and elsewhere was fascinated by brainy criminals who functioned not out of passion but from careful calculation, and usually got away with their crimes…. It proceeds, as Hitchcock’s films so often do, with a sense of private scores being settled just out of sight.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
