Tony
Wendice is a former tennis star whose wealthy wife is having an
affair with an old frined of theirs. He plans on murdering her and
getting her insurance money, and to facilitate shifting the blame
away, he blackmails an former college chum with a checkered past to
strangle her. But things don't work out exactly as planned and the
cat and mouse game begins in covering up the goings on.
This is a
classic Hitchcock film, but credit should go more to the deft script
by playwright Frederick Knott with a really smart succession of
twists and turns to keep you in suspense. Being written for the
stage, this film does very little to venture outside of the
livingroom where most of the action takes place, but the tightly
constructed plot is still riveting nonetheless. Hitchcock tosses in
a few touches of style, though some were injected due to the fact
that it was originally filmed to be shown in 3-D. Remade later in
the form of the almost equally entertaining A PERFECT MURDER.
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