A free-willed automaton named Beebee, muttering and sputtering like a cousin to Popeye and Donald Duck, gets blown to bits by a reclusive old shotgun-toting hag -- a turn of events comparable to the deaths of Janet Leigh in Psycho and John Wayne in The Cowboys. But the teenage whiz …
Sinatra paints an attractively washed-out portrait of a U.S. intelligence officer (a.k.a. "stupidity officer," in a line that tickled Dwight Macdonald). His fatigue and jitters seem an appropriate reaction to, and comment on, the task of propping up a delirious political thriller composed of tight-skinned, glassy-eyed zombies (Laurence Harvey, Henry …
The barrenness of the television-play production and black-and-white image works rather nicely in the early scenes of bleak urban existence — the comfortless hotel room, Janet Leigh's comfortless bra — but Hitchcock seems to be pushing and pleading, later on, to extract thrills from a nosy highway patrolman, a slimy …
Orson Welles at his most orotund as director, but not quite most rotund as actor. Rotund enough, though. ("You're a mess, honey," he is told by a wise Mexican whore. "You ought to lay off those candy bars." And later, after he has sent an underling to fetch coffee, he …