Under Capricorn

Alfred Hitchcock's Under Capricorn is one of the director's more divisive films, but it certainly doesn't deserve its unflattering reputation. This lavish period melodrama, set in 1800s Australia, might be deliberately paced, but it's as emotionally, psychologically and formally complex as any of the director's best work. The core of the film is a twisted three-way relationship that develops between the wealthy ex-convict Sam (Joseph Cotten), his disturbed, alcoholic wife Hattie (Ingrid Bergman), and Charles (Michael Wilding), who had known Hattie as a boy in Ireland and claims to Sam that he can awaken Hattie from her self-destructive, near-insane mental state. Indeed, the charming Charles is able to shake Hattie out of her stasis and mental collapse, but he also preys on her, seducing her away from her husband even as he cures her. Sam watches this situation unfold, glowering and brooding, under the watchful eye of his maid Milly (Margaret Leighton), who obviously desires Sam and resents his wife. There's a dark history here that slowly, patiently unfurls, but the emphasis throughout is not really on narrative, past or present, but on the churning, potent emotions of the protagonists and the engulfing visual style that Hitchcock springs like a trap around the characters.

Hitchcock made this film immediately after the long-take formal experiment of Rope, and he applies a similar aesthetic here, albeit not quite as rigorously. This was Hitchcock's only collaboration with Powell/Pressburger cinematographer Jack Cardiff, whose sumptuous use of color and glossy, unreal aesthetic is a perfect complement to Hitchcock, and especially to the particular qualities of this lush period drama. Using the unbroken take style of Rope, Hitchcock and Cardiff hold shots for minutes at a time, the camera unmoored, drifting around the rooms of Sam's palatial home, its gentle movements subtly but definitively defining the relationships between the characters. Who's in the frame and who's not means everything in this film, particularly in terms of the central love triangle, as Charles' friendship with and seduction of Hattie increasingly pushes her own husband out of the picture, shunting him off to the side.

In the first scene where Charles and Hattie meet, she wanders, drunk and dazed, into one of her husband's dinner parties and sits down at the head of the table. Charles holds her chair for her and then sits next to her, leaving his own spot at the table. Once Charles sits down by Hattie's side, it's as though there's no longer anyone else at the table; Hitchcock maintains a two-shot of them as she reminiscences about the past, occasionally glancing across the table, presumably at her unseen husband, but Hitchcock doesn't cut away, doesn't show the reaction of the others to this immediate intimacy, doesn't show anyone else or have anyone else even talk again until Hattie stands up and the camera tracks to follow her, past the others at the table, as Charles walks her to the staircase leading back to her room.


Later, when Hattie dictates a letter to Charles' sister, Hitchcock again keeps the camera on the two of them, Sam forgotten outside the frame, until the camera begins tracking away from Charles and Hattie, past her husband's now abandoned place setting, through the empty room, finally finding Sam, walking away, his back to the camera, in the hallway, as the image fades to black. It's as though, when Charles and Hattie are together, everything else fades away, forgotten, the triangle becoming a two-shot, the room emptying off-camera. Hitchcock and Cardiff have a way of shooting the scenes between Hattie and Charles so that even if someone's standing right next to them, it feels like they're all alone.

In a subsequent scene, Milly, who'd been fired, returns while Charles and Hattie go out to the ball together, again leaving Sam behind. Hitchcock holds a very long and mostly static take as the maid chatters away, delivering her passive-aggressive patter about Hattie, her voice full of gossipy insinuation. The frame slowly constricts and expands as Sam wanders in and out of view, sometimes glowering in the background, sometimes strolling towards the camera, his face dark. All the while, Milly's barely disguised bile dominates the soundtrack, and she remains the visual center of the shot, but it's Sam's darkening expression and stalking walk that actually serve as the scene's viscerally felt focus even when he's peripheral or outside the frame altogether. Only at the very end of the scene, the end of the shot, does Sam finally step forward into the foreground of the frame, and Milly's voice fades away, his anger finally blotting out her words.

There's another fantastic long take when Hattie tells the story of her past with Sam. The camera maintains a medium distance as she paces around the room, and the camera glides with her, often with Charles' head in the foreground of the frame, placing the spectator in his position as he listens to her. She often resists facing him, though, showing the camera her profile more than her full face, which makes the sudden closeup, when she confesses to shooting her brother, all the more startling: the camera suddenly floats upwards and presses in at precisely the moment when she steps forward and leans into the shot, nearly facing the camera for her confessional moment. It's especially striking because immediately afterward she returns to avoiding this direct, forward-facing manner, turning her profile to the camera or turning away altogether, looking up, down, anywhere but straight-on.


This patient, elegant style pays off especially well in the final act, when all the long-bubbling resentments and conflicted emotions come to the surface in an eerie, dreamlike climax. Hattie, returning to her drunken hysteria after a series of dramatic twists and turns, sinks back into her isolation, terrified of the horrifying things she imagines seeing around her room. As Sam tucks Hattie in and comforts her, there's a long, rumbling roll of thunder that sounds like a blown-out speaker, and it continues to roar throughout the nightmarish scenes in which Hattie discovers a ghoulish shrunken head in her bed and collapses, with Hitchcock suggesting the passage of time afterwards with a gorgeous image of a rain-streaked window superimposed over the unconscious woman's face. This whole sequence is haunting and gorgeous, with every detail heightened: the single beaded tear glistening on Hattie's cheek, the tracking shot along the rough terrain of the pillowcase and bedsheets, the continued rolling of the thunder, the sinister tinkling of Milly's keys as she creeps around the room, the light glinting off the poisoned glass that's so resonant of other sinister drinks in Hitchcock's oeuvre.

It's a dream, a nightmare, and the subsequent scenes in which the plot begins reversing gears to move inexorably towards a happy resolution have the feeling of waking up from a dream, finally shaking off the narcotized slumber that afflicted these characters and kept them trapped in a recurring cycle of self-destruction and recrimination. Under Capricorn is a stylish and beautiful movie, its aesthetic seductive and hypnotic, with a psychological complexity that makes it enthralling throughout.

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.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

[This post is a contribution to the third annual For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which will be running 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!]

The 1934 version of Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much is very different from the 1956 Hollywood remake he made with James Stewart and Doris Day. The original film is a punchy, economical little thriller that deftly juggles its conflicting tones, with a generally lighter, more comedic tone than the later film. Bob Lawrence (Leslie Banks) and his wife Jill (Edna Best) go vacationing in the Alps with their daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam), and get accidentally tied up in an international incident when their friend, who turns out to be a spy, is killed. Before he dies, though, he points the couple towards a clue that leads to a plot to assassinate a diplomat, and as a result Betty is kidnapped to prevent the Lawrences from giving their information to the British Foreign Office.

The early scenes of the film strike a jaunty tone, and strangely for a film that centers around a child kidnapping, it starts with a pretty cynical attitude about kids. In her first few scenes, Betty blithely skips onto the ski slope to scoop up her puppy, tripping up the skier coming down the hill and nearly injuring him badly, then snottily interrupts her mother at a skeet-shooting competition, prompting Jill to remark, as she misses her shot, "this is what happens when you have kids." It's all pitched in a ha-ha-just-kidding ironic tone that seems to hide at least a little genuine bitterness — which might be understandable, since after all this is a kid who obliviously blunders onto a ski slope, nearly kills a guy, and then laughs about it afterwards. The Lawrences are blithely ironic with one another as well, jesting and flirting — though mostly not with each other. As Jill dances with another man, Bob mischievously ties a piece of knitting thread to the back of the man's coat, so that as they dance the string winds around the legs of all the dancers. The climax of this comic set piece, when the man discovers the thread, cleverly dovetails with the introduction of the film's serious plot, as Hitchcock chooses this exact moment to have the man get shot.

Throughout the film, the comic is tightly interwoven with the dramatic, especially when Bob and his friend Clive (Hugh Wakefield) go hunting for Betty, trying to track down the kidnappers. The unfortunate Clive keeps getting a raw deal, serving as a guinea pig for an underworld dentist, then getting arrested himself when he tries to inform the police about the kidnappers' plot. Best of all is the strangely goofy scene when Bob discovers the kidnappers hiding in a church and confronts them: the villains can't simply shoot Bob or risk attracting police attention, so the showdown devolves into a wonderfully sloppy battle of throwing wooden chairs, Bob facing off against the bad guys as they hurl chairs at one another, all while a nun plays the organ to mask the racket they're making. It's almost childlike, a game with deadly serious stakes.


Of course, on a more serious note, there's the famous Albert Hall sequence, in which Jill sits in the audience, knowing that an assassin is going to shoot a diplomat when the music gets loud enough, but vacillating about what she should do. Hitchcock drastically expanded and refined this sequence for the 1956 remake, and it plays out much better in the later film, but here the essence of the suspense is already apparent, slowly building as the gun edges out from behind a curtain. Less successful is the protracted and lackluster shootout between the cops and the bad guys that concludes the film, with Hitchcock's usually precise sense of staging and action here degenerating into a flat, static mise en scène with constant pop-pop gun sounds coming from everywhere.

This extended sequence stands out as plodding because so much of the rest of the film rushes by at a clipped, no-nonsense pace, communicating everything in shorthand. When Jill first finds out that her daughter has been kidnapped, she stares off into space, walks a few zombie-like steps, and promptly collapses, and this is virtually the entirety of the film's depiction of parental grief. Everything is compressed and moves with a choppy, jittery rhythm that leaps from one scene to another. As a result, there's very little fat, but also very little characterization, and neither of the two lead performances stand out. Thankfully Hitchcock at least got a scenery-chewing villain in Peter Lorre, who plays the creepy kidnapper Abbott. He's a sleazy, slimy character, defined by the oddly skunk-like white streak running down the center of his hair. Curiously, Hitchcock gives Abbott some of the film's most subtle emotional beats, like the closeup of him looking down — with guilt? sadness? — while thinking about what he'll eventually have to do to Betty when this plot is over. Later, during the final shootout, when Abbott's female partner is shot by a stray bullet, he pulls her close to him, genuinely upset that she's dying. The film rarely pauses for such sentimental moments, so it's striking that the villainous Abbott is the focus of these brief diversions.

The Man Who Knew Too Much mostly speeds by, giving it a jumpy feel; it's bursting with the nervous energy of a rough, low-budget work. The film suffers at times from this economy, mostly in the clipped emotional subtext that the director would build upon when he remade the film, but it's still a fine early Hitchcock thriller with some enjoyable quirks.

Number Seventeen

[This post is a contribution to the third annual For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which will be running 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!]

For a film that its director didn't even want to make and later dismissed as terrible, Number Seventeen is a surprisingly entertaining, if more than a little ridiculous, minor thriller. The film was forced upon Alfred Hitchcock, then still very early in his career and coming off a box office flop that limited his options, so it's no wonder that he thought so little of it. In fact, it's a convoluted, frantically paced comic thriller that's devilishly difficult to follow, and doesn't even attempt to develop its narrative in the least until the hour-long movie's almost half over already, but is incredibly enjoyable anyway.

The plot involves a stolen diamond necklace, a bunch of crooks meeting up with their fence to split the take, a detective, the daughter (Ann Casson) of the man the necklace was stolen from, and an innocent bum (Leon M. Lion) caught up in this whole mess because he'd stumbled into the wrong building. Of course, none of these things are explained in the least until most of the movie's over already. To make things even more confusing, even when this basic scenario becomes clear, it's still not at all clear who's a crook and who's a detective. The film has a breakneck pace and hardly ever pauses to explain anything, which makes it not very satisfying narratively, but kind of fun in a baffling, manic way. It's the kind of film where a woman (Anne Grey) previously described as deaf-mute suddenly begins talking halfway through the movie, and it's never explained why, and where identities seem to switch every few minutes.

In the wordless, noirish opening sequence, the camera tracks rapidly along the sidewalk as fallen leaves and a man's hat are blown across the ground, stopping in front of a building where a man (John Stuart) runs into the frame to retrieve his hat. He stops outside the building, watching as lights mysteriously play off the walls inside, then he walks up to the door, which opens on its own like the entrance to the monster's lair in old horror movies. Inside, Hitchcock plays with expressionist shadows as the man prowls around, tracking someone else who's inside: there's a loud noise, a man collapses, his hand hanging over the upper railing and casting a tremendous shadow on the wall, and then the man from outside meets someone else wandering the abandoned building, who turns out to be the bum, Ben. They both find the body at the same moment, and Hitchcock finally deflates the tension with a jagged montage of a train roaring by, casting flickering lights over the two men — a forerunner of future Hitchcockian trains — and then cuts to brief, distorted closeups of both men comically screaming in terror.


More and more people begin converging on the abandoned building for mysterious reasons, and though nothing ever makes much sense, Hitchcock builds a compellingly eerie atmosphere as these people cluster in the darkness, listening for strange noises as shadows dance across the walls. At one point, the original man goes downstairs to check on noises at the front door, and he looks out the window to see smoke wafting up from the man on the other side of the door. Much else is conveyed with shadows and loud noises, and as more and more people show up, seemingly all of them toting guns and mysterious appointment cards, it increasingly begins to seem like Hitchcock's going for the atmosphere of a mystery/thriller with a plot that keeps getting more and more complicated without ever fully resolving itself. The film's pretty much a mess, but Hitchcock handles the narrative pile-up so deftly that it's easy to overlook the shambles of the script and simply enjoy the moody visuals and goofy comic asides.

Ben's a very comic character, a tramp who's stumbled into a mystery and just wants out. Hitchcock gives him some fun business to do, further distracting from the plot, like the scene where he checks to see if a gun's loaded by peering into and blowing into its barrel. He then tries to stalk his own shadow before realizing what it is, and playfully waves his arms about, watching as his stretched-out shadow mimics him.

The film finally accelerates to a manic, chaotic climax with a chase between a speeding train and a commandeered bus, much of the chase achieved with some nicely done scale models. Hitchcock keeps cutting back and forth between the bus and the train, conveying the rapid pace of it all and also emphasizing the humor, showing the bus passengers bouncing in their seats as it careens along, flying by a sign that reads, "stop here for dainty teas." It all ends with an epic crash, the detective's identity changes a few more times, and in the final shot, Ben gets his moment of glory, grinning heroically for the camera. It's an extremely absurd and sloppy movie, but its lighthearted tone and Hitchcock's shadowy expressionist approach to it make it nearly irresistible.

Murder!

[This post is a contribution to the third annual For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which will be running 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!]

Murder! was Alfred Hitchcock's third sound film, and it bears plentiful evidence of the young director experimenting with form and style, livening up what's otherwise a routine and glacially paced murder mystery. The theater actress Diana Baring (Norah Baring) is found one night sitting beside the corpse of one of her fellow actresses, swearing that she doesn't remember killing the girl. Nevertheless, it seems to be an open-and-shut case, and she's promptly convicted and placed on death row. Only after the trial is over does one of the jurors, Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall), have second thoughts about letting himself get talked into going along with the guilty verdict. He begins investigating the case himself, hoping to uncover evidence of Diana's innocence. The film's plot is simple and schematic, and the pace is almost painfully plodding, with one inert scene after another walking Sir John closer to the solution. The performances are mostly not bad, but it's Hitchcock's budding visual imagination and subtle sense of humor that really elevates this pedestrian material.

The film opens in a quaint, patently artificial village that looks like it belongs in a German Expressionist silent: an appropriate place for a murder. In the opening scenes, Hitchcock cleverly builds tension sonically, starting with a scream that wakes up the neighborhood, sends birds fluttering away, and sets the dogs to howling. The soundtrack becomes noisy and cluttered: barking, people chattering, the banging noises of the police knocking on the door of the house that's causing all this disturbance. Hitchcock defuses the suspense slightly with the humor of one couple who stick their heads out their window, the wooden frame continually sliding down on their necks, but they're so intent on seeing what's happening that they let it push them down into the flower bed, craning their necks to see. At the site of all the clamor, Hitchcock further elongates the tension by focusing on the reactions of the people at the scene, shooting the backs of the heads of the people crowding around the door.

By this point, it's obvious that there's been a murder, but rather than just unveiling the body, Hitchcock employs a precise, elegant, slow camera move that retains the influence of the silent cinema in its ability to trace a whole narrative in the angle of the camera' arc. The camera moves from Diana's haunted, staring profile, down her arm, to the splatter of blood on the hem of her dress and her hand dangling just above the floor, then moving perpendicularly along the floor, parallel to a fire poker, the murder weapon, which lays pointing directly at the head of the dead woman who now, finally, appears within the frame.

Diana doesn't appear much in the film, but she still instantly makes an impression with her intense stare and shell-shocked demeanor. She barely even says much, mostly just staring blankly off into the distance, haunted by the secrets she's hiding and won't reveal even to save her own life or help her case. Her expressive silent movie actress face carries a lot of weight for what is otherwise an underwritten character; she serves as the trigger for the plot but is only vaguely defined even though the whole story revolves around her. Her most compelling moment is a wordless montage in which Hitchcock alternates overhead shots of her pacing around her cell with a foreboding image of the shadow of a noose reflected on a wall, creeping slowly up the wall as the sun changes position, a cleverly grim way of suggesting the passage of time.


Hitchcock also has some fun with a quirky little scene in which two gossipy women prepare tea while talking about the murder. This long scene plays out in a single shot that repeatedly tracks back and forth between two adjacent rooms as one of the women putters around, preparing the tea and laying out cups. Each time she walks from one room to the next, the camera tracks with her, and her friend scurries after her, sitting down, then almost immediately getting up again to return to the other room. The back-and-forth tracking of the camera brings out the deadpan comedy of this otherwise mundane scene, building an entirely cinematic and formal humor that's distinct from the banal content of the scene.

Hitchcock puts a little verve into moments like that whenever he can, because he doesn't have a whole lot to work with here. Once the trial is over and Sir John begins his investigation, the film is dominated by a series of stagey dialogues with witnesses and suspects, and there's not much Hitchcock can do to make these lifelessly written scenes pop. There are hints, here and there, of a buried homosexual subtext that was more explicit in the Clemence Dane novel the film is based on, but here it's mostly replaced by an undercooked racial theme. The film's theater milieu is full of crossdressing actors, and gradually the investigation begins to focus on the trapeze artist Handel Fane (Esme Percy), who dresses up as a glamorous woman and flies through the air, wowing the crowds with his grace. Fane's feminine artistry plays into the shocking circus climax, which Hitchcock stages by putting the focus on the horrified reactions of the crowd, just as he had during the opening scenes.

He then follows this, almost perfunctorily, with a letter that explains the film's whole plot, because after a climax like that, there's not much to do but quickly wrap things up and call it a day. As Sir John reads this letter, the shadows of the circus crowd flit by on the wall behind him, giving the scene a weird, disconnected feeling, as though the hero has quietly tucked himself off in a corner, isolated from the chaos, to resolve the plot. It's fitting, too, that the film then ends with a curtain coming down on a theater's stage, a last playful touch that accentuates the artificiality of these dramatics.

Blackmail

[This post is a contribution to the third annual For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which will be running 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!]

Blackmail was the first British sound film, though it didn't start out that way. Alfred Hitchcock originally shot it as a silent before recutting it for sound, shooting new scenes and dubbing existing ones. The film is as rough as one would expect based on those origins, continually betraying its status as a hybrid in which many of the scenes were simply taken whole from the silent version and dubbed over. Sound enters the film only gradually, so that its first ten minutes provide a microcosm of the evolution from the silent era to the coming era of sound. The opening eight minutes are carried over from the silent version virtually unchanged: a pair of detectives visit a suspect, apprehend him, and interrogate him, and all of it plays out entirely without dialogue, even when they seem to be chatting profusely.

Hitchcock is saying goodbye to the silents that nurtured his talent, and saying it with panache, delivering unforgettable images like the detectives stoically staring at their target, slatted shadows laid across their faces, or the great zoom that shows the target catching a glimpse of the cops in a small shaving mirror. Slowly, bits of synchronized sound begin to appear, like a sound effect of footfalls when the prisoner jumps out of the paddy wagon. Soon, the detectives start to talk a bit, and then, when one of the detectives, Frank (Jack Longden), meets up with his girlfriend Alice White (Anny Ondra), the film bursts fully into sound.

The film's rather basic plot revolves around Alice, who has grown bored of the hard-working, stolid Frank, so she makes a date with another man, an artist (Cyril Ritchard), instead. She goes back to the artist's flat one night, he tries to rape her, and she kills him in self-defense, fleeing the scene. She leaves behind a key piece of evidence, though, and it's recovered by the weaselly criminal Tracy (Donald Calthrop), who attempts to blackmail Alice and Frank as the police investigate the crime. Hitchcock, somewhat hobbled by the static cameras required by early sound film, often turns this limitation into an advantage by composing images that rely on subdivisions of the frame to create visual interest. The attempted rape and murder happen offscreen, signified only by the flapping of the bed curtains at the far right side of the frame, while Hitchcock holds a steady shot that's mostly negative space except for a bedside table stacked with cheese. Alice's hand desperately fumbles at the table, grabs a knife, and after a time, the curtains stop moving, and then the artist's hand flops out, lifeless. Alice then steps out from behind the curtains, shocked and stiff, holding the knife in her fist in front of her, her eyes wide and staring, looking down at the weapon in surprise and then slowly placing it on the table as though it takes great effort to let go of it.

Earlier in the same sequence, before the murder, Alice changes into a dress to model for the artist, and Hitchcock stages the scene with the artist playing piano on the left side of the frame, separated from Alice, who's stripping down to her negligee right behind him, by a dressing shade. The shot is composed so that, while the artist faces off to the left side of the frame, Alice directly faces the camera, displaying for the audience what she's so carefully modest to hide from the artist. It's a clever bit of voyeuristic framing that is playful at first and then becomes creepy after the artist drops his gentle coaxing of Alice and becomes overtly rapacious. Later, Hitchcock is similarly playful with framing and space in the crowded mise en scène of the Whites' general store, where Tracy, Frank and Mr. White (Charles Paton) have to squeeze past each other during the scene where Tracy forces his way into their parlor with subtle threats. The physical closeness creates subtle comedy that's tied up with the understated menace of this creepy blackmailer.


Hitchcock's cinematic imagination displays itself in several other key sequences here, including early signs of his keen grasp of sound. After the murder, Alice begins seeing reminders of her guilt everywhere she goes, like a neon sign that she imagines showing a hand stabbing a knife repeatedly downward. Most notably, she sees certain extended hand postures — a cop signaling traffic, a mannequin's lifeless claw, a bum's slouched posture — as echoes of the dead man's hand falling out of the bed curtains. Hitchcock cuts from a shot of Alice standing over the bum, transfixed by his extended arm, to a similarly composed shot of the landlady discovering the artist's corpse, with its hand stretched out in the same way. A shrill scream accompanies the cut, a jarring, perfectly timed sound that links Alice back to the man she'd killed.

Also striking is the famous chase sequence at the British Museum, in which Tracy, now the prime suspect in the murder that Alice committed, flees from the police through the rigid geometric layouts of the museum: long chains of doors that seem to stretch to infinity, rows of book shelves with corridors tucked away between them, a coiled maze of desks, display cases which the fleeing man ducks around with the cops in pursuit. Hitchcock filmed the sequence with a special process very similar to the matte backdrops that he would often deploy in his later films, using still photographs of the museum, which contributes to the slightly disconnected, artificial feel of the scene. Adding to the suspense, Hitchcock continually cuts back to static shots of Alice, anxiously waiting at home to hear what has happened.

The film isn't always so thrilling, and there are several long, indifferently staged dialogue scenes to suggest that Hitchcock hadn't fully gotten the hang of sound yet, despite the innovations with it that he already displays here. But those periodic dull stretches are redeemed by the master director's inventiveness and his wicked sense of humor, which often enlivens the film at unexpected moments. Probably the best humorous aside is a gossipy woman's tossed-off line about how it's better to murder someone with a brick to the head — "there's something British about that" — than with a knife.

Then, in the final scene, Hitchcock strikes a jaunty, broadly comical tone, as the police, satisfied that the case is closed, shrug off Alice's attempts to confess and turn herself in, laughing at her with the condescending implication that they think she's just a silly woman. She joins them in their cackling laughter, though the comic tone of this finale is slightly undercut by the reappearance of a painting of a jester that had been in the artist's studio. Hitchcock cleverly cuts to the painting while the laughter continues, so that it seems as though the painted figure is himself laughing, and then the painting moves, revealing that it's being carried away, a last piece of evidence being carted off into storage now that the case is over. This ending, rich in irony and tragicomic suggestion as it is, is a perfectly Hitchcockian conclusion, an inversion of his later "wrong man" template: in this one, the wrong man dies for the crime he didn't commit, while the murderess laughs it off with the boyfriend who's helped her cover it all up. What a great happy ending!

The Manxman

[This post is a contribution to the third annual For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which will be running 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!]

The Manxman was Alfred Hitchcock's final silent film, since his next production, Blackmail, was belatedly transformed into a sound film part-way through its filming. This film is a rather conventional melodrama, centered around a predictable and rather bleak love triangle of the kind that was very popular in 1920s and 1930s melodramatic cinema. The fisherman Pete (Carl Brisson) and the lawyer Phil (Malcolm Keen) are childhood best friends who have stuck together for years, but their relationship is compromised when both of them fall in love with Kate (Anny Ondra), the daughter of the local tavern owner. They both love her, but Phil leaves his love unspoken and even grudgingly helps Pete woo the girl, at least until Pete sets off on an adventure, trying to make his fortune in foreign trade so that he can return, impress Kate's surly father (Randle Ayrton) and marry her. Predictably, while he's away, Phil and Kate fall in love, and when they get a message saying that Pete has died at sea, they think they're free to have their own relationship at last, even though Kate had somewhat frivolously promised herself to Pete before his departure. But of course Pete isn't dead, and when he returns Phil pushes his love back into the arms of the man she doesn't want, with predictably tragic results.

It's the typical kind of vaguely homoerotic love triangle film where the guys seem more interested in each other than the girl they're ostensibly vying for, the kind of story that Howard Hawks always infused with rich subtextual substance. Hitchcock doesn't seem as interested in that subtext, though of course it's readily available for plumbing anyway, intrinsic to the story and the constant emotionally charged glances between the two leads. The beats of the story are familiar and well-trod, with perhaps a few more tragic twists than usual.

The cast does little to set this rote melodramatic material apart from the countless similar movies made around this time. Brisson, especially, is dead weight, seemingly capable of little more than grinning into the camera, his eyes sparkling, his face broad and dumb. In comparison, Keen fares much better, overacting just a touch at times, and Ondra is charming and sprightly, bringing such a spark of mischief and playfulness to this girl that it's seldom clear if she's taking things seriously or not. This quality of her performance takes on a new and dark significance towards the end of the film, when, finally leaving Pete, she also leaves behind, unattended, their baby, which is laying in a crib by the fireplace when Pete returns home to find his wife gone.


Working with a tired plot and a somewhat inconsistent cast, Hitchcock elevates the material a bit with his elegant style. When Phil first gets the news that Pete has died, he's walking through the darkness, the town's lighthouse periodically casting a spotlight across him as it revolves past, and suddenly Hitchcock dissolves from a shot of Phil alone to one of him surrounded by people, clustered in the darkness around the local tavern, the Manx Fairy. The dissolve makes it seem as though the others have suddenly materialized from nowhere all around him, infiltrating his privacy, their sudden appearance in the otherwise empty streets indicating that something has gone very wrong. Hitchcock also finds an incredible location to stage the scene where Phil tells Kate that Pete isn't dead after all, as the two lovers meet on a rocky beach. Kate scrambles over the rocks in a dramatic long shot, framed against the horizon with the sun peeking over the rocks behind her, and when she gets to the beach she looks down at Phil from a distance, framed by a striking oval rock formation that surrounds his tiny form. The ragged, harsh terrain separates the lovers, just as soon they'll be torn apart by Pete's return — which is signified, throughout this scene, by the steam emanating from a boat out on the water, carrying the lost seafarer back to break up this relationship.

Soon, Pete and Kate are getting married, mainly because Phil, ultimately more interested in his friend and his law career than the girl, pushes her away once Pete is back in the picture. Kate walks away from her engagement, dazed, leaving Phil and Pete in the background, and she faces the camera, turning her eyes heavenward, her lips moving, approaching the camera until her face goes out of focus and she passes out of the frame as a blur. Later in her marriage, Hitchcock deals in an interesting way with the revelation that she's pregnant, omitting any explicit title cards as she tells Phil the news, forcing the viewer to read between the lines — cleverly implying but not outright stating that she and Phil had been sleeping together before Pete's return. It's not until she tells her husband Pete that the news is broken in a title card, before Hitchcock shows Pete celebrating in the background, while in the foreground Phil and Kate stand side by side but with a gap of negative space between them, staring glumly at the camera like prisoners awaiting a mug shot. Even better is the subtle way Hitchcock stages the scene where the doctor delivers the baby, then comes bounding down the stairs looking for the father; Phil instinctively stands up, then seems to realize what he's doing and points at his friend instead.

Of course, it all ends in tragedy, with Phil transitioning subtly from the romantic hero to the villain of the piece. Hitchcock underlines this point towards the end of the film when, after a desperate Kate jumps off the pier, trying to kill herself, Hitchcock dissolves from the rippling water to a closeup of the ink well that Phil dips his pen into as he sits on the bench as a judge. Moments like that show signs of Hitchcock's future ingenuity, and though The Manxman as a whole is a rote melodrama with mostly unsatisfying performances, it's still interesting for these glimpses of the director's development.

Downhill

[This post is a contribution to the third annual For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which will be running 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!]

Downhill was Alfred Hitchcock's fourth silent film, made at a time when he was still mostly making melodramas rather than thrillers. This is an especially overcooked and pedestrian melodrama, the story of the student Roddy (Ivor Novello), who's expelled from school after taking the blame for his friend Tim's (Robin Irvine) bad behavior. The story is fairly ridiculous and over-the-top, taking this ordinary young man and suggesting that he's descending into ruin and vice because of a simple misunderstanding. Seen now, it comes across as hopelessly old-fashioned, but one suspects that this moralistic story, derived from a stage play co-written by Novello and Constance Collier, wasn't exactly modern even when the film first came out.

The incident that propels Roddy into his "downhill" journey involves Roddy and Tim's dual flirtation with a shop girl (Annette Benson), who they both dance with one day, each of them jealous of the other over the girl. She dances with both of the boys in the shadowy back room, their romantic silhouettes overlaid with barred shadows from the beaded curtains. She finally settles on Tim, but when she gets in an implicitly unspoken but nonetheless obvious sort of trouble after their dalliance, it's Roddy, who comes from a wealthy family, on whom she pins the blame. (Of course, maybe it's not so obvious, since most descriptions of the film say that Roddy is accused of theft, not of getting the girl pregnant.) Hitchcock is able to leave it all ambiguous and unspoken because he hardly uses any title cards, even as the characters talk and talk; the scene where the girl accuses Roddy plays out with very few words, her accusation mostly communicated by a sequence in which her angry closeup is superimposed over images from the night that both boys spent with her. Hitchcock includes a shot of Roddy passing her a bill, which had been innocent in context, earlier in the film, but here, especially without any dialogue, it makes the whole thing seem like a sordid transaction.

Roddy gets kicked out of school as a result of this scandal, and he takes it badly; "won't I be able to play for the Old Boys, sir?," he moans, in an unintentionally hilarious intertitle. Novello, a good fifteen years too old for the part, only makes the whole thing even more laughable, especially in the earlier scenes where he and Tim don their swirled schoolboy caps and prance around like the world's most overgrown youngsters. After his departure, Roddy finds no comfort at home and sets out to make his own way in the world, descending away from home and school on an escalator that literalizes his fall.


He soon falls in with a theater troupe, though Hitchcock cleverly holds back this piece of information with a closeup that first makes it seem as if Roddy has landed on his feet as a man of society, then pulls back to reveal that he's a waiter, then reveals that after all he's just playing a waiter in a performance. He's part of the theater troupe of the couple Archie (Ian Hunter) and Julia (Isabel Jeans), though he obviously has his own designs on the waifish actress. He hangs around with her in full view of her other lover, never quite making headway with the other man around. In one of the cleverest scenes, Roddy and Julia are about to kiss, seemingly alone for once, when she stops him with a wry glance to the side, and Hitchcock cuts away to a chair, turned away from the camera, the smoke wafting over the top of it the only sign that the other man is sitting there. When an unexpected inheritance makes Roddy briefly rich, though, it's a whole other story, and Archie all but pushes Julia at the boy now, handing him a stack of bills and saying, "they're yours, dear boy, regard them as an entrance fee," followed by a sidelong glance over at the girl, as though the double entendre wasn't obvious or naughty enough already.

Roddy pays his "entrance fee" — another sexual transaction — and marries the girl, and presumably gains entrance, but he's not the only one, as evidenced by a comic scene in which Roddy goes searching for his new wife's lover in a closet, peeking in one door while the other man peeks his head out of another. Roddy's fallen even further now, and Hitchcock makes sure to emphasize him pressing the "down" button in the elevator as he leaves his wife. He then dances for money with dowdy old women in a Parisian nightclub — "the world of lost illusions," a title card dramatically announces — and eventually winds up, ill and crazed, in a rundown wharfside bar.

Along the way, Hitchcock composes some striking, moody images, like a very romantic, shadowy shot of Roddy and Julia embracing and kissing — although, comically, the romantic mood doesn't last very long, as she quickly gets up and begins darting around the room, avoiding her new husband. The film's final act is its best part, as Roddy, having fallen as far as he can, returns home in a zombified daze. He relives his downfall in feverish, fragmented flashes, having nightmare visions of the people who led him to this point and the things he'd done along the way. Hitchcock employs many shaky, wavering point-of-view shots that show the streets of Roddy's hometown as a blur, everything rushing past, images superimposed over one another to show how the whole experience runs together for him.

Despite such moments of technical inventiveness, which Hitchcock always used to enliven and enrich even the weakest of his early films, Downhill is a pretty dull, old-fashioned melodrama. It's a plodding film with a sappy, unsubtle performance from its lead, who cringes and mugs his way through his schematic fall from grace. Despite flashes of interesting filmmaking and noirish imagery, this film is only sporadically worthwhile as an indication of the great director Hitchcock would go on to be.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog

[This post is an early contribution to the third annual For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which will be running, starting tomorrow, 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!]

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog was one of Alfred Hitchcock's first films, and certainly his first really major work — Hitchcock himself considered it his first true feature. This moody, slowly paced silent is a variation on the Jack the Ripper tale. A mysterious killer called the Avenger is murdering blonde girls in the London night, creeping through the fog, killing women and then vanishing without a trace. The only witnesses who have seen him say that he wraps his face in a scarf, obscuring his features. So when a young new tenant (Ivor Novello) arrives at the Bunting family boarding house, his face wrapped in a scarf, the family naturally becomes suspicious of him. The Buntings (Marie Ault and Arthur Chesney) come to suspect that the new lodger could be the slasher, even as their daughter Daisy (June Howard Tripp) falls for the handsome young man, pushing away her parent-approved current boyfriend, the policeman Joe (Malcolm Keen).

Novello's introduction is calculated to generate suspicion: he appears framed in a doorway, wrapped in a trenchcoat and scarf, his wide eyes glaring above his hidden nose and mouth. It's an introduction worthy of Nosferatu, and he briefly seems like a supernatural being, gliding into the boarding house, bringing with him the foggy air and the threat of murder. Soon, he starts behaving in less supernatural but equally suspicious ways, carrying around a suspicious bag and asking his new landlords to take down all the paintings in his room. Hitchcock stages several scenes that hint at the new lodger's sinister intentions towards Daisy — gesturing at her with a knife and a fire poker — but turn out to be utterly innocuous.

Despite the premise, though, the film is far more about sex and romance than it is about the is-he-or-isn't-he suspense centering on the killer's identity. The love triangle gives Daisy a choice between the mysterious stranger who her parents seem to dislike and the familiar, stolid Joe, who her parents like — of course this isn't much of a choice at all. There's plenty of indication that she's already getting tired of Joe, and the new lodger just provides an additional distraction. At one point, she's kissing Joe, and Hitchcock cuts to a tilted angle from above, looking at the couple as Daisy peeks over Joe's shoulder, bored of his affection, her eye catching the movement of the chandelier that dangles down in the foreground, its shaking a sign of the lodger pacing around upstairs. Joe's idea of romance is pretty unsatisfying, anyway, tied up as it is with his work and his obsession with death. "When I've put a rope around the Avenger's neck," he says in one of the film's infrequent title cards, then continues in another, "I'll put a ring on Daisy's finger." In between the two cards, Hitchcock playfully inserts a closeup of Joe sticking out his tongue and miming a hanging, making a grotesque face of death.


This perverse vision of sex and death as an interconnected pair is contrasted against the lush romanticism of the scenes between Daisy and the lodger, though of course death hangs over this pair too in the form of the suspicions about the lodger's identity. There's a beautiful image of the lodger and Daisy walking through a tunnel at night, silhouetted in the midnight blue, a street lamp shining by a bench at the end of the tunnel. It's a very romantic image, and they sit by the lamp, embracing, gradually moving in for a kiss, while Hitchcock defuses the sensuality of the moment by cutting away to the jealous boyfriend lurking nearby. The potential kiss is interrupted here, but the tension resumes when Daisy and the lodger return home, and again ever so slowly seem to fall towards each other, their movements hesitant but graceful, a sexy slow-motion waltz of restrained passion and delayed gratification. Hitchcock then shoots their actual kiss in such an extreme closeup that their faces seem to tower on the screen, two planets being sucked into one another's orbit at a glacial pace. Then there's a high angle shot that mirrors the earlier one where Daisy was kissing Joe, her eyes glancing upward, but here she has nothing to see above her, no greater desire than what she already has with this man; she's not looking for something else, just rolling her eyes towards Heaven, and after a moment she closes her eyes again, satisfied.

The film's sensuality is joined with its low-key suspense in the scene where Daisy takes a bath, stripping out of her clothes as steam from the water swirls around her, Hitchcock's editing playfully suggesting her impending nudity while cutting away just a second before she'd actually show anything immodest to the camera. In a distant hint of the bathroom terror of Psycho, Hitchcock then suggests that the lodger is going to break into the room: there's something so vulnerable about getting naked to bathe, and even at this early point in his career Hitchcock hints at what it would be like to get attacked like this. But of course, everything in this film is a feint, a misdirection, so once again the lodger's initially sinister-seeming actions turn out to be innocent. Hitchcock wanted to leave the resolution of the story ambiguous, as it was in the Marie Belloc Lowndes novel it's based on, but in a pattern that would recur several times in Hitchcock's later star vehicles, the studio didn't want to imply that a handsome matinee idol like Novello could be a killer.

Before the tidy and predictable resolution, though, The Lodger is an interesting early suspense film from the man who would soon become the master of the form. The pacing is a bit slow at times, especially in some of the scenes with Daisy's parents, who provide a little out-of-place comic relief and spend many plodding scenes speculating about the mysterious, slightly strange lodger. A few flaws aside, this silent remains a worthy early example of Hitchcock's future brilliance.

The Pleasure Garden

[This post is an early contribution to the third annual For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which will be officially running 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!]

The Pleasure Garden was Alfred Hitchcock's directorial debut, following an apprenticeship in which he did virtually every job on the film set short of actually directing a picture. As with many of Hitchcock's earliest films, this is a lurid and rather conventional melodrama that shows periodic flashes of the young director's inventive visual sensibility — particularly towards the end of this debut, with its abrupt tonal shift into a psychological thriller. It starts extremely slowly, as the story of the chorus girls Patsy (Virginia Valli) and Jill (Carmelita Geraghty), both of whom are attached to men who work in a distant country. The girls are very different: Patsy is a deeply religious good girl who's faithful to her man, while Jill just wants fame and glamour, and quickly forgets about her fiancé once he's away from her. Of course, ironically, while the flighty Jill's fiancé Hugh (John Stuart) is a decent guy who remains true to her while he's away, Patsy's husband Levett (Miles Mander) immediately begins cheating on her even on their honeymoon.

The way it will all play out is pretty obvious, and the film's plot plods along slowly before the unexpectedly frenzied and rather crazy finale. Hitchcock has some fun along the way, though, interspersing comical sight gags and some clever visual flourishes. A blurry point-of-view shot that's then clarified as an old man puts on his monocle — to ogle the legs of the chorus girls in a leering closeup — would later be repeated by Hitchcock, sans the sexual voyeurism, in Easy Virtue. He also gets some enjoyable comic relief out of Patsy's dog Cuddles, notably in a slightly subversive sequence in which the dog interrupts the pious girl's prayers by licking her bare feet while she kneels.

Also notable is the scene where bad girl Jill, trying to manage the amorous advances of a suitor who's getting too handsy too quickly, uses a cigarette to repel him. This is a nice bit of pantomimed visual symbolism, as the man sits behind Jill, putting his hands on each side of her face, tipping her head back towards him, presumably so he can lean down and kiss her, though the way he does it is almost mechanical, forceful rather than romantic. She foils the attempt by putting her long cigarette holder in her mouth, so that by the time her head is tipped back the cigarette is jutting out from between her lips, preventing a kiss. When the suitor then decides to begin kissing her bare shoulder instead, she simply turns her head to the side, burning him with the ash.


The film then abruptly picks up its pace in the final act, when Patsy decides to travel abroad to find her husband, who she's heard has fallen ill. When she arrives, though, the drunken Levett has shacked up with a native woman, and Patsy discovers that it's actually Hugh who's sick and feverish. Naturally, she's eventually going to end up with the nice guy she probably should have been with all along, but to get there the script first assaults her with a barrage of ludicrous melodramatic occurrences that Hitchcock charges through at a frantic pace. The unhinged Levett drowns his lover, and Hitchcock films it as a flurry of limbs flailing above the water as the girl is held under. Then, in the film's craziest but most compelling section, the dead girl appears to Levett, compelling him to kill Patsy as well: the girl is superimposed over the image of Levett's native hut, walking towards the camera until her ghostly face fills the screen, with a wall full of pistols and criss-crossed swords visible through the translucent right side of her face.

This tense sequence shows the young Hitchcock already relishing suspense, separating Patsy and Levett with a wooden grating, with the crazed killer fumbling at her with a sword while she stares at him in terror. The sequence is a little clumsy, actually, and it ends with a totally unmotivated deus ex machina that clears the way for the predictable romantic ending, but Hitchcock stills generates some tension through the shots of Patsy's fearful eyes, glaring at her husband through the holes in the door grating.

The Pleasure Garden is an interesting debut for Hitchcock. Like a lot of his early films, particularly his silents, it's hampered by weak performances and a rather silly script, but even here, at the very beginning of his career, the director was already displaying his imagination in unexpected ways. The film has some striking images and a few compelling scenes, even if in the end it's a rather inconsequential melodrama.

Easy Virtue

[This post is a teaser for the third annual For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which will be running 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!]

Although Alfred Hitchcock would come to be known primarily as the master of suspense, he would not truly earn this reputation until the second half of the 1930s. Before then, and certainly in his formative years during the silent era, Hitchcock's material often tended more towards melodrama than thrillers. His sixth completed feature, Easy Virtue, is a romantic melodrama based on a Noel Coward play, the story of the divorced woman Larita (Isabel Jeans), who travels to Europe to escape the scandal of her broken marriage. Hitchcock does what he can with this rather lame material, but it's mostly a pretty slack, intermittent (not to mention incredibly sexist) drama in which the young director is still experimenting and finding his style.

Despite its brevity, the film could not exactly be called tight, and its pacing is wildly unbalanced. It takes nearly twenty minutes to get past the introductory courtroom sequence that essentially serves as set-up for the plot that consumes the remaining hour. Thankfully, Hitchcock crams this sequence with visual experimentation, flashes of his characteristic biting humor, and technical flourishes that help to spice up the rote courtroom dramatics. He seems to have purposefully elongated this segment because it's the part of the film that gives him the most opportunity to play, to indulge some genre flourishes, including even a brief turn to violence with a gun. Even at this early point in his career, it's already clear where Hitchcock's interests lie: far more with the courtroom theatrics and the blend of humor and violence that he finds there than with the somewhat routine melodrama that comprises the bulk of the film after this prelude.

The second shot of the film (after a newspaper clipping) already indicates Hitchcock's playful sensibility, with an extreme closeup of a fuzzy white ball that's soon revealed, humorously, as the top of a judge's white wig, slowly curving up as he raises his head. Hitchcock then inserts several point-of-view shots from the judge's perspective as he looks around the courtroom, seeing everything as a blur until he holds up his monocle to bring a little circle within the frame into focus. Later in the sequence, at the climax of Larita's account of her husband's run-in with her artist friend — related through flashbacks — a policeman calmly strolls up to Larita and begins taking notes while her husband rolls around on the floor, apparently suffering from a gunshot wound, while the cop studiously ignores the man's thrashing. Hitchcock's deadpan humor is very apparent at moments like this, infusing the scene with a faint air of the surreal.


Hitchcock also enhances the drama of the courtroom scenes, as in the sequence where he fades between alternating profiles of Larita and the lawyer, each facing in different directions as he interrogates her, or the shot of a watch dissolving into a clock's pendulum to indicate the passage of time. Soon enough, though, this section is over and Hitchcock has to move on to the real meat of the film, as Larita flees her ugly, scandalous divorce and goes abroad under an assumed name. Once there, she meets the young, wealthy John (Robin Irvine), who immediately falls in love with her and asks her to marry him. John's stuffy upper class family isn't too happy with this unknown foreigner's intrusion in their sprawling mansion, and his witchy mother (Violet Farebrother) is especially suspicious. The film mostly slows to a halt at this point, and Hitchcock seems rather unengaged by the love story with its personality vacuum of a male lead.

That's why he leaps at the opportunity to mock the lovers at their most romantic moment, when John proposes to Larita in the back of a horse-drawn carriage. As Larita and John kiss, the horse pulling their carriage nuzzles with a horse attached to another carriage, with Hitchcock playfully cutting from the lovers to the horses as though he finds the two images equally romantic. The scene's romance is further compromised as, behind the lovers, a car pulls up, the driver angrily honking the horn because the stopped carriages are blocking the road. This pivotal romantic moment is undercut by Hitchcock's wicked sense of humor. He follows it by showing Larita's phone call to John not directly, but through the delighted reactions of a phone operator who's listening in, a clever way of showing Larita's acceptance of the proposal.

Throughout the rest of the film, there are only periodic moments when Hitchcock's budding formal ingenuity redeems the film, as in the scene where John's mother finally discovers the truth about Larita's past. Hitchcock alternates between a bracing closeup of the woman abrasively yelling at Larita, and a somewhat aloof shot of Larita, holding herself straight as a board, her posture stiff and unflinching, her face stoic against her mother-in-law's onslaughts. Hitchcock suggests the differences in the two women's temperaments not only with their demeanor but with their respective distances from the camera.

The end of the film, after much aimless meandering and emotional flatness, finally generates some real poignancy from Larita's plight, as she sadly bows out — though not before there's an unexpected spark of lesbian subtext with Sarah (Enid Stamp-Taylor), the more class-appropriate woman who's poised to step in once Larita lets John go. At the film's finale, as the score builds up to a frenzied, bombastic climax, Larita speaks in the sublimely melodramatic final title card, "Shoot! There's nothing left to kill," as she faces the tabloid photographers eager to catch a glimpse of this notorious woman. That's an unexpectedly lurid and grandiose conclusion to a film that, with the exception of Hitchcock's occasional flashes of technical or aesthetic interest, is too often restrained and lackluster when it really demands the go-for-broke emotional intensity of that last line.

The Conversations #17: "Minor" Hitchcock

My latest conversation with Jason Bellamy is a discussion about two Hitchcock films that are often considered, rightly or wrongly, to be "minor" entries in the great director's career: To Catch a Thief and Rope. In talking about these two very different films, we get to deal with Hitchcock's oft-overlooked range, his humor, his use of actors and stars, his treatment of sexuality, and of course his aesthetics. We also touch on what it means for a film to be deemed "minor," and how these particular films might be enjoyed on deeper levels.

As usual, our conversation is only the beginning; head on over to the House Next Door to read the discussion and join in with your own thoughts in the comment section.

Continue reading at The House Next Door

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.

Films I Love #44: Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window is not just a film about a murder mystery, but a film about voyeurism, about how and why we watch other people — and by extension, how and why we watch films themselves. It is one of the greatest of meta films, although it is on its surface not about the cinema at all. Its plot concerns the adventurer/photographer Jeff (James Stewart), who is confined to a wheelchair with a broken leg after an accident (brilliantly conveyed by Hitchcock, entirely visually, by panning across a series of photos and objects at the start of the film). Locked up in his apartment, Jeff is unable to work or move around much. So whenever he's not being visited by his nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter) or his glamorous lover Lisa (Grace Kelly), Jeff takes to spying on his neighbors through a pair of binoculars. Jeff's window faces the courtyard of his apartment complex, and from this vantage point he can see into the windows of his neighbors across the way. Through these portals, he catches glimpses of their lives in action, their daily routines and private little peculiarities. He doesn't see anything particularly fascinating in itself, other than the contortions of the statuesque blonde dancer across the way. Mostly, he just loves to watch. It has often been remarked that Jeff's experience mirrors that of the cinema audience, uniquely situated between passivity and activity: he is confined to one spot and given a choice of spectacles, and he turns his gaze on those corners of the image that he wishes to observe at any given moment.

One of these images turns out to be a murder mystery story, in which Jeff begins to suspect that one of his neighbors (Raymond Burr) has murdered his invalid wife. This story slowly comes together and begins to occupy more and more of Jeff's attention, causing him to fixate on his neighbor's often-darkened window, with the man's cigarette ominously sparking in the blackness inside. Jeff even enlists Lisa to help him in his amateur investigation. The actual thriller aspects of the film are almost inconsequential, however, in comparison to the simple pleasures of voyeurism that Hitchcock offers up here. The film implicitly makes its audience complicit in Jeff's peeping tom habits, unifying the protagonist's gaze with the audience's. We love watching, along with Jeff, as miniature narratives play out within all the windows across the way, fragments of people's lives. And at the same time, we love watching James Stewart at his wittiest and Grace Kelly at her sexiest, the voyeurism of watching movie stars be movie stars, an enthusiasm that Hitchcock, with his love of working with big stars, again shared with his audiences.