Customer Reviews

Mary Higgins Clark: Pretend You Don't See Her

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This is a damsel-in-jeopardy flick featuring atmosphere shots of New York, where the film's heroine, finding herself witness to a murder, is put into witness protection and sent to Minneapolis. For some reason, the police there allow her to speak with relatives via cell phone, and she tells her sister where she is, simply because the sister wants her to. I believe the sister emphasized her need by weeping. The sister then for no apparent reason buys a Minneapolis newspaper, which immediately falls into the hands of the murderer, who loses no time in getting there. Throughout all this, the heroine gripes and anguishes over her loss of identity, etc., when what probably should concern her most is her own stupidity. Along the way, she engineers a meeting with a Minneapolis radio personality, who later in the film seems to provide a key piece of eyewitness knowledge useful in identifying who is behind the New York murder. I seem to have missed the explanation for his part in the East Coast events, for I thought the radio guy was in Minneapolis all the time. And more puzzling, how the cops just happened to pick his town in which to sequester our heroine. The film is presented competently but in no way creatively or with humor. It is basically a mediocre to sub-par TV episode stretched to an hour and half.

The pattern of the previous films of this series by Ms Clark is partly broken. The main character is not a radio anchorwoman but a female real estate agent. We are not dealing here with a serial killer but with a real hit man hired by a dirty soiled trafficker who appears slightly ambiguous because his secular but not criminal boss, who he cheats, is Italian, or has some kind of an Italian name. But it does not have anything to do with the mafia. The whole business is a cover up operation for a first murder that the police sloppily classified as being an accident. There the pattern is not broken. The police is still sloppy. What's more the police does not succeed where a simple woman, by taking risks and using her intelligence, baits the hit man and the rotten egg out of the basket in which they were hiding. The suspense is OK though of course we know from the very start what the stakes are and we are only missing the name of the man who is ordering these murders. The police will arrive just on time when it is needed not to get into more complicated business. And yet the whole film is built around a leak in the police protection of the main character and we will never know how this leak happened and where it came from. The police is always sloppy with Ms Clark, but Ms Clark is also sloppy on some basic logical elements.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne