Bildungsroman is an excellent word.

All killer no filler

Hitchcock in true crime exploitation mode. Handsomely made, with a quietly dignified performance by Fonda, but awfully straightforward for a film that was directed between Rear Window and Vertigo. The location shots of 50s New York are stunning.

Elliott Gould playing cat and mouse with bank robber Christopher Plummer in the Eaton Center of my childhood? Along with a baby John Candy? Plus a Bata shoe store! And disguises too??

This changes everything I thought I knew about 70s cinema.

I'm...shook

4 stars and  2 Jack Ryans

This is pretty much exactly what I imagined marriage and adulthood to be back in the 70s when I was still too young to know what sex was. All I knew at that time was that my parents and their friends were loud while I was trying to fall sleep and that some of those guys had a lot of body hair.

Elliott Gould is an absolute legend in this (and everything).

The next best thing to smoking cigarettes in a New York jazz club in 1958. Lemme tell ya I dug it, man.

Truly astonishing.

One of the all-time great hooks -- an everyman pulled into the mystery of solving his own murder. Still, despite that perfect set-up, I felt like the mystery itself was a little thin and rushed, missing the rich style and character that I've come to expect from so many classic noir films. Edmond O'Brien is fine (and perfectly sweaty), but once the fatal prognosis was delivered I wanted to feel every minute slipping away.

Surely one of the most complicated love triangles put to screen.