Jamaica Inn

[This post is one last late contribution to the third annual For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which ran from May 13-18. This year, hosts Marilyn Ferdinand, Farran Smith Nehme and Roderick Heath have dedicated the week to Alfred Hitchcock, whose early (non-directorial) work "The White Shadow" will be the beneficiary of any money earned during the event. Be sure to donate!]

Jamaica Inn was the final film of Alfred Hitchcock's British period, made just before the director emigrated to Hollywood. Hitchcock was purportedly not very happy with the film, which he made quickly and cheaply, in a hurry to get to America. It's certainly not one of the director's most characteristic works, a period pirate drama based on a Daphne Du Maurier novel. It's obvious the director is distracted and not fully engaged, and the film is pretty much as dire as its reputation suggests, mostly lacking in Hitchcock's characteristic visual rigor. Instead, it's talky and plodding, with little to recommend it beyond some showy performances and the occasional nice visual flourish.

Maureen O'Hara, fresh-faced and beautiful, is "introduced" in the opening credits, since this was her very first starring role. As Mary, she's playing an avatar of innocence and goodness, stumbling into the center of a den of thieves when she goes to stay with her Aunt Patience (Marie Ney) and Uncle Joss (Leslie Banks). Joss, it turns out, is the leader of a group of pirates based at the Jamaica Inn, a base of operations from which they lure unsuspecting ships to crash on the rocks, plundering the shipwrecks and killing any survivors to coldbloodedly eliminate any witnesses. Joss, unbeknownst to Mary or anybody else, gets his orders from Sir Humphrey (Charles Laughton), a local dignitary who Mary has met and thinks of as an ally. When Mary arrives at the Jamaica Inn, she quickly disturbs the pirate gang's plans, freeing the pirate Trehearne (Robert Newton), who is being hanged as a traitor by the rest of the gang.


The film is primarily an acting showcase for Charles Laughton, shamelessly hamming it up as Sir Humphrey, a role substantially expanded and changed from the Du Maurier novel especially for Laughton to sink his teeth into. He seems to be having a blast playing this man living a double life as a well-respected lord and a smuggler boss. When he's not bellowing enthusiastically for his servants, he's pattering in a rapid stream of pretentious wordplay and speechifying, all bluster and stilted mannerisms. It's an over-the-top performance, though Laughton modulates his hysterics towards the end of the film, when he finally reveals his villainy to Mary, dropping all pretense and affecting more of a quietly sinister demeanor, projecting menace in silky tones. At this point, he becomes something of a memorably Hitchcockian villain, binding Mary and taking her away as he unleashes a mad stream of vitriol.

Hitchcock shows only sporadic signs of being visually engaged by this material. In one scene, as Trehearne tries to convince Patience to let him go, Hitchcock's camera whips rapidly back and forth again and again from one of them to the other as they exchange lines, arguing over the man's fate. Hitchcock also makes the scenes out in the countryside very stark and dark, set in a bleak rocky wasteland with perpetually gray and cloudy skies hanging above the hideously warped landscape. The exterior scenes have an eerie, minimalist artificiality that's bracing and potent, creating an evocative atmosphere. In one scene, as Trehearne and Mary hide from the pursuing pirate gang, Hitchcock places them in the foreground of the shot, in front of a jagged rocky wall that obscures them from the villains scurrying around in the background of the shot. The docks where Humphrey takes Mary at the end of the film are also moodily shot, covered in shadows, betraying the influence of German expressionism, though Hitchcock doesn't linger long in this foggy locale.

On the whole, though, such evocative moments are rare, and Jamaica Inn winds up being one of Hitchcock's very worst films. Hitchcock was on his way to Hollywood, and his first film there would be another Du Maurier adaptation, Rebecca, the sensuous style and psychological depth of which only confirms how slapdash and uncharacteristic this final British film was.

Another Thin Man

The third film in the William Powell/Myrna Loy "Thin Man" series, Another Thin Man adds a new member of the Charles family, but otherwise sticks close to the series' roots. Nick Charles (Powell) and his wife Nora (Loy) get tied up in yet another twisty murder mystery despite the retired Nick's insistence that he's no longer in the detective game. The couple have a baby this time around, joining their playful dog Asta as the fourth member of the family, but otherwise the story's mechanics aren't drastically changed. The mystery this time around is rather silly and half-hearted, more so than in the series' first two installments, in which there was at least some attempt to pretend that the mystery elements were actually driving the film, rather than the cheerful sparring and barbed wit of Powell and Loy. This time, it's all about the Powell/Loy chemistry, and the mystery story is left to meander aimlessly until the obligatory final scene when Nick pulls it all together, seemingly pulling the solution out of thin air — it's all so confused, he couldn't have pulled it from anywhere else.

It all starts when Nick and Nora are summoned by Nora's old uncle Colonel MacFay (C. Aubrey Smith), who's scared for his life following threats made by a disgruntled former employee, Phil Church (Sheldon Leonard). Church tells MacFay that he's dreamed of the old man's death, and that his dreams usually come true — a thinly disguised threat intended to squeeze money from the colonel. But when the old man turns up dead, and Church disappears, things start to get complicated, and frankly it's hardly worth untangling the mess of false leads, double crosses, attacks and twists thrown into this mess. Nick's continually getting shot at or having knives tossed at him, but the real fun is the way he and Nora prowl around, tracking down potential leads while playing games with each other.

A prime example is the scene where the couple visits a boarding house, trying to get the scoop on a mysterious girl called Linda Mills who seems to be tied up in this case somehow. Nick hangs back, letting Nora take the lead and pretending he doesn't know her, and while the landlady (veteran character actress Marjorie Main in a hilarious bit turn) shows Nora a room, Nick actually gets to snoop around Linda's apartment. Main's chatty, strong-willed landlady is a great comic foil for Powell and Loy, even plotting to bring the two supposed strangers together. And when, by the end of the scene, Nick simply grabs Nora and plants a kiss on her before leading her out, the landlady's stunned reaction is hilarious.


Indeed, Nick and Nora get plenty of great bit players to knock up against here, and even if the film doesn't add up to a satisfying whole, there are individual scenes that surely rank among the funniest in the "Thin Man" franchise. One of the best involves the running gag of Nora hearing about some of Nick's old girlfriends and using their names as aliases whenever possible, prompting Nick's sly nod, an acknowledgment that she's scored a point on him. Then there's the suave Latin seducer (Alexander D'Arcy), who Nora mistakes for an informant and winds up trapped dancing with the man as Nick watches, simultaneously annoyed and grinning. One of the hallmarks of the couple's relationship is their outward nonchalance, coupled with deeper reserves of feeling underneath; at one point, the lights go out, and when they come on again, Nick's suddenly the one dancing with Nora, and her would-be Latin lover has been mysteriously punched in the jaw. Nick's also funny opposite the old colonel's seemingly unflappable housekeeper, Mrs. Bellam (Phyllis Gordon), who reacts to everything with such a disarming lack of concern that she even manages to nonplus the usually stoic detective. At one point, she calmly walks in to announce: "Colonel, the swimming pool is on fire," with the disinterested air of someone calling everyone in for dinner.

Another of the film's best gags involves the Charles' new baby, who is mostly used as a fun prop for a few setups and otherwise shuffled into the background while Nick and Nora engage in their usual hijinks. But the baby is unarguably at center stage when one of Nick's lowlife friends (Harry Bellaver) decides to throw the kid a birthday party, inviting all the hoods he knows with babies of their own — and some who were able to "rent" one for the day. The best moment comes from the thug who checks to make sure that no one kidnapped a baby to get into the party: "we don't need no hot tot." Of course, if this is starting to sound like simply a catalog of the film's gags and punchlines, that's because it's hard to write about Another Thin Man without resorting to recounting its best moments. The film is frequently funny, and the witty chemistry between Powell and Loy is as strong as ever, but by this third entry, the "Thin Man" series is starting to feel like it's yielding diminishing returns. The formula is set by now, even to the point that Nora gets the same exact line early on in each film: "Oh Nick, you have such lovely friends." The formula isn't exactly tired — with two actors this fine at the center, the film is still charming and lightly entertaining — but nor is it as fresh or wildly exciting as it was the first time around.

Stagecoach

Stagecoach was the first film to unite director John Ford with both his iconic genre, the Western, and the actor who would come to be his most iconic star, John Wayne. Ford and Wayne both made Westerns before this, of course, but their collaboration on this film sparked something bold and unusual that would breathe new life into the genre and help shape it for the next two decades, the Golden Age of the Hollywood Western. It feels like something new and special is afoot from the moment Ford introduces Wayne as the wrongly jailed outlaw nicknamed the Ringo Kid. The harsh crack of a gunshot stops a speeding stagecoach, and Ford zooms in frantically from a long shot of Wayne to a tight closeup of his face, the ghost of a smile dancing around his lips, his hat brim curved above that chiseled, square-jawed visage. It feels like Ford knew, from the moment he introduced his star, just how strongly this image would resonate: Wayne's entrance into the film is electrifying, the arrival of both the infamous outlaw and the new upcoming star.

Despite this emphasis, the Ringo Kid is only one of the nine passengers who winds up aboard the eponymous stagecoach, all heading in the same direction, braving dangerous territory plagued by warring Apaches, for very different reasons. The lawman Curly (George Bancroft) aims to stop Ringo from triggering a bloodbath at the end of the line, where he knows the three men who killed Ringo's father and brother are waiting. The prostitute Dallas (Claire Trevor) and drunken doctor Boone (Thomas Mitchell) are being chased from town by the more "respectable" citizens, some of whom actually aren't as respectable as they'd like others to think. The suave gambler Hatfield (John Carradine) projects a gentlemanly image, but he might just be a cowardly killer, while the pompous Gatewood (Berton Churchill) is fleeing town with stolen payroll money. There's also the ill Lucy (Louise Platt), trying to reach her cavalry husband, the nervous whiskey salesman Peacock (Donald Meek), whose wares provide a temptation to Doc Boone, and the cracked-voice coach driver Buck (Andy Devine), who can't stop complaining about his Mexican wife and her seemingly endless supply of poor relations.

This motley crew is comprised of stock types, and the subtexts about social class and respectability are as broadly played as the humor: the other coach passengers are huffy and scornful of Dallas and Doc Boone, until they realize that both of these downtrodden people have much to offer in their generosity and compassion. Only Ringo, an outcast himself as an ex-con and a wanted outlaw, cares little about caste, and insists on referring to both Lucy and Dallas as "ladies," which of course earns Dallas' gratitude. The film's settings and characters are standards, familiar representations of the Old West, etched into the hard stone of the landscape: the wide expanses of dusty hardpan, the flat-top mesas and rocky abutments jutting up out of the ground. Ford draws with broad strokes, crafting iconic images of the stagecoach winding through the open country, kicking up a wake of dust behind it, the big dome of the sky overhead dotted with cotton fluffs of cloud. The film is painterly in its treatment of these Western vistas, which serve as a contrast to the more claustrophobic interior of the stagecoach, where Ford's compositions are necessarily simple in the cramped space.


Throughout the film, the threat of Indian attacks — and the inevitable showdown awaiting Ringo at the end of the line — looms over the stagecoach's journey, but it's mostly a slow-building tension until the climax. Things are relatively quiet for most of the ride, at least outside of the coach. The arguments among the passengers, largely motivated by class divides and various perceived slights, aren't nearly as interesting as the pictorial beauty of the surroundings. There's energy and poetry in Ford's exterior shots — a shadowy image of a silhouetted Ringo stepping up behind Dallas in the darkness, the countless shots of the coach speeding across the plains — even when nothing much is actually happening within the stagecoach. And of course the film's finale is exhilarating, with the Apache attack providing a perfect excuse for some fancy stuntwork, with jumps from one horse to another and daredevil leaps amidst the fray. The whole film was working towards this explosive action showcase, and one can't miss Ford's enthusiasm when, at the last minute, the cavalry rides in to save the day: a storied movie cliché that Ford invests with such vitality that it's hard to resist. The whole sequence is fun and fast-paced, and sets up Ringo's final shootout with the three brothers who killed his family and sent him to jail.

As one of the defining landmarks of the Western genre, the influence and importance of Stagecoach is hard to avoid. But it's far from a staid, outdated relic of its time, despite the extent to which its language and narrative devices have filtered down through the history of its genre ever since. The film's big cast of stock players is sometimes unwieldy, and its themes overly pat, but Ford's images project such grandeur, such a romantically beautiful image of the Western country and its heroes, that it's always obvious just why this film has remained so influential and well-loved.

Films I Love #15: Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)

[To continue with the theme of the currently running Early Hawks blog-a-thon, the Films I Love series this week spotlights one of my favorite slightly later Hawks films.]

Only Angels Have Wings is one of Howard Hawks' finest films, a tribute to a tight-knit community of men living under the constant specter of death, and a woman who tries to forge herself into the kind of person who could love one of these death-courting daredevils. It is a quintessential Hawks subject, filmed in an atmosphere where cigarette smoke and the ever-present fog curl together, a shroud hanging in the black air of a South American town where a company of fliers must risk death daily in order to deliver the mail across treacherous mountain ranges. The film is one of Hawks' most gorgeously shot, with dark, moody images that capture the romance and bravado of aviation. Cary Grant is Geoff Carter, the head pilot of this crew, bearing a heavy burden as night after night he sends his men up in bad weather or good, taking the riskiest missions for himself when he knows no one else could pull it off. Jean Arthur is Bonnie Lee, the woman who arrives on a steamship for a layover and finds herself falling for Geoff, even though she knows he resists sharing his dangerous life with any woman. The film has a quiet, melancholy tone despite its occasional bursts of wisecracking Hawksian dialogue, and the fiery plane crashes that punctuate the film give it an uneasy, unstable quality, as though anyone could be snuffed out suddenly at any moment. It's a haunting masterpiece, a fog-shrouded romance — not just between a man and a woman, but between a man and his work, and perhaps most importantly, a grim romance between man and death.

The Women (1939)

George Cukor's The Women is an overwrought, bitchy melodrama in which, true to its title, the male presence is entirely eliminated in order to focus on the gossip, backbiting, betrayals, and catfights that go on among a group of society women. The film, adapted from a successful play, is a deliberately high camp satire. With its ripe, hilariously barbed dialogue, it perfectly captures a certain kind of shrill, endlessly chattering upper-class milieu, with women so isolated from their husbands and the male world in general that the men in their lives need not even appear in the film. Cukor went to great lengths to ensure that there was no male representation onscreen, even casting female animals for the scenes where dogs, horses, and monkeys appear.

The film's plot, based on a real piece of gossip overheard by playwright Clare Boothe Luce, centers on Mary Haines (Norma Shearer), who initially seems to be the only person in town who doesn't know that her husband Stephen is running around on her with the wily, man-stealing shopgirl Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford). All of Mary's supposed friends express fake sympathy, while eagerly spreading the news far and wide, none of them more than the cheerfully gossipy Sylvia Fowler (Rosalind Russell, in an amazing comic turn). Indeed, Mary is surrounded by these gossiping women, virtually a who's who of female MGM talent at the time the film was made: the nosy Edith (Phyllis Povah), naïve young Peggy (Joan Fontaine), the brash four-time divorcee Countess de Lave (Mary Boland), and the foxy former chorus girl Miriam (Paulette Goddard), a more benign man-stealer than the blatantly gold-digging Crystal. The cast is, obviously, top-notch, and they're given a lot of red meat to dig into. The script is hilarious, packed with memorably bitchy lines and patter, as all these women trade barely concealed barbs, openly insulting one another while maintaining at least an appearance of decorum and manners.

Only Crystal herself, with her lower-class background, is crass enough to let the veil slip aside, and her quips are more unfettered than those of the other women. When Mary, having finally learned about the affair, confronts Crystal and insults her taste in clothes, Crystal retorts without missing a beat, "Thanks for the tip, but when anything I wear doesn't please Stephen, I take it off." Crawford doesn't get as much screentime as one would expect to justify her top billing — she can't be onscreen for more than a half hour total — but she makes the most of what she gets, delivering frankly sexual lines like that with a raised eyebrow and a lewd leer. Later, she's the only character in the film to get as close as the Production Code would allow to calling another woman a bitch, when she not so subtly references a word that "isn't used in high society... outside of a kennel."


Cukor and the cast have an obvious ball with this lurid material, and whenever the cattiness of the women is the focus, the film crackles with energy. Cukor's camera groups the women into tight clusters, documenting their warm, friendly manner, their propensity to hug and smile and laugh together, even as their dialogue cloaks venom in a sweet, light coating of sugar. At other times, the film often lapses into over-the-top sentimentality, especially with regards to Mary, who is devastated by learning that her husband — who she thought of as an equal and a partner — is cheating on her. There's more than a hint of anti-feminist ideology in the script, which positions Mary as a proto-feminist figure who takes pride in her ability to fish and ride horses as well as her husband, and who engages in friendly competition with him over such manly pursuits. The implication is that it's only natural for the never-seen Stephen to seek out the arms of another woman, since Crystal offers him only sex and uncompetitive femininity. In the end, Mary becomes happy only when she's able to sacrifice her pride and accept her husband back, for the first time using the catty ways of her friends to win him back.

The film also falters whenever it indulges the over-the-top melodrama of the story too much, as it does in practically all of the overwrought scenes between Mary and her wide-eyed daughter (Virginia Weidler), which have a saccharine, unsubtle sentimentality that fits uncomfortably with the film's overall bitchiness. Indeed, it's somewhat hard to buy Mary's passionate and enduring love for her husband when the film's central conceit keeps the men, including Stephen, completely out of the picture. This choice makes perfect sense when it comes to the other women, who seem to treat the men in their lives like accessories, to be changed as though putting on a new hairstyle, whenever the old one gets boring. It's no surprise that nasty Sylvia's husband never shows up onscreen, given that his only function in her life seems to be for bragging rights and the stability of a society marriage. Mary is somewhat alone among the women in the film in loving her husband a great deal, even when his affair — and the gossipy meddling of her friends — sets the couple on the road to divorce.

At times, Cukor devises ingenious methods of keeping Stephen hidden even when pivotal scenes demand to be shown. The couple's breakup is narrated by a maid who listens outside their room to the argument, then runs downstairs to spill it all to the cook, acting out both parts with obvious relish. Thus, Stephen's words get into the film even when he himself does not. There are also several telephone calls between the couple, where Cukor shows only a closeup on Mary, trusting her reactions to communicate what's happening on both sides of the phone. In one heartbreaking sequence, right after she's learned of the affair but before she's confronted him, Mary speaks to him over the phone, trying to pretend that everything's alright as he excuses himself from dinner. She tells him it's all fine, trying to put a smile into her voice, but the tears well up in her eyes nevertheless. It's melodramatic, but it's one of the few scenes in the film where such theatrics seem genuine and moving rather than nauseating. Elsewhere, the absence of Stephen is more distracting, especially in the film's final moments, when Mary's joyfully teary reunion with him is conveyed by another of those gauzy closeups, accompanied by sweeping, romantic music. It's hard to celebrate, with her, the return of a guy who's never even been seen, and who seems to have treated her terribly, just because the script has Mary continually expressing her love for him even despite his straying.

The film is occasionally hard to bear whenever it ventures into this kind of sappy, audience-pleasing tripe, but that's perhaps to be expected of a film that is so openly intended as a woman's picture. The film even incorporates an interlude, in eye-popping Technicolor, where the women go to witness a fashion show. Cukor, as is to be expected, treats it like a theatrical showcase, a square of color initially inset into the film's black and white reality before expanding to encompass the entire screen. As the models parade around a brightly artificial succession of sets — including, of course, a theater where the women exit onto the runway at the conclusion of a play — they show off a series of outrageous outfits, proving that high fashion was every bit as ridiculous and disconnected from reality in 1939 as it is today. This bit of eye candy is an obvious nod to the film's intended audience, even if much of the rest of the film has a somewhat jaundiced perspective on that same audience of women. The Women is, for the most part, a delightfully nasty satire, as bitchy and tiger-clawed as its protagonists.