Man on a Swing

A young schoolteacher is found dead in her car in a parking lot in broad daylight. Police chief Lee Tucker is left with nothing to go on. Then a man named Franklin Wills turns up and introduces himself as a psychic. What he says sounds absurd at first; then he starts producing details only the killer could know. Frank Perry's film starts from a real murder investigation, from a book by William Arthur Clark. It offers no supernatural solution; its real question is where this man knows it from. Cliff Robertson's policeman never drops his doubt, and the man Joel Grey plays keeps the audience in the same uncertainty. The film gives no single firm answer all the way to the end, and takes its tension from that.