“All I need is a little work,” says traumatized secret agent Harry Hannan (Roy Scheider) to his worried psychologist in the opening moments of Jonathan Demme’s Last Embrace. Coming on the heals of his wife’s brutal murder and his own three-month stay in a sanitarium, it’s a cocky and dismissive sentiment that echoes L.B. Jefferies presumptive attitude at the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Both men see their professions—the former a spy for some shady government outfit, the latter an extreme photographer—as an escape hatch from the emotional repression building up inside.
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