"THERE'S A MANIAC LOOSE IN SAN FRANCISCO
AND THE POLICE ARE POWERLESS TO STOP HIM!"



The Sniper - real. Edward Dmytryk, 1952

"The Sniper is very likely one of the first films – using the new, more mobile equipment that emerged in the late 40s – to take full advantage as San Francisco as a location, transforming the city’s famously vertiginous geography into a metaphor for its protagonist’s unstable mental state. (...) If Hitchcock mined The Sniper for Vertigo, he seems also to have remembered it in constructing Psycho. Franz's character is portrayed as a strangely asexual loner with a profound mother complex (there is even a fatuous police psychiatrist, played by Richard Kiley, around to “explain” his compulsion, just like Simon Oakland in Psycho).

Marie Windsor

Just like Norman Bates, Eddie is driven to kill as a substitute for sexual fulfillment; he is alternately shyly protective around women (the Janet Leigh figure here is a nightclub pianist played by Marie Windsor) and violently contemptuous, a transformation triggered the instant a woman reveals a hint of sexual desire. Like Psycho, The Sniper ends with the camera closing in on an astonishing close-up of the killer, though in place of the death’s head grin that Hitchcock would give Norman Bates, Franz's Eddie releases a single glycerin tear as he looks up at the police detective (a rumpled Adolphe Menjou) who has finally, providentially captured him.

And the detective’s name (no kidding): Lt. Frank Kafka". (aqui)

(2009)