Room at the top
Ira Levin was a brilliant writer whatever genre he broached: sci-fi
with his terrifying " this perfect day" which compares favorably with Orwell's "1984" or "the Stepford wives" ,horror and fantasy with his masterpiece -which is also Polanski's towering achievement-"Rosemary's baby" and detective stories : "dead trap" and "a kiss before dying"; There were three heiresses in the original novel:the screenplay reduced them to two ,but it is not a big problem.The story of a boy who knows "there's room at the top but first must learn to smile as he kills" .Robert Wagner is terribly handsome and the title does not lie:the scene at the top of the building compares favorably with Hitchcock's murder scenes. The remake,starring Matt Dillon ,is good,much better than the average remake.. 
A Super-Suspenseful Re-Working of an Unfilmable Novel
I always thought this was a 20th Century-Fox production. All the stars
were under contract to Fox at the time and so were most of the technical personnel. Gerd Oswald does a great job, building suspense to breaking point and making most effective use of the wide screen to pointedly capture his locations in Tucson and elsewhere in Arizona, and yet emphasize the disturbing emotional distance between his players by often placing them right against opposing frame lines (a clever device that has been outlawed since the mid-1970s because of the demands of TV syndication). True, Oswald had never directed a cinema movie before, although he did have extensive experience as an assistant director and had directed two TV episodes. Robert Wagner gives a startlingly compelling performance as the killer (he is identified right from the start) and receives outstanding support from the lovely Virginia Leith. Also most effectively cast is Joanne Woodward, and in a minor role but key scene, Robert Quarry. Like Wagner, Jeffrey Hunter is also cast against type, but he is less impressive and tends to over-use his prop spectacles. Although Lionel Newman's score and his title song (lyrics by Carroll Coates, sung by Dolores Hawkins) have been criticized, I found both very suspenseful.. |
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