Some thoughts

This was recommended to me recently and I went ahead and watched it last night after noticing it was a zippy 81 minutes.

I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's an interesting film. I immediately noticed the inspiration from the Leopold and Loeb story, and some reading confirmed this. The themes here are dark subject matter, especially for the 1940s.

The film was sold to me as a simulated one-take, in the vein of Birdman or 1917, but this isn't precisely true. There are at least three undisguised, run-of-the-mill cuts in the film that I noticed. Still, the film does unfold in real time, and is MOSTLY a fake one-take.

I thought the actors here were tremendous. This was an interesting role for Jimmy Stewart, and seems like a kind of middle ground between his "Boy Scout" characters, such as the one found in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and his more shady roles, such as that found in Vertigo.

Overall, I thought it was a fun and effective film. I was surprised to read that both Stewart and Hitchcock were in agreement that the film was "an interesting exercise, but it didn't really work."