Insanely stupid film

[deleted]

This wasn't an "insanely stupid" film but it does suffer from many of the lapses in logic and the non-credible behavior that afflicts most of Hitchcock's films. Like TMWKTM, most of Hitch's movies are very enjoyable but don't bear much scrutiny when it comes to believability or consistency, even within each film's own context.

Stewart may have been as good a choice as anyone for this part but he overplayed it, turning in one of his weaker performances, acting more like a cliched version of Jimmy Stewart than a real midwestern doctor. I disagree about Doris; I found was extremely annoying and off-putting, though she was more "real" in her performance than Stewart was in his.

To the points you raised:

1) The cops didn't enter the chapel because they lacked a search warrant, so criticizing them for not noticing the warm seats is misplaced. Still, things like that would be another example among many of Hitchcock ignoring facts that don't suit his plots.

2) Churches were often locked (at least the interior beyond the entry, when no one was around) and left unattended for stretches of time, and anyway this was the chapel of some sort of cult-like group, not a "normal" church, so traditional practices probably wouldn't apply.

3) Well, why not mistake the name of the building for a person? "Ambose Chapel" sounds like a man to me. Who would first think it referred to a real chapel? This one I give to Hitchcock.

4) How would killing the kid be effective? If the parents knew, or even thought, he was dead, what incentive would they have to keep quiet? They'd spill everything they knew. Keeping him alive and promising to release him once their plot was completed was the only way the kidnappers had of blackmailing the couple into staying silent. This criticism makes no sense. Killing him afterward might be an option if the assassins wanted to be sure to cover their tracks -- which makes the parents' refusal to tell what they knew less credible.

5) I agree, the parents should have worked with the authorities. There was no guarantee they'd get the kid back anyway, and probably no more danger to him if they'd gone to the cops than in trying to be amateur sleuths. But had they done so, the point of the movie -- however inane or stupid -- would have been lost.

As I said, most of Hitchcock's films are short on logic and have lots of plot holes. Rear Window, a better film, has so many lapses in logic and sense that when you start to think about them the film becomes absurd. Same with most of his other movies. Whatever the merits of specific points in TMWKTM (either the remake or the original), singling it out as particularly poor in this respect isn't really justified. It's about as strong, or weak, as the rest.

Incidentally, Day hated "Que Sera Sera". It did become her trademark song but she's never liked it. But they needed the plot device of retired singer playing the song she sings with her son. Her other song, sung at the very end at the embassy while her husband, son and the kidnapper are walking downstairs, is a much lovelier tune.

i can admit that there is the most stupid line in the history of cinema: "don't you know that americans hate their children being stolen from them?"

“My god...people in the 1950s knew so little about the world around them....”

Yes, having five years earlier completed a world war in which 16 million Americans fought in Europe, Northern Africa, and all across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, 1950s Americans knew so little about the world /sarcasm/