In Contention‘s Guy Lodge has written about how 72 years ago a pair of Alfred Hitchcock films, Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent, competed against each other for Best Picture. The melodramatic Rebecca took the prize, and it certainly holds up today…mostly. But by today’s standards Correspondent, which Hitch derided as an implausibly playful B picture, has much more vitality and dishy mise en scene. The Amsterdam assassination-in-the-rainstorm scene, the plane crash finale, the Dutch windmill scene, Edmund Gween plunging off the tower…no comparison.
