Category Archives: Hitchcockian Thrillers by Acclaimed Directors

Frantic (1988) | Roman Polanski



Dr. Richard Walker (Harrison Ford) and his loving wife (Betty Buckley) travel to Paris where he is to speak at a medical convention. In their hotel room, they discover that his wife has picked up the wrong suitcase at the airport, and they report this to TWA. While Dr. Walker is in the shower, his wife gets a phone call and is soon out of the room, and out of sight altogether as she is now missing. With the French police offering little assistance to his plight, Dr. Walker must search through Paris on his own, hoping for some trace of where his wife has gone, forcing him through an odyssey through the underbelly of Paris’ seediest locations. Emmanuelle Seigner co-stars in this Roman Polanski film.


The Bedroom Window (1987) | Curtis Hanson



Steve Guttenberg stars as Terry Lambert, a businessman who is having an affair with his boss’s alluring French wife, Sylvia Wentworth (Isabelle Huppert).  After their latest coupling, they are startled by a scream coming from the courtyard outside.  Rushing to the window, Sylvia shrieks as she sees an assault on a woman at the hands of a redhead male with pasty white skin.  However, she can’t report it, as she desperately doesn’t want her affair to become known by her wealthy husband.  Terry thinks he’s doing the honorable thing by pretending that it was he who saw the actual assault, as he suspects that there may be a connection between it and the series of murders in the area.  However, circumstances lead to Terry himself being implicated in the murder, and the only person willing to help is Denise (Elizabeth McGovern), the victim he has been trying to assist. Curtis Hanson writes and directs.


Still of the Night (1982) | Robert Benton



Roy Scheider plays a newly divorced New York psychiatrist named Sam Rice, who discovers that George Bynum (Josef Sommer), one of his prominent patients, has been murdered. Bynum was the curator of antiquities for Crispin’s, a high-scale auction house, who engaged in a sexual affair with Brooke Reynolds (Meryl Streep), a younger woman who worked with him. During his counseling sessions, Bynum told Sam all about Brooke in such vivid detail that Sam thinks he might have fallen for Bynum’s mistress himself. Those feelings get reinforced when Brooke visits Sam’s office to hand him Bynum’s wristwatch he left in her apartment the night of his death. Sam becomes infatuated with Brooke, but as he pursues her romantically, he’s also frightened of her because she might be Bynum’s murderer. As the police press him for evidence, Sam begins following Brooke to learn more, only to feel she might already be stalking him as her potential next kill. Robert Benton writes and directs.