The issues aren't satisfactorily resolved, but Hitchcock seems to be exploring the ways in which various falsehoods -- the falsehoods of acting, storytelling, and art in general -- can lead to the truth
One is strongly suspicious, after watching this helter-skelter film, that Mr. Hitchcock was much less interested in his over-all story than in individual scenes.
The standard British murder mystery is raised to a higher plateau by Hitchcock in Stage Fright, but still falters in comparison to the best of the master's works.
A fairly routine thriller, noted chiefly for its cheating flashback, though with much more to enjoy than its detractors -- including Hitchcock -- make out.
When I first started watching Alfred Hitchcock's movies, I would pretend I was part of an alien race that was going to pillage Planet Hitchcock. Not really, but go with it. I'd start with the classic major cities (Psycho, Vertigo, North By Northwest), then work my way out to the smaller but still happening cities
(Rope, The Trouble With Harry, The Birds.) But lately I'm sifting through the lesser cities. The dull ones that serve egg noodles with ketchup and try to pass it off as spaghetti with marinara sauce. The towns that close by six, have two traffic lights and are 40 miles from the nearest Wal-Mart. I'm not going to go as far as to accuse Stage Fright of being the geographic equivalent of the armpit of the world, it sure as hell isn't a Fresno, CA! Stage Fright more or less wears into territory that Hitchcock spent a lot of time walking upon with the innocent being chased while trying to disprove their guilt. Here he does so from a different perspective with a woman trying to prove the innocence of the object of her affection. Stage Fright's cast is pretty good (normally I can't stand Jane Wyman but she's not bad here) but Alastair Sim steals the show as Wyman's father and makes the movie pretty damn funny at points. Stage Fright did little to make me wonder if the rest of Planet Hitchcock was worth conquering but it could always be worse. It could be Planet Bay or Planet Shyamalan. And we all know that the crappiest towns on Planet Hitchcock are still better than the meccas on those hellholes.
Stage fright has it's highs and lows, it's not one of his better films but that isn't saying much when you appreciate his amazing body of work. That said, here he invented one of my pet hates, the false flashback. He himself later admitted that he regretted it, a forgivable mistake though, especially when you consider
his pioneering work within cinema - trial and error maketh' the man and all that. It is however, directed beautifully, I particularly enjoyed the backdrops of late 40's London, even to the point that I had to go on google-earth and check them out after the film. The performances are also very good, Jane Wyman & Marlene Dietrich are both brilliant but for me it's Alastair Sim who steals the show.
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