THE GIRL WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE

year: 1977

cast: Jodie Foster, Martin Sheen

rating: **

This works as a take on Hitchcock's ROPE with a young teenage girl living ALONE in a house left by her dead poet father and being intruded upon by the perverted son of an uptight real estate lady and then gets badgered by the agent herself, who ends up accidently being killed in the wine cellar, and thus we have our ROPE as Foster has to guide people around the house WITHOUT them realizing there's a dead body in the basement as she keeps telling them (before and after the woman's death) that her father is in fact alive and working in "the study". The downfall is Scott Jacoby as a teenage Magician who aids Foster in BOTH coverups. His character is too helpful and doesn't allow the main character enough complications to make it more suspenseful. If the overall theme is a young girl making it on her own, she should have been alone for longer without the help of Jacoby's character who fills too many holes much too easily. Martin Sheen is great and shifty and steals the show as he tries to figure out where his mother is and flirts with young Foster, but isn't in it enough. And Jodie Foster does a good job, as usual... But there's too much there and not enough missing to give it that Hitchcock touch that it obviously tries hard to achieve.