Something to Hide
AKA Shattered
Directed by Alastair Reid
1976
Starring Peter Finch, Shelly Winters, Colin Blakely, John Stride, Linda Hayden
92 minutes
A drunken married couple, Harry and Gabriella (Peter Finch and Shelly Winters), are truly miserable together. Harry's big dreams have fallen flat and Gabriella is still bitter about giving up her stage career for marriage 26 years ago. One Christmas Eve, she leaves him. Left alone, Harry takes to the bottle even harder and is on thin ice with his boss. He continually skips going to the office in order to pick his wife up from the airport but she never shows. One afternoon, he picks up a young and very pregnant hitchhiker named Lorelai (Linda Hayden) and brings her home. She is a manipulative little parasite who worms her way into Harry's life and things quickly spiral out of control.
Something to Hide is a very dark, off beat, and melodramatic sleeper full of tension and a sense of terrible dread. The title song "How Can We Run Away" by Buddy Greco is as cheesy as it is perfectly ominous. Shelly Winters is completely obnoxious (but her part is little more than an extended cameo) and Peter Finch is excellent. Beauty Linda Hayden (Taste the Blood of Dracula) is made up to be so awful and unappealing in this movie that she's hard to look at. This film definitely won't restore your faith in humanity or give you a spring in your step but it's definitely worth a look. I don't think the writer likes women very much and you won't believe the freakin' ending!
"Goddamn vegetarian creep!"
The trailer is full of SPOILERS, watch at your own risk:
Wow, I've never heard of this one! Now I know where they got the image of the girl in the window for the poster of Don't Open the Window (aka The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue)! Will have to check it out.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think this film was actually shot in 1972 but not released in the U.S. until 1976.
ReplyDelete@Ryan - Good point. It does feel earlier than '72. And nice work spotting the poster art. Maybe I shouldn't write movies anymore! I'm not really detail oriented, I guess.
ReplyDelete