Signpost to Murder

French philosopher Michel Foucault famously announced that madness is relative, that it’s defined by the social and cultural needs of each era, writing, “When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world.” This idea is effectively illustrated in George Englund’s Signpost to Murder in which insanity becomes a relative condition; as the film goes on, mental hospital patient Alex Forrester (Stuart Whitman) appears more normal and those “on the outside” seem less so (“Look at the loonies!” cry the tourists through the hospital fence). While under the care of Dr. Mark Fleming (Edward Mulhare), Forrester escapes from the hospital and invades the nearby rustic farmhouse belonging to Molly Thomas (Joanne Woodward), a structure he had long studied from his cell window. While Forrester holds Molly hostage, they open up with each other and develop a mutual attraction, but this new reality collapses again when a corpse is found with its throat slit. Some may find the film stagey (it’s based on a play) and the dialogue occasionally wilted, but the story is uniquely clever and the farmhouse setting brilliantly maintains tension in large part due to a water wheel which never stops splashing and creaking outside, its rotation visible through the windows spanning two floors.