The Mail on Sunday

Manhattan upstages Matilda

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SORRY if you haven’t seen the last episode of The Undoing, the whodunnit starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and the impossibly sultry Matilda de Angelis, pictured right.

Everyone is talking about it. I’m not sure why, given the idiotic, rather boring ending which required emergency character transplant­s for so many of the cast. It was quite obvious to me that Donald Sutherland (or rather, the character he played, Franklin Reinhardt) had done it.

But as so often nowadays, the real star of the show was Manhattan, now a reliably evil, menacing background of cruel, Babylonian towers, never free of the electronic mourning of police and ambulance sirens.

Yet look at the same city portrayed in 1959 in that great film North By Northwest and you see a cheerful, prosperous place in which normal people still lived. And I was recently shown a startling picture taken in December 1956, showing several of its great towers with their lights switched on to display the Christian cross. Wouldn’t happen now. It is interestin­g that, as it has grown richer, New York has also grown grimmer and more cruel.

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