A perfect film about the "perfect crime"
Can an experimental film be made in 1948? Yes! Hitchcock did it with “Knot in the Throat”. 80 minutes of uninterrupted sequence shot (in reality there are some editing connections but they are almost invisible to the viewer's eye). Shot indoors, the film immediately offers us the perspective of the killers and their motive: the creation of a perfect crime. Two young friends kill a third boy and hide his body inside a chest. This is what they tell us in the very first lines of the film. In the evening a party is planned after which the two boys will leave for a holiday. The guests are about to arrive and no one must suspect that a crime has just taken place in that apartment. The murder soon begins to appear as a sort of macabre homage paid by the killers to their mentor. Throughout the film we breathe the homoerotic tension between the two characters even though nothing tells it clearly. The dialogues are perfect. Nothing is left to chance. Everything is studied to the millimetre. Every performer gives their best. James Stewart stands tall above all. A film that is a film school from every perspective you look at it. Even now, more than eighty years later, Hitchcock manages to hit the target.
