Rich and Strange

A serious misfire from Alfred Hitchcock, Rich and Strange follows a couple (Henry Kendall’s Fred and Joan Barry’s Emily) as they embark on a cruise and subsequently find themselves falling for other people. Filmmaker Hitchcock, armed with a screenplay written alongside Alma Reville and Val Valentine, delivers a meandering, momentum-free endeavor that strikes all the wrong notes virtually from the word go, as the movie, which runs an often interminable 83 minutes, boasts a hopelessly underwhelming (and uninvolving) opening stretch devoted primarily to Fred and Emily’s less-than-enthralling exploits – with the arms-length atmosphere compounded by Hitchcock’s incongruously flat visuals and an overall feeling of abject pointlessness. The tedious midsection, which features a heavy emphasis on the protagonists’ dull encounters with other people, does little to alleviate the aggressively unwatchable vibe, nor does the inclusion of a oddly racist third act that isn’t satisfying in the least – with the end result an all-out disaster that surely marks the nadir of Hitchcock’s body of work.

* out of ****