Never trust the guy who makes the first toast at your anniversary party!

Jeremy responds to Dave’s inaugural choice of Hitchcock’s I CONFESS with Brian De Palma’s 1976 film OBSESSION, starring Cliff Robertson and Genevieve Bujold, with a treacherous frenemy turn from John Lithgow. Something is rotten in New Orleans in this genteely lurid steambath of loss and longing, as Robertson’s Michael Courtland hopes to recapture the love of his life by wooing a younger woman whose uncanny resemblance to his dead wife alarms those closest to him. With Bujold playing both female roles, we’re firmly in Hitchcock territory, with nods to VERTIGO piling up like stacks of cash in the ransom scheme that robbed our hero of his wife and daughter years before. 

Dave unpacks the parallels between Hitchcock’s masterpiece of fetishism and OBSESSION’s layers of imitation, while Jeremy marvels at the artistic choices that made Roger Ebert enthusiastically describe this film as “overwrought melodrama” in which “excess is its own reward.” With Lithgow twanging his way through a series of white linen suits and languid, spiteful glances, Robertson’s stoic and deeply tanned widower and his new paramour both find themselves retreading familiar ground as they approach the uncanny denouement. 

Is it good-bad or bad-good? Can you blame a guy for believing the unlikeliest of coincidences? Don’t you want to see what happens when he goes all in? Join us for our next episode where we uncover the image behind the image that is OBSESSION. 

Music by Jeremy Donald.

Find Dave here:

https://linktr.ee/davedwelling