Hitchcock was known for “owning” his material – transforming novels and plays into real Hitchcock films. This was one of the exceptions – he didn’t tamper with it too much, resulting in one of his stagier works (although it has it’s fans such as Martin Scorsese). The source material is impressive; it’s a complex, clever piece – I wrote an article on the career of Alec Coppel, and I feel that this is the sort of play Coppel tried to write all his life but never quite succeeded.
It has hall marks of some of Coppel’s work – it involves a love triangle, about a ruthless English husband tries to bump off his cheating wife, who has been having an affair with an American (it’s the set up of Coppel’s A Man About a Dog – although here the lover and wife are quite sympathetic). The American is a TV writer who works in the crime genre, and characters make comments like “the perfect murder does X”, which Coppel had characters do all the time.
But the plot of this feels worked out more thoroughly than anything Coppel managed to achieve. It is very clever, with the ex-tennis pro husband going about his murder in a smart fashion. Some great twists – the murder falls through, but then the husband sees his chance to frame the wife anyway… only to fail because of stuff involving a key (it gets very complex with detail but the main thing is the husband thought the supposed killer had his key on him but it was actually the supposed killer’s own key!)
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