There are some films (most famously Charade) that seem Hitchcockian enough to be genuine Hitchcocks. This one falls short (although it's probably better than a couple of his weaker efforts), although one wonders what the master would've made of this material, and this star-studded cast.
The plot: we are in London, and Doris Day is Kit Preston, new (just 3 months) bride of Banker Tony Preston (Rex Harrison at his suave best - unusually un-ascerbic), who starts getting mysterious phone calls
threatening to kill her. However, nobody ever hears them (not even us, for most of them, although we do hear the initial threat that comes in the fog as she walks across Grosvenor Square from the American Embassy to their swanky flat) and Tony, initially solicitous and supportive gradually loses confidence in the reality of the threat.
Meanwhile, at Tony's bank they are about to withdraw funding from a man's Gold Mine because somebody is somehow trying to undermine it (I didn't understand that part, because it involved money) and then an employee works out that some other employee has gradually been syphoning money from the bank to the (current) tune of a million pounds.
Side characters include Melvyn Douglas as Tony's colleague who is shown to be a serial loser at the horses (to the extent that he is refused credit at his regular bookie's), Roddy McDowell
as the ne'er-do-well son of Kit and Tony's maid, Nora, who doesn't like that Kit "is trying to come between them" (she watches him leech money off his doting mother and then makes sure to make up for it herself. He is a suspect for the voice because it is high and sing-song. Then there's the mysterious (and ludicrously unlikely) foreman of the construction team building right outside their apartment building, who is supposed to be English but is played by too-good-looking-by-half Rock Hudson knock-off John Gavin,
who is American (and went on to be Reagan's ambassador to Mexico!). Oh and Kit and Tony's neighbor Peggy, whose husband is off at sea with the Navy. And part way into the film Myrna Loy shows up as Kit's feisty Aunt Bea.
And John Williams (not the composer, but an instantly recognizable very English character actor) is the skeptical police inspector who plants the seed in Tony's mind that the threatening voice is a creation of Kit's unconscious. Oh, and finally there's a mysterious scar-faced man
who hangs round all the time and even breaks into Kit's bedroom, although of course has vanished by the time the help she screams for has arrived.
Multiple misdirects make it genuinely impossible to tell who's messing with Kit (although there's never really any serious implication that she's imagining it all). Things come to a head as first Tony postpones a promised trip to Venice (because of the whole bank business) and then reverses course and is ready to go off with Kit after one last bank meeting. Then the phone rings...
Definitely a bit slow to start, and, although there's nothing wrong with Day's performance, her character is made into a bit of a victim and she's a bit too girl-next-door to buy as somebody having a genuine psychotic break. Also, I can't help but feel that some of the cast is underused, especially Loy
and McDowell, as well as the wonderful Hermione Baddeley (best known as
Ellen the Maid in Mary Poppins) who only gets a couple of scenes as a publican.
However, the last twenty minutes or so is genuinely gripping and you can't help but feel sorry for Kit at the end... Oh, and if you're wondering, the title comes from the name of a garment that Kit buys for herself to get Tony excited, that she is wearing at the film's climax, that manages to be a curious combination of lacy and matronly on Day.
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