Sim City

Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950) is another movie I feel like I should have seen. But I'm pretty sure I would have remembered it.

It starts in the middle, with Jane Wyman driving Richard Todd through London. He is telling her he didn't know who else to turn to, then tells her the story in flashback. 

His married lover, Marlene Dietrich, showed up at his apartment in a blood-stained dress. She had killed her husband accidentally in a fight. She's a singer, and isn't sure whether to go to her performance that night. He convinces her to act normal (she's also an actress) but she'll need a clean dress. So he goes to her place to get one. And of course, someone sees him. So he dropped off the dress and called Wyman.

She takes him to her father's country place so he can hide out. He's a sly old duffer played by Alastair Sim. I thought at first that he was actually Inspector Cockrill or the guy from Cottage to Let. But no - in this one, he plays the accordion when thinking deeply. 

One of the things he's thinking about is the blood-stained dress that Todd is still carrying around - it seems to have been smeared purposely. Todd gets angry at this, and burns the dress. 

But now Wyman wants to investigate further. She follows Dietrich's shrewish maid, Kay Walsh, to a bar to eavesdrop. But a nice man named Smith (Ordinary Smith) chats her up. He is played by Michael Wilding, Mr. Elizabeth Taylor No. 2. He is also a Scotland Yard detective. 

Wyman bribes Walsh to let her take her place as Dietrich's maid, pretending to be a reporter. So we get to see Wyman, who had been playing prim upper-middle-class, doing a simple girl in service. She does all this while falling in love with Wilding, although she had been in love with Todd, who was in love with Dietrich, who was probably just toying with him, even after he covered up her killing.

All of this is handled by Hitchcock with snesitivity and humor. I wouldn't call Wyman a great actress, but she is quite convincing as a love-struck innocent (for two different men) and as a snoop playing a servant. Sim is a joy as always, and Todd and Wilding play their parts as bad boy and besotted detective well. Dietrich gets shorted a bit, although she has some good scenes as a heartless widow. Hitchcock is perhaps too respectful of her iconic status, so she stays an icon. She does get to sing "La Vie en Rose", though.

But here's the spoiler - I had heard about this myself but managed to forget - that first flashback was a lie. It didn't happen the way Todd told us, even though we "saw" it with our own eyes. Some people, including Hitchcock in the end, consider this a cheat. Well, all the flashbacks in Rashoman are questionable, and nobody complains about that.

In conclusion, I feel like I've seen Sim playing accordion when thinking, like Sherlock Holmes' violin, somewhere else. Is this just deja vu? Some other character with another instrument? Or have I seen this before?