What's most surprising about this film is the date, 1955. It is a nice criminal detective comedy since all ends well that had started very grimly and so bad. If we take this film like all films by Hitchcock should be taken, that is to say as a metaphor of real life, of history, of fate, then we might be less surprised by the date. After all the worst is gone, is behind. The war is finished, the second world war and the Korean war, and even McCarthy is dead and buried, politically I mean. We can breathe. The future is clear. The complications are all behind. We are finally getting out of this dark hole in which we had been buried for a long time. The famous post war thirty glorious years and its baby boom generation are starting to bring in the fruit of our suffering, sweating and efforts if not travail. What we have produced is being bought by some millionaire. Our work is recognized and valorized. We are going to be famous, great, rich, beautiful, who knows what else. So we can bury the past. We can un-bury it, and then bury it again, and eventually un-bury it a second time, but why not re-bury that poor past in order to finally get it out once more and discover it was not so bad and it was nothing but some kind of sad heart disease, a disease of the heart, a weak heart crushed by passions, love passion, dreams that me made into nightmares, and maybe some anger. But the film is surprising because Hitchcock manages to have absolutely no staircase, no flights of steps, with or without mezzanines, and yet don't believe me that easy because it is not flat country indeed. And so up they go and down they go, the roads and the tramps, and all the other people in that village, uphill and downhill, upstage and downstage, upriver and downriver, up the strokes and down the strokes to paint and paint and paint reality till no one recognizes it or sees it. And if it were not enough to constantly go up and down lanes and paths and trails and tracks, you go up and down into and out of the ground, you dig out and fill up and dig in and refill up and dig out again and fill up a third time and dig up this time and fill down for the last time. All that vertical movement around a man who is dead and lying horizontal in the middle of the auburn and russet leaves of the fall. Hitchcock is still with us. And he is all the more with us because he explores the psyche of the human species. When they meet with death, their first reaction is to feel guilty for a crime they assume at once they have committed. Paranoid species. Then they feel relieved because someone else assumes the crime they have committed till they feel guilty again and reveal their own doing in the crime. Neurotic, psychotic and schizophrenic, all in one same species. But then they try to forget and wipe it out to go on with the present and their lives. But that is to no avail because life is stronger than illusions and death is even stronger than life. So the crime comes back because it has to be brought out and registered for the life of the living to be able to go on. And it is then that it is all revealed that human beings are as dumb as my thumb and instead of having thought and thought again and pondered, they jumped to conclusions without even thinking one second. And it is the crazy doctor who trips on cadavers all the time and beg their pardons for having disturbed them who finds out all that death was natural and the hullabaloo was nothing but a mid summer night's dream in the middle of the fall. In other words Hitchcock is questioning us on the real value of life when death is no longer a crime. There seems to be little left in life if that is the case. Crime and murder are the real spices of life which is so banal and tasteless otherwise.<br /><br />Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines