Obsession

Hitchcock made Vertigo in 1958, which inspired Paul Schrader to write and Brian de Palma to direct Obsession. Bernard Herrmann wrote original music for both films, earning a posthumous Oscar nomination for his characteristically melodramatic work on De Palma's 1976 mystery thriller.

Choristers mourn, horns wail and strings cascade while Cliff Robertson woos and plans to wed an Italian art restorer (Genevieve Bujold) who's a ringer for his dead American wife. She'd been presumed killed 15 years earlier in a car crash, along with their young daughter, following a failed kidnapping. Property developer Robertson met the young woman when he joined his long-time partner (John Lithgow, with a heavy Southern accent) on a business trip to Florence.

It's quickly apparent that there are no other lead characters, ensuring that the plot's simplistic surprise twists can be fully anticipated. Consequently leaving its audience's brain on hold, the film encourages deeper appreciation of its lush, shadowy cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond. An Oscar-winner for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and a nominee four other times (most recently, at the 76, for The Black Dahlia), the veteran talent still maintains his long working association with Woody Allen.

Robertson, a long-time B-list actor born in 1923, was a surprise Oscar-winner for Charly (1968) - as a retarded man, one of the best ways to get recognised by schmaltzy AMPAS members. Maybe sensing that the competition was too strong, Roberston didn't attend the parade, for which he gained more votes than Alan Alda, Alan Bates, Tony Curtis and Peter O'Toole (who won the year's Golden Globe) as Lawrence of Arabia. He stopped working after his recent supporting role as Ben Parker in Spider-Man (2002).

Strange accents add little mysteries to the movie, mostly laughably, with a French-named (Brie) police inspector in New Orleans, Lithgow's Southern drawl and his character's declamation of Italian dialogue, and Bujold's dying mother's Italianate-English. De Palma was better served by his cinematographer and composer; he simplified the screenplay so much that Schrader virtually disowned it. Hitchcock was reportedly angered by the conceptual rip-off, which certainly lacked the depth of characterisation that made his psychological fantasy more credible.