The Intimate Stranger

Pseudonymously directed by Losey, who had been driven from Hollywood by the McCarthyite purge of the studios, Intimate Stranger is a wonderfully slow thriller with a baroque climax in a film studio. Richard Basehart is the studio executive pursued by blackmailing letters from a mysterious girl claiming to be his mistress, his problems complicated by the fact that his wife is the boss' daughter, while the star of his current film is a still-amorous ex-lover. As usual with Losey, both predator and victim take an almost pathological pleasure from their game of mutual destruction.