So this is a Hitchcock movie, but it’s a very weird, and I think ultimately unsuccessful, one. The premise is that Tippi Hedren plays a woman who is engaging in a certain amount of crime and con womanning; a young Sean Connery plays a rich guy whose eye she catches. And then the suspense is on!

I’m going to be vague here, because I don’t want to spoil things, but what I will say is that the core mystery and its resolution felt kind of weirdly obvious and also vaguely silly. Like, you know the kind of pointless denouement scene at the end of Psycho where they talk about the psychological background of Norman Bates? Imagine that level of psychological “sophistication,” but applied to a main character and driving the whole plot of the movie.

Modern psychology isn’t as based on these particular dated theories, and our understanding of trauma is a lot more sophisticated, so this ended up feeling like something that used outdated stereotypes of psychiatry rather than something psychologically real. It was too medicalized to just be storytelling cliche, but too dated to feel right to a modern.

There’s also scenes (including one particularly awful one) of what are clearly sexual assault from Connery, and yet the movie just breezes right past this and keeps acting like he’s an unvarnished good guy. Apparently one of the earlier writers pleaded with Hitchcock to take that scene out, and was fired because Hitchcock really wanted that scene in there, presumably because Hitchcock is himself awful.

(Also there’s an apparently-non-existent subplot where Sean Connery and his sister clearly have the hots for each other (there’s one scene where they give each other a really intense kiss on the lips, for instance), and it was extremely weird that this never paid off in anything. I genuinely don’t know what was going on there at all, I kept thinking it was going to be a big reveal that she was like secretly his wife all along or whatever, but nope. I’m not treating this as a spoiler, because it doesn’t seem that Hitchcock intended it to be a mislead, it just felt like one.)

End of the day, this is very minor Hitchcock. There are elements that could have been good in a different movie, and Connery works surprisingly well as a Hitchcock protagonist, but the movie is just a hot mess, and not really recommended except to completists.