Apart from maybe 'Marnie', this might possibly be the worst film in Alfred Hitchcock's entire canon.
For one thing - and I'm not sure why this is - the sound quality is absolutely dreadful. The jarring frequency of the microphones is loud enough to sometimes drown out the voices of the actors. Some occasionally concerning feedback noises also suggest that something's not quite right with the tech behind the scenes(!). Not helped by the fact that the actors' enunciation - by modern standards - isn't phenomenal away, so it can be extremely difficult to follow what is actually going on in the plot.
The story itself (and this is neither the fault of Hitchcock nor the actors) isn't that original. It seems to be a combination of Romeo and Juliet and Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and a fairly boring combination at that, centred around agricultural politics?
We don't get treated to much (if any?) suspense or tension either; instead, our usually very expressionistic director just gives us shots of a room where two characters talk...and follow them around as they continue talking...(and as I've said, you're only guaranteed to comprehend about 50% of it).
What follows therefore is a boring, 82-minutes-too-long, incomprehensible, suspense-free drama where you're constantly wondering if the apparatus was about to explode...or if it's just a film hard to 'restore' properly for modern viewers.
For one thing - and I'm not sure why this is - the sound quality is absolutely dreadful. The jarring frequency of the microphones is loud enough to sometimes drown out the voices of the actors. Some occasionally concerning feedback noises also suggest that something's not quite right with the tech behind the scenes(!). Not helped by the fact that the actors' enunciation - by modern standards - isn't phenomenal away, so it can be extremely difficult to follow what is actually going on in the plot.
The story itself (and this is neither the fault of Hitchcock nor the actors) isn't that original. It seems to be a combination of Romeo and Juliet and Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and a fairly boring combination at that, centred around agricultural politics?
We don't get treated to much (if any?) suspense or tension either; instead, our usually very expressionistic director just gives us shots of a room where two characters talk...and follow them around as they continue talking...(and as I've said, you're only guaranteed to comprehend about 50% of it).
What follows therefore is a boring, 82-minutes-too-long, incomprehensible, suspense-free drama where you're constantly wondering if the apparatus was about to explode...or if it's just a film hard to 'restore' properly for modern viewers.