A long absent uncle goes to visit his relatives and is trailed by detectives who think he is a murderer. The family's eldest daughter tries to learn the truth of the situation.
Dull. An hour and 47 minutes seemed to pass slowly. I had to force myself to be interested in the plot because I was watching this for film class at school. Nothing of consequence happened until the last few minutes. Characters were stereotypical of the era: the dorks, businessmen, housewives... The whole thing was based mostly on dialogue that was not very interesting. I think that the actors did a professional job of playing their roles. Sets and costumes looked like an early sitcom. It seemed to be a prototype for I Love Lucy and Leave it to Beaver. The suburban town, men in suits, women in dresses, everything looking the same. Camera-work was not as bad as the rest. Hitchcock is known for shot variety and this delivered on that, if nothing else. The audio was actually mixed quite well. I could hear dialogue, music and sound effects at the correct levels, with nothing clipping into distortion. I would describe the style best as gentrified and stuck in first gear. This got 8/10 on IMDB, Roger Ebert gave it 4/4 and it has 100% tomatometer, 90% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. 92.5% A grade average seems a little high for something so uninteresting. I rate this tolerable because it was just plain boring.
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