Last Embrace

Last Embrace is a 1979 American neo-noir thriller film directed by Jonathan Demme. Very loosely based on the novel The 13th Man by Murray Teigh Bloom, it stars Roy Scheider and Janet Margolin, telling the story of a woman who takes the role similar to the biblical avenger Goel and kills the descendants of the Zwi Migdal, who enslaved her grandmother. Obvious Hitchcockian references abound -- a chase in a bell tower, a threatening pair of scissors, an interrupted shower, the cliffhanger finale -- suggesting that homage to Alfred Hitchcock is more important than fidelity to the source novel.