MAHANAGAR (Satyajit Ray, 1963)

Satyajit Ray’s Devi (1960) proceeds by a negative, showing by its absence the need for gender equality. Umaprasad cannot protect his wife while he is away at school; if only Doyamoyee might have been able to protect herself! Mahanagar (The Big City), on the other hand, handles its feminist material very differently—and in a contemporary setting. It is as light and easy as Devi is dark and trenchant. Mahanagar is direct and positive, arguing for the individual liberation, social enlightenment, and marital benefits that gender equality can bring. It again takes aim at the shibboleth of patriarchy—but delightfully. It’s a tonic.
     Arati and Subrata Mazumdar are a couple living in Calcutta. Arati takes a job in the workday world. Initially, Subrata feels enormously threatened. In time, however, he discovers that he and Arati are indeed equals on the same side of life’s daily struggles. Arati’s liberation strengthens the marriage and, eventually, makes Subrata more comfortable in his own skin.
     One of the things that contextualizes the couple is the city itself, the busyness and complexity of which seemingly help direct the psychologies that shape the Mazumdars’ marriage. Also, there is the lesser status of females that lowers expectations for them. “Is it worth it?” Subrata asks Bani, their young daughter, who is studying. “You’ll end up in the kitchen, like your mother.” But, of course, Arati gets out of the kitchen, as will Bani in due course—and more easily, because of her mother’s example.
     Visually, this is not one of Ray’s more expressive films—and be prepared: the dialogues are profuse. Mahanagar is prose, not poetry. But the narrative engrosses, the style is unaffected, and the message is pure gold.

CAT PEOPLE (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)

Recently I saw a film addressing issues of immigration and assimilation, Inch’Allah Dimanche (2001) by France’s Yamina Benguigui, herself an Algerian immigrant. It is an inferior piece of work, with perhaps only a bit of feminist interest to commend it. Writing about it, though, reminded me of a far better film that deals with similar matter. It is Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 horror classic Cat People.

A great commercial success, partly because it is truly frightening (unlike, say, Paul Schrader’s sour, misbegotten 1982 remake), and also because, unexpectedly for its time and place, it is deliciously erotic, Cat People isn’t often discussed as having anything to do with issues of immigration and assimilation. For the record, Tourneur himself was an immigrant, having been born in Paris and having come to the U.S. in the mid-1910s. (His father was Maurice Tourneur, who made popular silent films in Hollywood.) Born in Fresno, California, the author of Cat People’s script, DeWitt Bodeen, also wrote the screen adaptation of I Remember Mama (George Stevens, 1948), a somewhat labored but, intermittently, warmly entertaining immigration saga about a Norwegian family in San Francisco, coincidentally, at about the time the Tourneur family moved to California. About five years earlier, Cat People’s legendary producer, Val Lewton, born Vladimir Leventon in the Crimea, moved with his mother and sister to the States from Berlin, to which they had moved a few years earlier.

Irena Dubrovna has made few acquaintances in New York City, where she now lives. One day at the zoo she meets Oliver Reed, who is as drawn to the Serbian-born beauty as she is drawn to the sleek panther she is sketching. They fall in love instantly and marry. But something is not right with Irena, who remains deeply attached to Serbia, its superstitious legends and tragic history. Fearful that passion might turn her into a murderous cat, Irena beseeches Ollie for patience while their marriage continues unconsummated. Sex, it turns out, isn’t life’s only passion. As Ollie turns to co-worker Alice Moore for moral support, Irena’s jealousy, unleashed, transforms her into a feline monster, placing at risk Alice, whom she stalks, Ollie and Dr. Louis Judd, the psychiatrist who has misdiagnosed Irena’s condition, his dogged rationalism mistaking a sick soul for a sick mind.

This is a fantastic story, of the grand sort that invites its reincarnation as a symbol-studded opera/ballet. Tourneur, though, treated his outrageous material soberly, realistically, lending touches of the surreal to such pivotal moments as the wedding banquet in a public eatery, where a tall, dark woman with the eyes of a cat approaches the seated Irena and speaks to her in Serbian, saying something that strikes our untutored American ears as possibly meaning “My sister.” Irena wants to live in the present and have a future with her bridegroom; but something is always pulling her back into the past—the domain of nightmare, surely, but nightmare that, recurring since childhood, has become, for her, uneasy comfort: dark, terrifying though familiar terrain.

Cat People is a werewolf film, except that the character who lives in two worlds, one darkly fantastic, one real, is a woman, not a man, and what she turns into isn’t a wolf but a cat. In a bravura opening shot, Tourneur—what an economical artist this is!—establishes the identity of cat and Irena and associates the fantastic and real worlds each with the other. Starting on the panther in its cage at the zoo, the camera measuredly withdraws to reveal Irena, standing, sketching it. Thus the two figures, panther and person, are inextricably linked by the shifting frame of the image caused by the movement of the camera, as the object of attention, the panther, maintains a part of our field of vision, which is, in effect, enlarged to include also Irena, the one for whom the panther is the object of attention. This identification of each with the other consigns the stability of subject and object to the shifting breezes of dreamlike fluidity. Which is which? The cat’s pacing back and forth behind its bars—the cage that, later on, Irena will herself unlock—presents an image of capture, confinement, dislocation, unnatural environment, distress, dissatisfaction. By contrast, Irena remains still, except for the movement of her arm as her hand proceeds with the sketch (an attempt to capture the animal’s likeness); but, captivated by the captive cat, she herself is its reflection. It is her feelings as an immigrant, a citizen on foreign soil, that the caged, pacing panther projects.

Reciprocation between cat and woman, animal and artist, sets the stage for Irena’s first encounter with Ollie. It is a remarkable moment. Dissatisfied with her sketch, Irena crunches it and misses the refuse receptacle into which she tries to toss it. Silently Ollie does three things that extend or “complete” what Irena herself has just done: he picks up the ruined portrait; he puts it into the receptacle; with his facial expression he chides Irena for littering. (Subsequently he properly disposes of another sketch of hers she is about to toss away.) Without a trace of defensiveness, Irena silently acknowledges Ollie, what he has done and what he is “telling” her. In short, it is a scene of reciprocation, only in this instance between two strangers, a man and a woman, rather than between the woman and a cat. This establishes reciprocation as a unifying procedure in the film. Moreover, the dreamlike silence in which the reciprocation between Irena and Ollie unfolds connects the realism of the moment to the realm of the fantastic, especially as this instance follows hard the connection the camera has established between Irena and beast.

Cat People proceeds to document Irena’s sense of being lost in her new home, that is to say, New York, that is to say, the United States. Nowhere is it mentioned that the likely cause for Irena’s relocation is the Second World War, which is ripping apart Europe. (Serbia fought on the Allied side; Croatia, on the Axis side.) Throughout, then, war remains the elephant in the film—or should I say the monstrous cat? However, the film’s procedure of reciprocation yields a brace of intriguing matter on the domestic front. Irena’s unease as an immigrant reflects her American reception, or at least what she worries is the way that the natives feel and think about her. Ollie embodies this ambiguous reception. He starts off by not quite chastising her for bringing something unwanted to American soil, which the litter (at least to Irena) symbolizes. When Irena invites him into her apartment, she immediately apologizes for her heavy use of fragrance there; Ollie reciprocates by describing the perfume as “warm and living,” signaling his attraction to Irena. But then there is their unconsummated marriage. Shorn of the film’s procedure of reciprocation, we have here a man showing saintly patience in an unfortunate situation involving his wife’s fearfulness and distress. When we apply the procedure, though, we may be surprised to confront something very different. For, while it is true that Irena is not having sex with her husband, it is equally true that her husband is not having sex with her. When we coordinate this fact with another, that Ollie’s marriage to Irena appears to be, at least in part, an unconscious attempt on his part to avoid a sexual relationship with Alice, we arrive at an astonishing result: the foreigner—Irena—is being “blamed,” that is, made responsible for the less than satisfying outcome of the marriage. The ongoing issue of marital nonconsummation, then, speaks to the immigrant’s concern that she or he is being made a scapegoat—a concern to which time and again social and political realities have become attached. Indeed, by a stroke of thematic clarity, not mere coincidence, Ollie’s “patience” becomes exhausted at the precise point that Irena is ready to have the marriage consummated. It is at that moment that Ollie tells her he wants a divorce instead! Upon further reflection, and with Alice’s assistance, Ollie decides on a different course of action to which the nonconsummation legally entitles him: having the marriage annulled—as though it never existed; as though Irena never existed. Ollie’s ambivalence again kicks in once he decides that if Irena is as mentally ill as Dr. Judd says and, as a result, he is going to have her committed to a mental institution, he ought not to abandon her until she is well—and, of course, in the meantime, while Irena is away in the “cage” of an asylum, the issue of making the marriage whole would never arise. This aspect of the film compellingly projects the immigrant’s fear of legal vulnerability, that at any moment forces beyond the immigrant’s control can be brought to bear to make her or him “disappear.” If the panther is the cat that Irena fears she is, it is also the cat that Ollie unintentionally helps her to become by helping to enforce her status and mindset as immigrant.

Besides being charming and gorgeous, Simone Simon, more like a kitten than a grown cat,* gives a wonderful performance—at least the equal of her turns in Jean Renoir’s La bête humaine (1938) and Max Ophüls’s Le plaisir (1951). (Simon also was an immigrant here—like Renoir and Ophüls, as a matter of fact, a temporary one because of the war.) She provides the key element for my favorite shot in the film: Irena, naked in her bathtub, dissolving into tears, drops of water glistening on her back—an example of the kind of delicate detail that Tourneur would conjure for the sake of a (paradoxically) dreamlike realism: the essence of erotica. Cinema would not again show so glorious a back until Luis Buñuel, bless his memory, applied a salutary whip to a dreaming Séverine Serizy in Belle de Jour (1967).

* For me, Simone Simon, not Brigitte Bardot, was the preeminent French “sex kitten”—and Simone Signoret, the full-grown cat.

THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES (Walter Salles, 2004)

“It is better to die standing than to live on your knees.” — Che Guevara

The soul who uttered this famous remark did not become himself quickly or easily, as indeed is the case with most of the rest of us. Born Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, in Rosario, Argentina, in 1928, the future expert strategist on guerrilla warfare, the brilliant engineer of Fidel Castro’s overthrow of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, began as the pampered, sheltered son of an upper middle-class family. The eldest of five children, Guevara struggled for breath all his life, suffering from acute asthma. This is why his family moved to Alta Gracia, Cordoba, when he was two, where the climate was drier. (Ironically, his condition kept Guevara out of national military service.) Perhaps this is also why Guevara later chose the path of becoming a doctor, although his initial interest lay in treating leprosy. A pivotal event in his life that helped Guevara achieve his identity and embrace his destiny is a long journey throughout Latin America, begun in 1951 on a moped, that he undertook with a friend, Alberto Granado. The trip, which outlasted the life of their vehicle, spanned some 4,000 miles, taking the two young men—Guevara was 23 at the outset; Granado, 29—from Buenos Aires down the Argentinian coast, through the Andes Mountains into Chile, and up north into Peru, Colombia and Venezuela. Guevara had already studied Karl Marx, but for the first time he came into contact with impoverished workers, that is, the politically dispossessed, and, in a leper colony on the Amazon River, other instances of suffering humanity. His confrontation with injustice ignited his compassion and sense of Latin American identity and commitment, propelling him into the belief that the continent’s different nations represented the artificial barriers that European colonialism had imposed, dividing the people, as the Amazon River divided lepers from the medically healthy, bank from bank—the metaphor that fired his imagination. All this coalesced into the first stirrings of Guevara’s political consciousness. As the director of The Motorcycle Diaries (Diarios de motocicleta), whose subject is this journey, has explained, his film is “about Ernesto Guevara before he becomes The Che”—a “definition,” he adds, that “is not mine, [but] was given to me by [Guevara’s] son, Camilo.”

The director is Brazilian-born Walter Salles, and The Motorcycle Diaries is his long-nurtured dream project. The script, by Jose Rivera, is based on books about the journey written by its two participants, including the published version of the journal that Guevara kept during the event. Salles gained international celebrity and exaggerated praise for the Brazilian Central Station (1998), another “road film,” and one worn down into insignificance by its sentimentality and illogic. But every filmmaker should realize his or her “dream project,” I reasoned, recalling the phenomenal beauty of John Huston’s film of James Joyce’s The Dead (1987). On the other hand, Salles is no John Huston.

I like this new film by Salles—quite beyond reason, perhaps. It is the work of a lightweight artist, not a great one. It is highly imperfect, and I will summarily address some of its defects. But it is a compelling emotional entertainment. The film took the audience prize at San Sebastián and, more substantively, the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes. It was also a great success at Sundance. Robert Redford, that old Chéist, is one of the film’s producers.

The Motorcycle Diaries is a sort of coming-of-age story, an attempt, as Salles has put it, to “humanize” a figure that has become largely mythological and ideological. In his eulogy for Guevara, with whom he had parted ways politically, Castro launched the idea of his old compatriot as a model and inspirational revolutionary, and the liberal U.S. media, reducing Guevara’s image to one of the principal commercial icons of the twentieth century, neutered memories of Guevara’s dedication and fervor by appropriating that image for a chic form of anti-American Americanism. Here before us, in Salles’s film, is Guevara as an idealistic and compassionate boy—an idealization of him, to be sure, but something humanly recognizable. For the record, though, there is little in the film that can predict some aspects of the future Che Guevara. As Commandante of the Revolutionary Army of Barbutos, Guevara—only a few years later than the time covered in the film—ordered scores of executions of Batista loyalists and deserters. This “Che” is no way discernible in Salles’s Ernesto, and indeed, in reality, one might not have been discernible in the other. But the knowledge we bring to the film makes us wonder. Nor should we forget that, during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Guevara became disillusioned with the Soviet Union over Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s refusal to launch nuclear war against the United States. It is well and good that the film provides a postscript indicting the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency for its hand in the murder of Guevara; but what of the Guevara who thought nothing about murdering masses of citizens of the United States? You will not find the remotest intimation of him in Salles’s film. On the other hand, the Abraham Lincoln whose Patriot Act-type clampdown on civil liberties during the American Civil War defined part of his presidency is discernible in John Ford’s portrait of him as a young man in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Sergei M. Eisenstein’s favorite American film, at least in part, I presume, because of Ford’s cautionary analysis of U.S. democracy’s vulnerability to demagoguery. Salles could have made a more probing film (as did Ford), and his “humanizing” Guevara may constitute just another mythology.

Even (or, perhaps, especially) apart from the particular case of Guevara, Salles engages us by recording with emotional clarity the spirit of youth. In this light, the future Che may be seen as a radical departure from Ernesto as much as an evolved instance of human growth. Attempting to right injustices, war imposes its own rules and often creates personalities in line with the perceived necessities of those rules—personalities at stark variance with those that would otherwise have developed in the same human beings. In order to embrace Salles’s film, one must both relate Ernesto to Che and separate the two. The film errs near the end by showcasing the asthmatic Ernesto’s gratuitously “heroic” swim across the Amazon River, from one bank to the other on the night before his departure for home, to rejoin the lepers whom he has been tending. It is as false and sentimental a gesture, for Salles, as is the film’s ridiculous coda, in which the actual Alberto Granado, today, is pictured in horrible closeup, his eyes filled with convenient memories. Salles has borrowed this bogus documentary finish from Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), and Spielberg himself took the idea from a film in which the strategy works: Agnieszka Holland’s fine Europa, Europa (1991). It is all too apparent that Salles holds the closeup as an invitation for us to “read into” the real old man’s face the face of the much younger Granado that we have watched throughout the film. This is shabby, shameless and cornball. Buried beneath this sentimental gesture is the one pertinent point: that Granado has long honored the memory of his dear friend, Ernesto, by adopting Cuba as his homeland and practicing medicine there. This is how the Revolution has continued, but Salles is tone-deaf to the sweet music of undying friendship at his disposal.

The film lives, then, for the duration of the Latin American journey that it depicts—the trip that gave Ernesto Guevara an education of the heart. The faces of the workers (such as at a Chilean copper mine) and of other ordinary persons he encounters are indelible—for him and for us. (The periodic black-and-white insertions of reiterated images of these souls might have worked better if they implied Guevara’s haunted memory rather than, as they do, Salles’s manipulative technique.) The land, which Guevara says he had wanted to get close to, becomes a key visual player—the earth, the skies, the Andes, the Amazon River. There is too much of a lot in the film, including upwardly tilted quasi-Soviet-silent shots of human faces portrayed against the illimitable sky; but much of the film’s excesses translates into a warm generosity. Where Salles has most admirably restrained himself is in the area of Nature’s gorgeousness. Images of this appear as punctuation during the trip—glimpses of such unearthly beauty that a steady stream of such images would have greatly diminished both the beauty and their utility. Salles’s selectivity and restraint help keep the film from becoming a travelogue, which I, for one, would have found tiresome; the glimpses seem visionary, and they accumulate into a metaphor for the growth of both Guevara’s humanity and own visionary capacity. We observe Nature as a projection of liberated humanity, and the poor and the struggling whom Guevara meets along the way imply the context of humanity’s need to be liberated—that is, freed from oppression. The visual aspect of the film is touched by poetry. The human faces, the earth, the sky: these merge into a single grandeur in the regions of our imagination. The film’s superb color cinematographer, Eric Gautier, deservedly took the Technical Grand Prize at Cannes.

The meditative first-person voiceover also contributes to the poetry of the film. For instance, Guevara’s comment on two consecutive points in the journey assumes the stature of a universal reflection. He speaks of the melancholy he feels over the place he is leaving and the excitement he feels about the new place he is entering—as though the present, emotionally, was the point of intersection between past and future. Guevara’s sensitivity to environment, including people, suggests a man capable of continual rebirth.

Gael García Bernal, the Mexican Alain Delon, plays Ernesto Guevara de la Serna. Bernal came to The Motorcycle Diaries with experience; he had already played Che Guevara in a 2002 television mini-series about Fidel Castro. Salles has drawn from him excellent work. I question the necessity of amplified sound for Guevara’s heavy asthmatic breathing, but in the main Bernal is a joy from start to finish.

If only Bernal could have what Delon has had—Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Joseph Losey and Louis Malle directing him!

MOBUTU, KING OF ZAIRE (Thierry Michel, 1999)

The principal attraction of Thierry Michel’s Belgian documentary about the despot born Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, co-written by Lye Mudaba Yoka, Professor of Literature at the University of Kinshasa, is the riveting nature of the man’s story—and its Shakespearean dimensions. Born in the colonized Belgian Congo, Mobutu grew up continually humiliated, and smart. In 1949, he was impressed into the Belgian Congolese Army for rancorous behavior. In 1956 he joined the Congolese National Movement, which agitated for independence. After he negotiated this independence, Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s—now Zaire’s—first elected prime minister, appointed Mobutu to his cabinet. But the loyalist betrayed his mentor, angling for his own grab at power. Later that year, a coup d’état, which Colonel Mobutu headed, left in presidential power Lumumba’s coalition partner, Joseph Kasavubu. Early in 1961, Lumumba was assassinated—by African mercenaries at the behest of Eisenhower’s C.I.A. (Michel omits all mention of U.S. involvement.) Mobutu betrayed Kasavubu, seizing power for himself in 1965. Mobutu cashed in on Lumumba’s reputation by rehabilitating it in 1966. In 1972 he renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga: “The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake.” His “presidential” reign, which increasingly mired Zaire in poverty, instability and corruption, lasted thirty-two years. In 1997 a coup removed Mubutu, and Zaire became the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
     Michel’s lively, always engaging film isn’t exactly probing; Shakespeare Michel is not, and we never gain access to whatever veins of guilt may have penetrated Mobutu’s mind and soul. However, we note Mobutu’s gradual passage from a slender, spectacularly handsome, often smiling young man to a stocky, glum, ugly, medal-festooned dictator. A picture is worth a thousand words.

FALLEN ANGEL (Otto Preminger, 1945)

Written by Harry Kleiner from a novel by Martin Holland, Otto Preminger’s Fallen Angel is a tale of two women living in two different parts of town. The town is Walton, California, which is 150 miles from San Francisco. One of the women is dark, played by a Mexican-born actress on the professional rise; the other is blonde, played by a former American sweetheart hoping for a comeback. The dark woman is a waitress at Pops, a tiny hamburger, coffee and beer joint; she lives in a small apartment in the seedy, dilapidated part of town close to shore. The blonde woman, who is middle-class and moderately rich, lives with her sister in their own house in the clean, manicured part of town. The film identifies the dark woman’s part of town with pitch-dark night; the blonde’s, with sunny daylight. The latter plays classical music; the former listens to honky-tonk. The dark woman has been around the block a lot; the blonde woman is sexually inexperienced. The contrast between the two women and the two parts of town is formally rendered throughout by deep, ravishing contrasts in the black-and-white cinematography that Joseph LaShelle gorgeously conjures. LaShelle was Preminger’s painstaking cinematographer for Laura (1944), for which he won an Oscar.

In Laura, Preminger had wryly approached the contrast in class between his working-class police detective and the society rich making up the detective’s list of suspects in the murder he is investigating. But Fallen Angel investigates its class distinctions with more dedication and brio, arriving at a social critique about two Americas, the festering division in the social American landscape. One group of people consists of relocated individuals, transients and those perpetually poised to become transients, a point underscored by the fact that Stella, the waitress (Linda Darnell, vivid), has a history of disappearing from job and home for days on end, much to the chagrin of her employer, who unabashedly adores her. By contrast, the Mills sisters represent a kind of stability. They have a history in Walton; their deceased father, Abraham Mills, had been the town’s mayor. They are respectable, while Stella is on the make, looking for the one guy who will prove her ticket out of socioeconomic stress.

A rich, ambiguous work, Fallen Angel isn’t at all as schematic as my description thus far has made it sound. For one thing, one of the Mills girls, the non-blonde Clara (Anne Revere, on the verge of winning her Oscar for National Velvet), has been touched by nonrespectability herself, having lost her inheritance, except for the house, to a lover who conned her out of the money. For another, the protagonist, a drifter named Eric Stanton (Dana Andrews), shuffles back and forth between both parts of town, dating both Stella and Clara’s sister, June (Alice Faye), ostensibly to get hold of June’s money so that Stella will accept him as her lucky break. In the meantime, June, whom he mercenarily marries, falls in love with Eric for real. Does love blind her or help her to see with especial clarity? When Stella is murdered, June alone believes in his innocence and takes flight with him, from the police, to San Francisco.

At the core of this film noir, which is one of Preminger’s very best films, is a dream element that anticipates another San Francisco-film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), by positing the possibility—here, in symbolical terms—that the two women, dark Stella and blonde June, are somehow identical, or, perhaps, aspects of a single character.* Kleiner and Preminger pull off this sleight of eye effortlessly. I will recount four of the key elements in the film that forge this identification of the two seemingly disparate women, although, in fact, there are many more. For one, as noted earlier, Stanton dates both characters. One night, he takes Stella dancing, and the next night, having tarried in town longer than planned, he takes June dancing. By coincidence, Stella is on the same dance floor that night, with her own date. “Ditch him,” Stanton whispers to Stella, “and I’ll meet you afterwards.” Stella declines, but the invitation implies the women’s interchangeability, hence, identity. Again, Stanton marries June, but only because he wants to marry Stella, for which to make happen, he believes, he first must get hold of June’s money! Marrying one character because he wants to marry the other is a second way the film implies their identity. It is Stanton’s desire to leave town, to run away with, Stella, but, once she is murdered, he runs away with June instead—a third hint of identity. A fourth point of identity between Stella and June is the redemption of Stanton’s marriage to June by his sleuthing out the identity of Stella’s killer.

Needless to say, in context none of this is schematic, either. The identity between the two women bridges the apparent wide divide between them, creating a poignant undertow. Preminger has found a way, through the identification of the two lead female characters, to reimagine America, to express his egalitarian heart and dream of a single, unified America. The gradual accumulation of this symbolic vision of his makes Fallen Angel a more profound, if unremittingly sober experience than Laura, although, of course, Laura provides more scintillating entertainment.

As is the case with Laura, perhaps the most celebrated of all Hollywood whodunits, the revelation of the murderer’s identity is rigorously, even perfectly logical and yet also comes as something of a shock. When it can surprise you with the most reasonable unraveling of the crime, a mystery delights like nothing else on earth.

* Hitchcock’s Judy (Kim Novak) sounds almost exactly like Preminger’s Stella!