After a long, long time, a review of an Alfred Hitchcock film. Hitch has been one of my favourite directors ever since I (then aged twelve) first watched The Lady Vanishes. In the first few years of blogging, I ended up reviewing most of my favourite Hitch films from before 1970: The Thirty-Nine Steps, Rear Window, The Trouble With Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Spellbound, Lifeboat… and others. But it’s been a while, and this film has been lying among the bookmarks on my browser, waiting to be watched, for quite a while now.

The aptly-named Stage Fright is set in the world of theatre, where Eve Gill (a very young Jane Wyman) is an aspiring actress. She has still not quite managed to make it into any productions, really, but she is hopeful. When the story begins, though, Eve is not acting or rehearsing: she’s busy helping a friend of hers who’s in trouble. Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd) is likely to get implicated in a murder, and Eve is driving him to (hopefully) safety.