Sabotage

Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage is best known for a plot device that Hitch himself regretted using, a suspense sequence that the Master of Suspense later deemed a failure in his oeuvre. Indeed, the film is dominated by this particular set piece, a lengthy scene in which a young boy carries a package across London, not knowing that there's a bomb beneath the unassuming brown paper wrapping. The boy is Stevie (Desmond Tester), the younger brother of Sylvia (Sylvia Sidney), and he was given the deadly package by his sister's Eastern European emigré husband, Verloc (Oskar Homolka). Verloc is a saboteur, working against the British war effort at the behest of shadowy employers who urge him towards increasingly horrible crimes. When his initial acts of sabotage, like disrupting London's electrical power for a few hours, are deemed "laughable" by his superiors, Verloc is instructed to deliver a bomb instead.

The sequence in which young Stevie carries this package across town for his sinister brother-in-law is a typically masterful Hitchcockian suspense set piece, despite Hitch's later disavowal of the scene. The tension builds steadily as Stevie is continually delayed in his journey. He was told to get his package to a cloak room by a certain time, but obviously not told why or what was inside, so he doesn't really feel the urgency of the mission. Instead, he dawdles along the way, admiring the goods at an open-air market, getting pressed into a toothpaste demonstration by an aggressive street hawker and stopping to watch a parade that prevents him from crossing a street. Throughout the sequence, Hitchcock frequently cuts back to the package that the audience knows carries a sinister cargo, and also inserts shots of clock faces to show the passage of time as the minute of the bomb's detonation ticks slowly closer. It's a harrowing scene, and by the end each stoplight, each delay that keeps the boy from his destination, only makes the pulse pounder harder and faster. As the final moment draws closer, the cutting accelerates, faster and faster, until the economical final montage: a few quick shots of the package in the boy's arms, followed by a shot of the tram he's on exploding.

This shocking denouement destroys the audience's expectation that a filmmaker would never kill off an adorable kid so callously — especially after really jerking on the audience's heartstrings by having a cute little puppy playing with the boy in his final moments. It's a startling and horrifying scene, and in fact Hitchcock was probably right to disown it despite its undeniable power; it unbalances the film, elevates its stakes to a level that it would be pretty much impossible for a light thriller to justify. In the aftermath of this scene, the film struggles to find its feet again, and never quite does. Actually, Hitchcock is never really able to conjure up much credible drama here at all. Verloc is being investigated by the Scotland Yard detective Ted Spencer (John Loder), who poses as a vegetable seller and constantly hangs around outside the cinema Verloc owns. Ted takes an interest in Sylvia, who's married to the older Verloc not out of love but because he's good to her brother and provides them with stability and security. It's a familiar 30s story, the romantic triangle of the young woman, the handsome man her own age, and the older man who she respects and feels indebted to, here given a twist by making the older husband a sinister, criminal figure.


The plot is relatively inert, since from the beginning the audience knows that Verloc is a saboteur working for a foreign power, that Ted is a detective, and that by the time the film is over Sylvia will have to realize what's going on with her seemingly harmless husband and switch her affections to the other man. With not much happening on the story level, Hitchcock gets as much as he can from the pure visual storytelling possibilities of the situation. In fact, at times the film seems to consist of little besides exchanges of charged glances and slowly tracking dramatic closeups. Hitchcock encodes the drama in alternating closeups, focusing on the eyes: Sylvia looking suspiciously at her husband, wondering what's going on with him as strange men meet with him in the cinema's back room; Verloc glaring, his heavy brows arched as he contemplates his next devious and desperate step.

This approach reaches its apex in the climactic dinner scene after Stevie has been killed in the explosion. Sylvia knows what happened and about Verloc's role in it, and as Verloc cravenly tries to act as though everything is normal, Sylvia's eyes are burning holes in him. Hitchcock accentuates the tension by patiently drawing out the moment, capturing that look of hatred and rage in Sylvia's eyes, and honing in on the details that reveal what's going through her mind. Hitchcock's camera pinpoints her fingering her wedding ring, thinking about what it now represents, and eyeing the knife she's using to serve dinner, thinking about what other uses it could be put to.

Despite the dark material, Hitchcock also still finds some space for comic relief and humorous asides. Sometimes these diversions come in the form of offhand jokes, as when a couple walks by during Verloc's rendezvous with an enemy agent at an aquarium, and Hitchcock takes the opportunity to toss in a joke about oyster sex changes. But there's also the character of the bomb-maker A.F. Chatman (William Dewhurst), who disguises his real profession behind the front of a pet shop and quarrels with his bitter daughter (Martita Hunt), implicitly insulting her right to her face. It's deliciously funny, naughty material, and Dewhurst delivers a juicy performance in a small role, clearly having fun with this nebbishy terrorist. Indeed, the performances in general — excepting perhaps Loder's thankless role as the bland Ted — are strong, from Homolka's vaguely foreign evil to Sidney's wide-eyed innocence, reminiscent of fellow Hitchcock heroine Nova Pilbeam. The film falls apart after Stevie's death, struggling to find the proper tone and ultimately finding that there is no way to salvage a lightweight thriller after such a devastating event. But even so, Hitchcock's keen eye for entertaining performances and subtle visual storytelling keeps the film interesting even when it's not wholly satisfying.

TOERIFC: If....

[This post is prompted by The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club, which will be spotlighting a different blogger-selected film every month. This month's selection is courtesy of Pat Piper from Lazy Eye Theatre. Visit his site to see his thoughts on the film and to join the main discussion.]

Lindsay Anderson's If.... is a harsh, uncompromising nightmare vision of British society as a culture unhealthily obsessed with tradition, locked into brutal, nearly fascist rituals and a blind, cowering respect for authority. Set in a British boys' college where the discipline is draconian and completely without rationale, the film examines the peculiar pressures placed on young men in a society where militaristic virtues such as loyalty, obedience, servitude and conformity are held up as the example. This school establishes a rigorous chain of command, selecting the most obedient of the older boys as "whips," who then become disciplinarians, keeping the younger boys under control. The result is that the school seems structured not so much for real education as for indoctrination and control — the only thing these boys are learning is that, in order to get by, they must learn the rules by rote, parrot back what they're told, never question orders, never think for themselves. Anderson juggles multiple storylines throughout the first half of the film, showing the way the school is run from multiple perspectives.

Jute (Sean Bury) is a new boy in the school, and he provides the newcomer's perspective in the early scenes, looking at the chaos around him with wide, terrified eyes. He is quickly taken under the wing of another boy, who impresses upon him the importance of obedience, of learning the rules quickly and being able to pass the complicated tests that will be imposed upon him. Jute is the film's icon of innocence, a usually silent and cherubic witness to the horrors around him, confused and disheartened by what he sees, unwilling to be shaped into the cold, brutal thing that this place seems design to churn out. There are other boys drifting around the film's edges, too, mostly stock types like a scrawny loser who's constantly being beaten up, a fat kid, and a quiet intellectual who generally buries himself in his telescope or his studies. But the film quickly centers itself around the school's trio of rebellious outcasts, the three friends who refuse to conform, who refuse to bow politely before the pointless discipline and cruelty of this place. Mick (Malcolm McDowell) is the de facto leader of the trio, with Johnny (David Wood) as his best friend and co-conspirator, and Wallace (Richard Warwick) as their somewhat slow-witted, dopey buddy. These three boys have the only reasonable reaction to the absurd regulations of power-hungry whips like Rowntree (Robert Swann) and Denson (Hugh Thomas).

Anderson presents this college as a nasty, suffocating place, piling on one infuriating incident after another until it seems obvious that something has to break, that no one could sustain this much tension and pressure. There is more than a hint of the absurd here, too. The whips are fey and masochistic, fingering their canes as though they'd really love to use them at any moment. They shout at the students to stop talking even before anyone has talked, as though always anticipating some minor infraction over which they can exercise their power. They survey their fellow students in the lower levels like military drill inspectors, advising them to cut their hair, making sure they're docile and ready for bed at the proper time, and capriciously confiscating any trivial item they deem unnecessary. The teachers are no better. The headmaster (Peter Jeffrey) is a pompous elitist who seems to fancy himself an education reformer, adapting to new times, when in fact his school is run like a barbaric Middle Ages prison. He leads the whips around the grounds at one point, boldly orating about the necessity to encourage creativity in young minds, to enlighten the next generation, to prepare them for life. His words are hypocritical, of course, considering his audience — the brutish thugs whose job it is to beat and suppress the younger students — and his spiel about education is especially empty when contrasted against the scenes in actual classrooms.

The teachers, for the most part, barely engage with their students. A professor of mathematics marches around the room intoning abstract phrases about geometry, lessons that can have no real meaning without demonstrations and diagrams, and yet he randomly stops every so often to ask a student if he understands. Then, even if the poor boy says yes, he slaps him in the head, or molests him in some way, at one point worming his hand inside a boy's shirt to caress his chest. Anderson's style is exaggerated and absurd, presenting these shocking, over-the-top images side by side with more naturalistic and conventional presentations of college life, the brutality and oppression of students guided by pointless rules. The result is metaphorical more than realistic: Anderson views education as a process of molesting and deadening the minds of the young, so he presents the education system in his film as literally abusing and violating the children it's supposed to be teaching. Only one teacher here even tries to engage his students, talking about the power of fascism and asking the students if they believe that fascism arises because of one powerful, evil leader, or because of a whole society of docile, casually evil people. As if to prove his point, the students simply stare back at him, uncomprehending.


This question is a central theme of the film, particularly in its final acts. The film slowly slips more and more into an absurd, surrealistic dreamworld in its second half, particularly after Mick and Johnny go out on a trip to town. The two boys steal a motorcycle, riding through the lush, open green fields of the countryside, laughing as the speed blurs their faces; it's a potent image of freedom in a film where these boys are hemmed in on all sides by oppression and a denial of free will. At an empty offroad café, the two boys meet a young girl (Christine Noonan), a waitress who will turn out to be a pivotal and mysterious presence, gently nudging the film into the spiraling surrealism of its denouement. At first, her confrontation with Mick and Johnny is utterly prosaic and nearly silent, as the boys snarlingly order coffee and Mick tries to grab her for a kiss, getting violently slapped for his efforts. But then the tenor of the scene abruptly changes, as the girl begins seducing Mick; they act like tigers, snarling and clawing at one another, rolling around on the floor tearing at their clothes, until suddenly their clothes disappear altogether and the girl is biting Mick's arm. The whole interlude is over as suddenly and inexplicably as it began: a lurid and transitory dream vision of animalistic sexual release. It's a true down-the-rabbit-hole moment, signaling the film's increasing departure from reality into a netherworld of dreams and nightmares.

The girl, who periodically reappears without explanation as an icon of freedom and sensuality for the three rebel boys, leads them into the final act of the film, in which the school is taken over by militaristic fervor. Generals and bishops visit, along with distinguished men and women dressed up for some pomp and circumstance, while the students, now dressed as soldiers, march around in formation, chanting and playing tightly controlled war games with paintball guns and firecrackers. This, Anderson suggests, is what this kind of oppressive conformity is grooming people for: to be soldier-automatons, ready to die for God and country, always willing to obey, never questioning orders. Only Mick, Johnny and Wallace really stand out, refusing to go along with this absurdity: while they lounge around in exhaustion, bored with this ritualistic violence, other students teach each other the "scream of hatred" that's yelled out when charging one's enemies. Then, just as these war games are starting to die down, the three boys begin shooting real bullets at the administrators and teachers, finally shooting and then bayoneting a priest in a general's garb. Absurdly, the boys are given a slap on the wrist for this offense, and asked to apologize to the dead man's corpse, which is kept in a wooden drawer in the headmaster's office and sits up to shake their hands before lying back down, playing dead. Obviously, the film has departed from reality by this point, increasingly existing in a fragmented fantasy in which these boys are finally able to strike back at their oppressors, using the headmaster's much-vaunted creativity and imagination to fashion an alternative world, one in which they're actually free.

The paradox, of course, is that having been themselves created by an atmosphere of cruelty and violence, the only freedom they can imagine is the freedom to wage war. The film's final scenes are a horrific vision of anarchy and destruction in which the rebels and the authorities (the latter represented, cartoonishly, by stereotyped authority figures like generals and bishops, as well as a knight in armor) go to war, everyone handling submachine guns as though they were born to. This anarchic finale suggests burning everything down to start anew, but Anderson's vision is more nuanced than Mick's punk rage. There's a moment earlier in the film that suggests a more utopian possibility for change, when Wallace's graceful exercises on a high bar halt a gym class, as the younger students, including the gay Phillips (Rupert Webster), stare at him in awe and admiration. The scene is staged in languid slow motion, as the younger students watch the fluid movements of the older boy as he spins around the bar, his body curling up and unfurling like a jackknife. There's a sense of wonder in this scene, a sense of real connection, that presents an alternative to the violence, hatred and disconnection that's everywhere else in this film.

This scene, like many others dotted throughout the film, including the café scene, is shot in black and white, which Anderson randomly intersperses with the color footage, creating disjunctions that call attention to the film's essential unreality. This approach separates Anderson's If.... from its obvious black and white influences, Zero For Conduct and The 400 Blows, the seminal French films of youthful rebellion and authoritarian oppression. Anderson nods to those films, but tweaks their verité aesthetics by often setting his most disjunctive and surrealist scenes in black and white, reversing the usual conventions about black and white stock versus color. Elsewhere, during a church service that's shot in black and white, Mick looks up briefly and sees a stained glass window in dazzling, brilliant color, a sudden vision of spirituality and clarity to offset the numbing banality of this college. This is a startling, utterly original film, a potent and unrestrained critique of a society seemingly teetering on the brink of fascism. Anderson is spitting in the face of the establishment, crafting a film as rebellious and revolutionary as his proto-punk protagonists.

War Requiem

Derek Jarman's War Requiem is a potent, poetic visualization of composer Benjamin Britten's grandiose anti-war composition of the same name. Britten's epic choral music, written in 1962 and recorded with Britten as conductor in 1963, incorporates Latin texts along with the poetry of Wilfred Owen, a British soldier who served during World War I and was killed in the final week of the war. Owen's posthumously published poetry captured the experience of war with a combination of romanticism and unvarnished realism, and Jarman's film is similarly conceived. The film is entirely dialogue-free, relying on the juxtaposition of Britten's music, Owen's poetry and Jarman's ripe imagery. During the prologue, Laurence Olivier appears, in his final role before his death, as an old soldier, also in his last days, reminiscing about his long-ago wartime experiences with his nurse (Jarman regular Tilda Swinton). On the soundtrack, Olivier reads one of Owen's poems. The remainder of the film is set to the entirety of Britten's War Requiem with no other sound, which was a requirement imposed upon the film by the holders of the recording. Nevertheless, Jarman makes brilliant use of this music, setting Britten's sweeping orchestrations and vocals against a collage of images, archival war footage and semi-narrative vignettes.

Tilda Swinton reappears in the body of the film as a wartime nurse, and much of the action cuts between her tending to patients and various scenes with Wilfred Owen (Nathaniel Parker) and other frontline soldiers played by Sean Bean and Owen Teale. Jarman's dialogue-free storytelling is lyrical and haunting, capturing the feel of war, its horror and misery, both for those in the middle of it and for those waiting elsewhere for news of their loved ones. These soldiers are dirt-smeared, caked in mud and blood, lying in piles to sleep, huddled together; there's a certain homoeroticism in Jarman's depictions of soldierly comradeship, inspired by the homoerotic subtexts in the poems of the possibly gay Owen. These men, suffering together, take comfort only in each other's presences, and in the periodic letters they receive from home. In Jarman's vision, there is no meaning to war, no advances or victories or even concrete battles: he shows only the aftermath, the men bleeding and dying, the muddy survivors lounging around in their bunkers, blank-eyed and exhausted, or the wounded, shell-shocked men who fill up the beds of the hospitals.

Interspersed with these scenes are memories of pre-war happiness, shot by Jarman in his characteristic grainy, hazy super-8 to contrast against the crisp formal quality of the wartime scenes. For these men, their memories are thus rendered ephemeral and indistinct against the hyper-real present of the war, and yet the past seems even sweeter for its gauzy imprecision. These memories are often simple, just glimpses of domestic tranquility, like a soldier helping his mother fold laundry. In other scenes, children play at war, making a game of it, not understanding that one day they will see its horrors for real. In one of the film's most haunting sequences, a group of children hold a warrior's funeral for a beaten-up old stuffed teddy bear: they place the bear in a red-lined coffin with solemnity and pomp, then lay it on a pyre of burning leaves, crying as they say goodbye to their beloved toy. It is a child's memory of a ritual that would later be enacted as an adult, with friends lost and buried instead of toys.


The film also incorporates a great deal of religious imagery, making a metaphor of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. Jarman imagines Abraham (Nigel Terry) killing his son (Parker again) to the applause of corpulent businessmen in theatrical makeup, smoking fat cigars — the angel's last-minute change of plans goes unheeded in this version of the story. The film inventively recontextualizes the Biblical tale as a metaphor for war, as fathers send their sons off to war, to be killed on the basis of vague orders from above, all for the benefit of the wealthy classes, who profiteer as the blood of the young flows through the trenches. Later, the soldiers evoke another Biblical sacrificial figure, donning crowns of thorns as they carry the dead and wounded through an apocalyptic wasteland of burnt-out fields and rubble.

Jarman's imagery, without telling any particular story, nevertheless manages to capture the one larger story of war: the companionship of the men at the front, the letters home, the friends who die and are mourned. His dialogue-free storytelling and vague characters suggest that all wars have only this one story: young men suffering and dying and losing the people they care about. In the film's final half-hour, Jarman largely switches from depictions of individual soldiers to a more generalized image of war itself. Using archival footage of various conflicts, stitched together into an increasingly frantic, frenetic montage as the pace of Britten's music accelerates, Jarman moves smoothly from the suffering and death of the individual soldier to the horrors of war as a whole. He splices together images of soldiers dying all over the world, representing different nations, different races and ethnicities, different conflicts. But they're all dying or dead, all of them ripped apart, bleeding bright red, their brains exposed within their split-open scalps, as the cannons fire, different guns, new developments in warfare, all of them intended to cause more and more fiery death. This montage reaches its seeming climax with an image of the atom bomb exploding, an apex of horror, but then the collage of dead soldiers merely resumes, as though to confirm that the dropping of the bomb was not a horror to end all horrors, but merely one more especially devastating entry in the 20th Century's massive death toll.

Another of the film's most poignant sequences is more personal, a lengthy closeup on Tilda Swinton during a particularly elegiac movement of Britten's piece. The shot opens with Swinton braiding her long red hair, her eyes staring blankly off into the distance. As Jarman holds the shot, his camera gently bobbing, reframing Swinton's distinctive face, she begins swaying with the music, closing her eyes and mouthing the lyrics. It's the only moment in the film in which the images and the music are explicitly synced in this way, and it drives home the agony of those waiting at home for news of a soldier, as Swinton soulfully dances in place with the music, its melancholy tones moving her body, her graceful limbs arcing in balletic sweeps over her head as she's overcome with grief and the bittersweet smile of nostalgia. These complex emotions, the emotions of war and its aftermath, are at the heart of Jarman's intense, affecting film.

Films I Love #34: The Angelic Conversation (Derek Jarman, 1985)

Derek Jarman's The Angelic Conversation is the purest and greatest of the filmmaker's experimental works, a lyrical, abstracted visualization of the love sonnets of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's poems, long thought to have been addressed to an anonymous young man, are read aloud on the soundtrack by Judi Dench, accompanied by the expressive ambient industrial music of Jarman's collaborators in Coil, who intersperse their chiming electronic tones with sloshing water sounds and other field recordings. This music — my own introduction to the film, since as a Coil fan I owned the soundtrack long before I ever saw the film itself — is haunting and ethereal, a perfect complement to Dench's mannered readings and the ghostly beauty of Jarman's images. The film constantly suggests the outline of a story, but it is nevertheless largely non-narrative, simply following several young men meandering through desolate, rocky terrain or performing arcane rituals with fire and reflective metals. Jarman shot the footage on 8mm film stock and then blew it up to 35mm, giving everything a fuzzy, grainy, blown-out quality, with extreme contrasts between muddy shadows and blinding flashes of light and color.

The imagery is some of Jarman's most sensual and layered, gorgeous images in which nothing much is happening beyond the play of light on skin, the jittery slow motion that animates these figures, the mutations of a flickering flame played out in closeup frame by frame. The film is an ode to the sensuality and dark beauty of love, and particularly, unsurprisingly, of gay love. Torches flare and pulse in dark caves. Men walk through scorched, foggy landscapes carrying heavy burdens on their backs like Christ. Strange rituals are performed by men whose skin is turned a pale gray by Jarman's video processing; allusions to mythology and spirituality are encoded in these bizarre, stagey interludes. Violent wrestling and struggle slowly softens into caresses and embraces, hatred becoming love. This is a stunning, deeply affecting film, a masterful translation of Shakespeare's evocative sonnets into a series of abstract vignettes whose mystery and suppleness matches the evocative lyricism of the Bard's verse.

Films I Love #32: A Walk Through H (Peter Greenaway, 1978)

A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist was the culmination of Peter Greenaway's 1970s short-form work. It is a 40-minute abstracted journey film, told almost entirely through the use of a series of 92 "maps," a set of drawings and patterns gathered together in a museum by the mysterious Tulse Luper, a character who has wandered through many of Greenaway's films. The narrator (Colin Cantlie) drolly describes each map in turn, recounting a journey through "H," though the meaning of this journey or what "H" stands for is never explained outright. Instead, as Greenaway's camera pans across the surface of each drawing, following the maze-like paths that lead from one map to the next, the narrator describes how he came to possess each of these maps, and what his journey is like. Greenaway occasionally intercuts images of birds and sunsets, the only figurative images in the film with the exception of the bookend sequences in the museum where all these maps are framed and displayed. Otherwise, the film is "set" entirely in the world of "H," which is represented only by Tulse Luper's maps, an elaborate guide through a mystery region, with a mysterious purpose as the goal.

This film is a culmination of Greenaway's tendency towards lists and repetitions, a motif that would soon be elaborated on even further in the three-hour epic of The Falls. Here, Greenaway's deadpan wit is comparatively concise, and about as mordantly funny as he'd ever be. The narrator is entirely straight-faced, but his bizarre, offhand descriptions of people and places and incidents — all of it tossed off with a tone that suggests he expects his audience to know exactly who and what he's talking about — are often hilarious non sequiturs. Some of these characters and ideas would later show up in Greenaway's feature films, and it's not surprising: A Walk Through H suggests a thriving, fully populated world beyond its narrowly defined borders, with a great deal of intrigue and activity leading up to the gathering of these maps. The entire journey is driven as well by the propulsive, looping score of Michael Nyman, a chiming, hypnotic piece of music that accelerates to a frenzied crescendo for the breathless conclusion, in which an ornithologist is (possibly?) reincarnated at the journey's end. This is a strange and unforgettable film, an imaginative mental odyssey, a map leading into the creative jumble of Greenaway's fertile mind.

We Are the Lambeth Boys/March to Aldermaston

Karel Reisz was, along with filmmakers like Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, Michael Grigsby and others, one of the guiding intelligences behind the British Free Cinema movement of the late 1950s. The films produced and screened under the loose banner of this movement displayed a versatile surface realism coupled with an interest in inventive sound/image experiments, necessitated by the crude equipment then available for sound recording and sync sound. Indeed, Reisz's second film, the hour-long We Are the Lambeth Boys, produced as a television documentary for the BBC, was an early experiment in recording synchronized sound outside a studio setting for the first time in the UK. This film, a documentary about a group of working class kids of various ages, centered around a London youth club, lacks the ragged energy and vibrancy of Reisz's first film, the electric Momma Don't Allow, co-directed with Richardson.

Like that film, We Are the Lambeth Boys concerns itself with the young, with the ways in which they spend their time, with their nighttime escapes from the drudgery of work. The best moments of this second film are the ones that capture the same free-spirited vibe as its predecessor. Reisz loves to watch kids dancing, even if they do it awkwardly or badly, shuffling their feet and moving their arms pneumatically; they have no rhythm but they're having fun anyway, smiling and twirling, bodies coming together and then spinning apart again. The dancing sequences here are a blast, as they were in the earlier film. Reisz, like many of the Free Cinema filmmakers, also has a feel for faces, and he'll often pan across a row of gathered youths as they talk and chatter. His closeups have urgency and power, a sensitivity for people's faces and personalities, and he always seems to linger just long enough to capture the intricacies of a person's face, their tics and gestures and ways of expressing themselves. The documentary has a large cast of kids who drift in and out, none of them becoming recurring characters, none of them speaking directly to the camera. There are no interviews here, and the kids' names are tossed off in casual asides. Nevertheless, Reisz captures the personalities of several of his subjects, letting their faces and voices speak for themselves.

In this respect, this is a fine, admirable documentary, treating these working class kids, all of them taking on various tough jobs immediately after finishing high school, with respect and sympathy. But the film is also saddled with a rather generic and trite voiceover commentary by Jon Rollason, whose dulcet tones give the rather unfortunate impression of a public television nature documentary. His objective, distanced commentary makes it sound like he's commenting on some exotic phenomenon, observed carefully from arm's length, rather than the lives of ordinary British kids. One pictures him crouched in the bushes, whispering to a companion, "sssshhh, look, they're about to dance now." It's unintentionally funny to hear the awe with which he describes a simple night out after work, and his patronizing attitude is consistently at odds with the quiet dignity conveyed by Reisz's imagery.

This tendency is perhaps at its worst during the montage that attempts to convey a sense of what these kids, mostly seen at night at the club, do during the day. As Reisz's images capture the drudgery and boredom of jobs in factories and offices, doing repetitive and numbing tasks, the narration attempts to put a positive spin on things, to act as though these kids are doing jobs they enjoy or, at least, that the pleasures of nights at the youth club can compensate for the menial dullness of the working day. The narrator's jaunty attitude and distance from his subjects is distracting, especially considering the poetic verisimilitude of Reisz's depictions of working class life.


Free Cinema was always a particularly loose collective, with the filmmakers involved in the screenings insisting that they weren't really a movement but merely a group of unrelated filmmakers with similar aims and ideas about how to make movies. As a result, the actual organized Free Cinema screenings didn't last very long, but the movement inspired a great deal of subsequent British cinema, which picked up on the ideas advanced by these filmmakers. March to Aldermaston was one of the documentaries to come along in the wake of Free Cinema, obviously inspired by the naturalistic shooting and freewheeling approach of these filmmakers. Indeed, this anonymously made and produced film included, among its many technicians, cameramen, directors and editors, Free Cinema veterans like Anderson, Reisz and Elizabeth Russell.

It's a rather straightforward documentary account of a march for peace, a protest against the H-bomb. A large mass of people undertook a long walk from London to the town of Aldermaston, where British factories manufactured arms and nuclear weapons. The march, lasting several days over Easter weekend in 1958, was documented with a variety of cameras, some taking on a high vantage point above the crowds while others weave in among the lines of marchers, capturing expressive closeups or stopping for brief interviews with the participants. The style is loose and rowdy, and the music emanating from the crowd — most of it, surprisingly, bouncy Dixieland-style jazz, though there's also a smattering of the kind of dire, preachy folk songs one expects from a march like this — provides the soundtrack to the proceedings. The film is interesting as an historical document, but only sporadically successful as an actual work. Its voiceover (by Richard Burton) is overbearing and largely irrelevant, and because of the difficulty of capturing sync sound, the narration too often steps in to fill in the gaps; instead of hearing a speech, the audience hears the narrator say, "there was a speech."

The film is better when it sticks to simply documenting the march and spending time with the participants, some of whom explain in their own halting, unrehearsed words why they chose to take part. What's especially interesting here is the sheer variety of people who participate. The film definitively smashes any preconceptions of peace marches as hippie affairs, dominated by rebellious teens and slackers. This march is attended by a wide cross-section of British society, not only the young: parents, grandparents, laborers, teachers, conservative-looking ordinary people who are concerned about the future, for their kids and grandkids, in a nuclear age. It's moving to see these people protesting and to hear them express, in simple and direct terms, their feelings about nuclear weapons. It's fascinating to see so many people of different ages and classes coming together, and one struggles to imagine a similar variety of people at modern protests. This is pure democracy, with so many people willing to endure a long and grueling march to make their voices heard, to express their passionate feelings about an issue they all care about.

These powerful images are this documentary's most valuable asset, a glimpse into a past when all sorts of people engaged passionately in public political discourse, something sadly less common these days. Also interesting is the film's willingness to depict the fun, social aspect of this event, while refusing to judge the dancing, singing, merry young people seen here for actually having fun during a protest. The narration's best, most unpretentious moment comes as an answer to the criticisms of the young protesters as "unserious" and "frivolous." The narrator's rejoinder summarizes the most vibrant threads running through this interesting if inconsistent documentary: "There's no use being against death, if you don't know how to enjoy life while you've got it."

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is an absorbing, stylish character study, a film overflowing with complex emotions: love, loss, aging, friendship and betrayal, the confusions of political change, but most of all nostalgia, an aching, bittersweet nostalgia for a more innocent time that may never even have existed outside of the movies. Nevertheless, the film's titular Colonel Blimp — the nickname of Clive Candy (Roger Livesey), who matures during the film from a volatile young soldier into an aging, rotund, well-respected general — is indubitably a representative of that more innocent time. He is an embodiment of the English gentleman, with all that entails, for both good and bad. He is stiff and elitist, with a great respect for rules and procedures, for protocol. He's condescending and imperialist, unquestioning of his own country in all that they do. But he's also kind-hearted and generous, the kind of man who will fight a duel and then become best friends with his opponent afterward.

This is exactly what happens in the film's first extended segment, a reminiscence of Candy's time in Berlin during the early 1900s, where he has gone to defend his country's honor over accusations that the British had committed atrocities during the Boer War (which, of course, they did, though Candy doesn't know this and the film is politically unable to acknowledge it). Candy means well, but his blundering nearly causes an international incident when he, more or less inadvertently, insults the entire German army. The Germans pick an officer from their ranks to fight a duel against Candy, and when the two men wound each other, they are sent to the same hospital to recuperate. There, Candy becomes fast friends with the officer, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), despite the other man's lack of English. They communicate mostly through the lovely English governess Edith Hunter (Deborah Kerr), who in the process falls in love with Theo. This is the film's most detailed and evocative segment, and for good reason, since the events here will haunt the remainder of Candy's long life. His friendship with Theo will last, despite long absences when the two men do not see each other, and despite even the period of hostility when they fight on different sides during World War I. But Candy will be even more deeply scarred by his unrequited and, indeed, never pursued love for Edith, who stays behind in Berlin to marry Theo. Candy, always a gentleman, smiles broadly and congratulates his friend when he learns of the couple's engagement, but he is hurt nonetheless, and he returns to London feeling a great loss, a loss that will affect him for the rest of his life. He will continue looking for Edith everywhere he goes, and will find at least two more incarnations of her (both also played by Kerr).

This romantic, melancholy story is simply one thread weaving through Candy's long and eventful life. In between incidents, the film uses documents and objects to mark the passage of time: newspaper reports, photographs, letters, and especially the accumulation of animal heads in Candy's den, each one dated and stamped with the location where he shot it. Various deaths are noted in simple two-line obituaries, the entirety of a life reduced to a platitude in a newspaper — the exact opposite of this film's sprawling, generous storytelling. Even so, these interludes sometimes seem to elide too much. Candy's long and presumably happy marriage to Edith look-alike Barbara Wynne (Kerr again) is treated very superficially, and his wife's character is never allowed to develop very much beyond her resemblance to his first wife. One wonders if this is intentional, reflecting Candy's essential disinterest in her beyond her appearance. One gets this sense especially from a late scene, after her death, in which the much older Candy proudly shows off her portrait to Theo, mechanically repeating how much she looked like Edith.

In a way, though, it hardly matters, since despite the romance the real central relationship of the film is the one between Candy and Theo, who reconnect as old soldiers when the latter flees to England, escaping from the Nazi horrors in his own country. The relationship between these two men is complex, woven together with politics and with their mutual love for the same woman. One of the film's most interesting uses of time is the way it condenses the period of time between the two World Wars, so that Theo's departure from London as a defeated P.O.W. after World War I is swiftly followed by his return to London many years later as a refugee from the Nazis. In the first scene, he leaves offended by Candy's patronizing attitude towards him, and he angrily tells his fellow German soldiers about the weakness and naivete of Britain — an ominous suggestion of the post-WWI bitterness and bad feelings that would thrust the Nazis into power. By leaping over the intervening years, the film powerfully depicts how Theo's initial bitterness over losing the war had given way to a more resigned melancholy, as well as a hatred of the evil forces taking control within his own country.


This film was made at the height of World War II, so it should be no surprise that it contains elements of anti-German war propaganda. What's interesting is how subtly this material is incorporated into the narrative, and how sophisticated and twisty the film's messages about war and nationalism can be. Candy is a naïve figure, convinced of his own rightness and that of his country: he believes in fighting wars according to rules, maintaining strict decorum and gentlemanly conduct even in the midst of combat. A repeated theme throughout the film is Candy's obliviousness, his outdated outlook on the world, which persists even as those around him increasingly argue that they must respond to the aggressions of their enemies not as gentlemen but as unrestricted fighters who will do anything to win. One of the film's most interesting questions, then, is whether it's Candy or the filmmakers who are actually naïve — or if they just expect audiences to be naïve. The film repeatedly characterizes British fighting methods as decent and noble and pure while the methods of their enemies are characterized as dirty and cowardly. Beyond the obvious contradiction — the quaint fantasy of fighting a "decent war," as though so much bloodshed could ever be anything but horrible — this mentality willfully glosses over all sorts of historical facts about British warfare preceding World War I, which could hardly always be described as "noble."

Candy doesn't realize that his ideal of a gentleman's war is a fantasy. There are hints in the film of darker realities — one scene cuts away before a scarred soldier begins interrogating a group of German prisoners, but there's little doubt that things got ugly after the fade to black — but it's obvious that there couldn't be any more tacit acknowledgment of these kinds of things, not in a wartime propaganda drama. For the most part, this is a brightly colored Technicolor fantasia of Candy's worldview, nostalgic for a time when wars could be fought with honor. But as nostalgia goes, this is especially sumptuous and skillfully executed nostalgia, with gorgeous studio-bound Technicolor imagery, lushly painted matte backdrops standing in for sunsets and bombed-out wartime locales. The obvious artificiality of it all helps create the impression of war as a clean, honorable affair, a game between gentlemen, who set start and end times, in between which they bomb one another. The beautiful, textural cinematography (by George Périnal, with future Powell/Pressburger cinematographer Jack Cardiff assisting) is suited equally to sweeping, colorful vistas and enveloping closeups.

One of the best of these is an extended shot of Theo as a much older man, a long, carefully held closeup during which he tearfully recounts the story of his stay at the hospital in Berlin, where he met both his future wife and the friend who would remain his one constant throughout his life. The camera stoically studies his face, now lined and worn with age, his features softened by his bittersweet memories of the past, of this time when he was so happy. The rich emotions of this scene are deepened by the immersive quality of the closeup, and by the fact that these characters have grown and matured over the course of the film, aging slowly into their older incarnations. The makeup used to age them sometimes makes them look mummified, caked in white paint, but the subtlety and warmth of the performances always shine through. Candy could easily have been the oversized caricature implied by the film's title, a walking symbol of British obliviousness and elitist condescension. And he is, to some extent. But he's also a sympathetic, richly drawn character, a man left behind by history, a man whose private ideals are increasingly out of sync with both his nation and the world, if they were ever in sync with anything beyond his own fantasies to begin with.

Life Is Sweet

In a working class British neighborhood, a family struggles to survive and cling to their modest dreams despite the seemingly meager pleasures and opportunities available to them. They trudge through daily routines, fight and bicker relentlessly with one another, and make obviously ill-fated attempts at moving beyond their ruts. Any other director, titling this film Life Is Sweet, would be doing so as an ironic gesture, a self-aware commentary on the misery and abjection of these characters. For Mike Leigh, however, this title is obviously anything but ironic, and its resonances within the film are much more complex than a simple reversal of the film's bleak reality. Leigh's vision of life is often described as miserable or negative, which is not entirely incorrect, but is only an incomplete description at best. It's undeniable that he shows characters with problems and limitations not often seen in the cinema. His characters are stuck in dead-end jobs, they're crude and drunk and probably not particularly intelligent. Leigh doesn't sugar-coat things. He's presenting a vision of unvarnished reality, of the kinds of routine troubles that affect ordinary people: not enough money, bratty and ungrateful kids, business ventures that never go anywhere, a seemingly endless line of home improvement chores that there's never enough time or money to complete. These are true working class characters with working class problems, the kind of people who seldom appear on cinema screens. Leigh, and pretty much Leigh alone, is interested in telling stories about these people, and doing so without resorting to either glossy dramatization or "social problem" moralizing. Leigh's films are not political commentaries, at least not in the usual sense: he's not diagnosing an "issue" that needs to be addressed. He's just telling stories.

The story he has to tell here concerns the family of Andy (Jim Broadbent) and Wendy (Alison Steadman). He's an industrial chef working at a factory, while she works at a children's clothing store. They have twin daughters, Natalie (Claire Skinner) and Nicola (Jane Horrocks), who couldn't be more different. Natalie's a smart, together girl, a bit of a tomboy, working as a plumber and saving her money for a trip to America — her parents are perhaps a little concerned about her boyish mannerisms but they're proud of her ambition and essential goodness. Ah, and then there's Nicola. Nicola is an inspired creation, a mesmerizing trainwreck of a girl as conveyed through Horrocks' twitchy, snarling, utterly fearless performance. She's a bulimic, obsessed with her weight, a walking, scarecrow-like bundle of neuroses with a fuck-you attitude. Beneath her mop of brittle-straw hair and her enormous eyeglasses, her blue eyes are shifty and angry, and her mouth is perpetually twisted into one of a seemingly pre-programmed set of snarls and scowls and grimaces. She looks disgusted by the world, and by herself, horrified by everything she sees. She professes to a profound hatred of men, declaring herself a "feminist" without even really understanding what it means, and yet at the same time she seems drawn to men, a would-be Lolita whose twitching fingers betray her excitement when even the most unpromising male specimen walks in the door. She has a lover (David Thewlis in a pre-Naked trial run for his role as Johnny) who comes by during the day to smear her body in chocolate and have sex with her, though she inevitably throws him out in contempt immediately afterward, sickened by what they just did together.

Nicola is a fascinating character, a complicated mess of contradictions whose every line is brilliant — and often brilliantly comic, too, although it's undeniably a dark and somewhat uncomfortable strain of humor. She works best in the many closeups Leigh gives her, closeups of a probing and intimate quality that capture every nuance of her frustration and rage and blistering emotional onslaughts. Leigh is famous for the care and attention he gives to his actors, developing their characters with them over the course of lengthy rehearsals before a frame of film is even shot. This process shows through in the depth and complexity of these characters. Each character is lived-in, perfectly conceived.

One hesitates to call it realism, since these performances often shade into the realm of cartoonish exaggeration, but it's maybe a kind of realism, since, even if the individual characters are outlandish, they fit together as a family. They feel right together. Steadman's loony, chirping housewife is a good fit for Broadbent's slightly goofy middle-aged working man, who gets excited like a kid at the prospect of opening his own lunch wagon and going out on his own at last. Wendy and Andy fight, and one can often see the traces of bitterness passing beneath their banter — the angst about their puffy middle-aged bodies and "love handles," the struggle of living in a lousy apartment that continually needs work — but there's also tenderness between them. Leigh films an extended scene of them lying in bed, cuddling, Andy playfully goosing his wife beneath the covers as they worry together about their kids and talk about their plans for the future. It's a sweet scene, a gentle, loving moment that puts their relationship in context.


This is perhaps the point of the film's title. For this family, life is sweet not because of material circumstances (certainly not!) but because they still have hopes, they still have ambitions, they have affection and respect for one another. Only Nicola seems to have no hopes, no positive feelings whatsoever. Only Nicola, seeing how little they have and how little real chance there is of getting any more, has given up, retreating into herself behind a door marked "private." She poses at politics, but as her mom points out late in the film, she never actually does anything about it. In a display of open-mindedness, Wendy tells her that if she's actually "political," to go join a socialist group or something, to go protest something. Actually, Nicola isn't political, she's just a snotty punk, and her sneering attitude is a disguise, a mask for her emptiness and confusion. Leigh allows her to develop naturally towards the moment when the mask falls away, when the traces of the little girl within begin to show through.

But what's interesting is that Nicola's opening up, her moment of vulnerability, is treated not as a breakdown but as a breakthrough. The film's structure is built on a familiar model, the escalating series of events that culminate to break up the family's routine, seemingly leading towards a tragic denouement. This trope is well-worn, the kind of film where in the final act everything starts to go wrong for the characters, their routine shattered and their lives upended — think of P.T. Anderson's Magnolia and the countless films it drew the template from. In the final act of Leigh's film, Andy falls at work and breaks his ankle, Wendy is sexually assaulted by a drunken family friend (Timothy Spall), and Nicola's boyfriend breaks up with her before her mother begins berating her. And yet there's no tragedy. The moment the audience is expecting, the moment when it all comes crashing down in tears and misery, never comes. Andy, though in obvious pain and frustrated by the setback, treats his injury with shamefaced humor, hanging the spoon that tripped him on the wall in a "place of honor." Wendy shrugs off their friend's attempted rape and the loss of her waitressing job, vowing to focus on her family. And Nicola's rough day seems to be a promising first step towards an uneasy rapprochement with the world and, most importantly, with her family.

The film's final shot is an image of the two sisters sitting on the back porch together, talking honestly about their problems, with Natalie promising to help her sister. It's not a feel-good ending, exactly, but it suggests hope, it suggests that things are not quite so bad as they sometimes appear, that this family will continue to muddle through and find moments of happiness here and there. This is what Leigh is after, this kind of honesty that doesn't descend to maudlin melodramatics or tear-jerking manipulation. He's honest about the ugliness and deprivations of this family's life, the con schemes and decrepit home and drunkenness and squabbles, but he's also honest about the good things. The film is full of humor, and yet Leigh isn't laughing at these characters; he's finding humor and pleasure in their lives because that's what they do. Even the misanthrope Nicola provides a kind of humor for her family, who almost enjoy her nihilistic pronouncements in a certain perverse way. Ultimately, the point is that attitude matters far more than concrete circumstances. Leigh's characters could easily give in to squalor and abjection, could easily say "fuck off" as Nicola does, but they don't. Instead, they struggle on, make do, live for their hopes and for each other, for the rare but nonetheless cherished moments when they can say, with genuine contentment, that life is sweet.

The Tempest

Derek Jarman's film of The Tempest, William Shakespeare's final play, challenges the idea of the "faithful" literary adaptation. Jarman's marvelous, light-hearted, visually evocative film is, for the most part, true to the text of Shakespeare's play, but the director builds around the text in ingenious ways, creating a dense patchwork that melds his own punk sensibility with the Bard's mystical ode to romance, revenge and redemption. The film is true to the story and structure of the play, which concerns the bitter, exiled sorcerer Prospero (Heathcote Williams), whose lordly title was stolen from him by his conniving brother Antonio (Richard Warwick) and the King of Naples (Peter Bull). Sent away with his young daughter Miranda (Toyah Willcox), Prospero becomes lord of a nearly uninhabited island, where he quickly enslaves Caliban (Jack Birkett), the animalistic son of a witch, and Ariel (Karl Johnson), an elemental spirit of the air who does Prospero's bidding in the hopes of one day earning his freedom. The play opens twelve years after Prospero's exile, when he summons a storm that causes his betrayers, Antonio and the King, to shipwreck upon his island, along with the King's son Ferdinand (David Meyer) and several retainers.

Jarman not only follows this plot fairly closely, but has his characters speaking much of Shakespeare's dialogue without alteration, in all its intricate, stylized poetry. Despite this fealty to its source, The Tempest never feels like anything less than a personal expression of Jarman's vision: a mystical, erotic, visually sumptuous work in which the sensual quality of the imagery is as important to its overall effect as the language of Shakespeare. Filled with flickering candles and ornate decorations, Prospero's island stronghold has a kind of dilapidated grandeur that's matched by the ragged period costumes of the characters. Miranda especially is the film's spirit, a sprightly nymph with a mischievous smile and the dirty beauty of a street urchin. She is the proper heiress to a kingdom but has been raised in cluttered squalor amidst Prospero's dusty libraries, in rooms where elegant furniture sits in a chaos of filth and garbage. She wanders through the castle, and through the film, with her billowing gowns strewn haphazardly around her, playing at being a princess. Her playful spirit and charm animate the film. In one great scene, she practices at descending a staircase while demurely greeting imaginary guests on each side of her — halfway down, she stumbles and falls into an abrupt sitting posture on the steps, her dirty bare feet sticking out from beneath her gown at askew angles.

It's through performances like Willcox's turn as Miranda that Jarman subtly worms his way into this old, well-known material. The acting has a spirit of play and winking slyness about it, a flippant attitude that's not disrespectful towards Shakespeare's text but rather especially attuned to the comic possibilities of these characters. Caliban is an important figure in this respect, and Birkett plays the monstrous slave with leering intensity. His introduction is unforgettable, sitting in front of a fire and eating whole, uncooked eggs, spitting out the cracked shells and letting a dribble of yolk run down his face as he does so. With his blackened teeth and wide, popping eyes, he is a ridiculous figure, a grotesque caricature. Birkett's campy performance finds its match in the duo of drunken sailors who Caliban soon finds himself involved with: Stephano (Christopher Biggins) and Trinculo (Peter Turner). Together, this comic trio attempts to lead a revolt against Prospero, but instead mostly just stumble drunkenly through a series of games of dress-up: their flamboyant performances and proclivity for donning dresses and makeup brings a homoerotic component to their conspiracy.


Jarman's wildly original perspective on this material is equally apparent in the visualization of the flashbacks involving Caliban and his sinister mother, Sycorax (Claire Davenport), who is depicted as a naked witch breast-feeding her adult son and living in a state of savagery. Many later critics have viewed Shakespeare's Tempest in terms of colonialism, with Prospero as the colonial conqueror who takes control of a native land, enslaving its inhabitants with his more sophisticated means, which they tend to view as magic. Jarman's interpretation acknowledges this modern, deconstructionist reading of the play in these scenes, in which Prospero describes himself as redeeming the island from its wild nature. He uses the language of a liberator but only offers a new kind of slavery, freeing the air spirit Ariel from Sycorax's imprisonment but forcing the spirit to obey a new master instead. Despite this nod to the interpretation of The Tempest as a colonialist text, Jarman's own vision of this material is much more in line with the playful sensibility of Shakespeare than with the political shadings layered over the text by subsequent interpreters. He's simply having fun, reveling in the myriad possibilities this play affords for striking imagery. Ariel's assault on the shipwrecked King and his party is in particular a visual tour de force: the spirit appears to them accompanied by a pair of midgets in drag, who claw and howl at the prisoners while the room spins, and Ariel weaves a spell around the group in the form of cobwebs clinging to a chandelier.

Even better is the film's climactic scene, in which Jarman definitively departs from Shakespeare for the staging of the grand ball where Prospero forgives his enemies and announces the impending wedding of his daughter to the King's son Ferdinand. Jarman surrounds this scene, the romantic climax of the film, with a dazzling array of homoerotic imagery, including a sped-up dance featuring a galloping troupe of sailors, exchanging partners and twirling in circles around the throne room. Finally, the singer Elisabeth Welch appears, shimmering in gold like a sun goddess, weaving through the room soulfully singing an upbeat variation on "Stormy Weather," smiling with grace and passing by everyone in turn, putting smiles on their faces with her beautiful voice.

It's a wonderful moment, Jarman's campy, irreverent replacement for Shakespeare's finale, in which Prospero, having used magic to forgive his enemies and send his daughter off into the world with a new husband, gives up his magic arts for good. Jarman elides these scenes, perhaps unwilling to give up magic. Shakespeare's finale has been widely interpreted as the playwright's farewell to the theater, so it's fitting that Jarman, so early in his career, should be unwilling to say his goodbyes to film in the same way. Instead, his film ends in the aftermath of a colorful party, in a room whose floor is littered with multicolored flower petals. It's a fitting closing to a film that celebrates the visual magic of the cinema as thoroughly as the magical arts of Prospero.

Young and Innocent

Alfred Hitchcock primarily made his reputation with his many "wrong man" thrillers, chase adventures in which men were wrongly accused of horrible crimes and went on the run while trying to prove their innocence. His early film Young and Innocent is in some ways an example of this specialized genre that Hitch helped create, but more accurately it could probably be called a wrong man comedy. Of course, most of Hitch's films have their share of humor and wit, and his British work in particular is often light and funny. But this film is almost completely lacking the texture of a murder mystery or thriller. It's more like a farce, a caper flick about a pair of young people who meet and have a wild series of adventures, obviously falling in love along the way. That the young man is accused of murder, and the young woman is the local chief constable's daughter, is almost incidental to the film's free-spirited good humor and sense of fun. All that matters is that they're young and attractive and quick to smile, and they head off traipsing around the countryside together.

At least, that's what the film becomes, but its opening is a different matter. The first scene is a prime example of Hitchcock's inventive staging, his way of catching the audience's attention right from the start. The film's first image is a closeup of a woman, right in the middle of an obviously angry conversation. She steps aside, out of the closeup, her form shifting out of focus as she steps back within the frame, and as she does a man steps forward into a closeup of his own, pausing to light a cigarette before continuing the argument. Within a single shot, Hitchcock has already established a kind of chase motif, with the man sinisterly pursuing the woman, even following her through the sequence of her blocking within the shot. When the woman turns up dead the next morning, strangled with a belt from a raincoat and then thrown in the ocean, the audience already knows exactly who did it, even though they didn't see it. Everyone within the film, however, suspects the young Robert Tisdall (Derrick De Marney), who shows up at the scene and happens to know the dead woman, an actress who'd been helping him out because of some writing work he'd done for her. It doesn't help that the grateful woman left him some money in her will, supplying Robert with a convenient motive, and that he had (and lost) a raincoat just like the one whose belt was used in the murder.

Things don't look good for Robert, but he quickly (and cleverly) escapes, hiding in plain sight by slipping away from his guards and sitting in the audience at the courtroom where he was supposed to appear, then in the confusion posing as one of the volunteers looking for himself. Soon enough, he falls in with Erica (Nova Pilbeam), the daughter of the local constable who is initially distrustful of Robert but soon comes to believe in his innocence. The two then proceed to wander around the country, looking for Robert's missing raincoat. As soon as one stops to think about it, this is really one of Hitchcock's most preposterous McGuffins — does Robert expect to run into the police station yelling "I've found a raincoat" and simply be set free afterward? The whole thing is silly and contrived, so it's a good thing that Hitchcock mostly pays it little mind. He's having too much fun setting up even sillier and more contrived situations for Robert and Erica to deal with while on their search. Erica's attempt to concoct an alibi for her disappearance backfires when her nosy, gossipy Aunt Sally (Mary Clare) ropes her and Robert into a child's birthday party, from which they continually attempt to disentangle themselves while playing games like blind man's bluff.


There's even more fun to be had once the duo pick up the tramp Old Will (Edward Rigby), who supposedly might be able to pick out the real murderer but who's really just there because he's funny. Robert and Erica dress up the old guy in fancy duds so they can sneak him into a hotel where they think the murderer is staying — don't ask why, it doesn't make any more sense than anything else in the plot. Hitchcock gets a lot of mileage out of Rigby's comic performance, his fumbling with his shirt cuffs and deer-in-the-headlights stare when he has to ask for a table or order tea. And the sequence of him trying to dance around the room with Erica while keeping an eye out for the murderer is downright hilarious, as he waddles duck-like through his dance steps. More problematic is the fact that the final sequence prominently features a band in outrageous blackface, complete with heavy lips circled around their mouths. And among them is the murderer, hiding behind the facepaint. The film's climax is essentially centered around an extended blackface gag. Despite the formal inventiveness of the scene — a series of lengthy tracking shots that establish the murderer's location within the large ballroom — this is a really uncomfortable way to close out such a sprightly, good-humored film.

The blackface does serve Hitchcock well in that its offensiveness distracts, at a crucial moment, from the complete absurdity of his story, which after all Robert and Erica's investigation and struggles, ends with the murderer simply giving himself away and screaming his confession out to the whole room. It's an absurd deus ex machina, but no more absurd than the question of the murderer's whereabouts throughout the whole rest of the story. After all, the opening scene establishes that he's the murdered woman's husband, or ex-husband, a fact that the film then dismisses rather quickly.

This is all very far from being one of Hitchcock's tightest or most elegantly made films, though there's still a rough ingenuity to the comedic scenes and the small touches Hitch brings to the scenario. At the beginning of the film, he repeats the trick from The 39 Steps where a scream blends into the sound of a train whistle; this time, two women's shrieks of horror are interrupted by a quick insert of a flock of cawing seagulls. There's a similar playfulness to offhand gags like the way the fleeing couple throw a teacup out of the window of their car and, without realizing it, foil some pursuing cop cars. The couple themselves are certainly having a lot of fun through it all. De Marney and Pilbeam seem to be lightweight but appealing actors, from that particular school of British acting that's all earnest good humor and broad grins and "cheerio chap," but their unpretentious manners are perfectly suited to their naïve young characters. This is unquestionably minor Hitchcock, but it shows the director at his most flippant and easygoing, carelessly mashing together his characteristic elements into a silly but entertaining little trifle.