Conventional wisdom has it that Hitchcock never made a bad film. Conventional wisdom also has it that you should never revisit the scene of a crime. Here, both are overturned in Hitch's remake of his 1934 film of the same title. The action of the first part is relocated from Switzerland to Morocco, but to no great purpose as the screen time is largely eaten up with fake backdrops, even when the characters are walking. Then we're launched into a nonsense plot where James Stewart gets told a couple of names by a shot Frenchman, and his son gets kidnapped so that he'll be persuaded to part with his secrets, which are to espionage gold what alphabetti spaghetti is to Italian cuisine. And Doris Day gets to sing Que Sera, Sera, just because she's there. Several times.
Any hope of suspense is undermined by a laughably flimsy plot in which the protagonists trot from A to B for no particular motive. And to add to all this, it isn't even witty. Avoid like the plague and watch Vertigo for the umpteenth time instead, if you must.
3/10
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