Don’t watch the trailer before seeing the film!

The trailer included on the Blu-ray is rather interesting, if you have already seen the movie. It includes a scene set in the park that was obviously never intended to be in the actual film. The murder victim (who of course never gets a line of dialogue in the movie, unless you count his screams as the movie begins) is shown chatting in the park with his girlfriend (who is in the film). They part ways, planning to see each other at the party that night—and then Jimmy Stewart appears to tell us that they will actually never see each other again.

I’m honestly not at all sure how I feel about this kind of marketing angle. I mean that not as criticism, necessarily: I’m genuinely torn.

But the end of the trailer is a travesty. In the “making of” featurette, there was speculation that the underlying unspoken homosexuality might have been responsible for the film’s lack of box office success. But how about showing the climactic scene in the trailer? I tend not to like trailers in general for how much they spoil movies, but I’ve never seen anything like that before. Even if the movie studio doesn’t care about the artistic/creative reasons not to spoil the ending, why would you expect audiences to flock to a film when you have spelled out the climax in no uncertain terms? Puzzling.