The Stop Button

There’s a distinct, definite brilliance to Siodmak’s direction. The film itself is unique in casting a woman as the hero in a film noir, essentially Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, while maintaining her as female. Ella Raines’s boss (played, in the film’s only mediocre performance, by Alan Curtis) is falsely convicted, due to perjury. Raines […]

I watched this film on a recommendation, since I’ve mostly sworn off Truffaut. I’d read it was one of his Hitchcock homages (and anything has to be better than Mississippi Mermaid) but I really wasn’t expecting so much “homage.” Besides the Bernard Herrmann score, which is identical to his more famous Hitchcock scores, mostly Vertigo, […]