So I saw this movie back in 2004, and I liked it quite a bit; so even though I didn’t strictly need to rewatch it for AFI purposes, I was 100% up for it.

The thing that stands out this time to me is how much this feels like a Coen Brothers movie. There’s a scene early on that could have come out of Burn After Reading, the plot is basically The Big Lebowski, and the general “ordinary guy gets caught up in something too big for him” vibe is really just where the Coens have lived cinematically.

But beyond that, my 2004-era impression of it as a Big Summer Action Movie also holds up pretty well. Like, Psycho is not quite like anything else you’d see today; Vertigo isn’t quite like anything else you’d see today; Rear Window isn’t quite like anything else you’d see today. But this? You’ve definitely seen a lot of things like this, maybe most recently with Daniel Craig playing the Cary Grant role.

I mean, like, the plot logic is thin in general, and the logic of individual scenes is sometimes non-existent. The famous crop-duster scene is a great example: It’s memorable, it’s visually compelling, it works emotionally to make him feel persecuted in a creepy way, but like… what the heck is going on there? If you try to explain the chain of events that leads up to this happening, there’s just no way to make it even remotely plausible. It’s there because Hitchcock thought it would be cool, same as the Mount Rushmore fight. It’s just extremely Summer Action Movie in the way that it’s a bunch of cool scenes strung together with the thinnest of threads.

Really, the main place I disagree with myself is about Eva Marie Saint. Back then, I thought she was wooden and not doing much; this time around, I thought she was good. Interestingly enough, in the Unspooled podcast (the reason we’re watching these AFI movies), Amy Nicholson thought she was wooden and flat, and Paul Scheer thought she was good. So apparently 20-year-ago me agreed with Amy, but I tbh don’t see why.

(But I 100% agree with young me — and everyone else — about Cary Grant’s evident greatness here. The dude is just a charisma factory in every movie he’s in, and he has some great lines here, like his case for not getting killed: “I’ve got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders depending upon me.”)

To kind of consider this movie in the context of the AFI list, I’m in the weird position of thinking it’s maybe the most purely enjoyable Hitchcock, but also really is doing the same thing a lot of other movies have done. Like, if this, why not a whole bunch of perfectly enjoyable action movies? And — as the Unspooled people pointed out — there are zero Coens on the list. So I like this movie a great deal, but as the fourth Hitchcock on the list, I’d also happily sacrifice it for Fargo or whatever to get the Coens on.