The Battle of the River Plate

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Battle of the River Plate is a scrupulously authentic film about a real World War II battle, in which a trio of British cruisers pursued a German battleship that had been sinking ships along British supply lines. It's a tense, well-crafted war movie that uses real World War II era ships — including at least some of the ships that were actually involved in this encounter — to recreate this intense naval battle and its aftermath along the coast of Uruguay.

The film opens by humanizing the German Captain of the Graf Spee, Langsdorff (Peter Finch), who takes aboard the British Captain Dove (Bernard Lee), the skipper of the Graf Spee's latest victim. The two captains, from opposite sides of the war, nevertheless immediately strike up a gentlemanly repartee based on mutual respect and rivalry. Later, after the battle, Langsdorff expresses awed admiration for the cruisers that had attacked him and sent him into retreat. Seemingly stunned by the way the battle had occurred, he is shocked that the three smaller ships had charged directly at him as though they were much bigger; so great was their bravery, he says, that he was convinced they were actually trying to drive him towards an unseen fleet of much bigger ships, which in fact did not exist. Langsdorff is obviously an honorable man: when, during the post-battle diplomatic negotiations, the propagandistic Nazi reports about the battle are read aloud, Langsdorff paces anxiously back and forth, bristling at this distortion of the battle, which minimizes the bravery of the British sailors and the damage taken by the Graf Spee.

The film is steeped in the value of coolness under fire, valorizing the British officers and sailors who always maintain their gentlemanly reserve and their dry wit in the face of battle and death. The captain of one ship, under heavy fire, is injured in his legs and spends the rest of the battle dispensing commands while a medical orderly applies bandages and stitches to his wounded legs; when the captain notices that the doctor is applying bandages to his left leg as well as his right, he remarks that he hadn't even noticed that both legs were wounded. The same valor is displayed by the lower-ranking sailors as well. When the gunnery station of one ship is blown apart by shells, the wounded and bleeding men struggle to maintain their stations, asking only that doctors are sent down below to tend to them while they prepare to fire again. One of the men, when asked how he is, remarks only that it's "a bit drafty" with all the jagged holes in the hull.


At the height of the battle, Powell and Pressburger cut back and forth between the three British ships and the captured British officers imprisoned in the hold of the Graf Spee. They're in a tough position, cheering on the British navy even though they know that a direct hit on the enemy means their own deaths, that they'll likely go down with the German ship if their own side wins this battle. The heroic sailors cheer on the pursuing British cruisers anyway, speaking as though they're with the British: "we're on their trail," they cheer, even though in fact they're in the heart of the German ship, awaiting destruction at the hands of their own side.

Powell and Pressburger create a moody, potent nighttime atmosphere in scenes of British ships drifting through the night, hunting the Graf Spee with a red-tinged night sky hanging overhead. The nights are eerily quiet, the ships cutting through the water with the dull murmur of their engines and the water lapping at their bows. The images have a sightly unreal magic hour beauty, the red glow in the sky setting the bulky silhouettes of the ships off from the glistening water. Later in the film, Powell and Pressburger's depiction of the harbor of Montevideo, where the Graf Spee takes shelter after the battle, is equally compelling, as the film shifts from the claustrophobic intensity of the naval war sequences to the tense diplomacy and negotiations that take place over the German battleship in this neutral country. The atmosphere of this small harbor, now flooded with journalists, sailors and diplomats, is rowdy and colorful, with much of the action here centered in a small bar where an American reporter (Lionel Murton) sends out breathless dispatches on the struggle over the Graf Spee.

This is a film all about the glory of war, about the nobility of the men who face death so bravely and stoically, whichever side they fight for. It's an almost romantic film, with its depictions of calm battles where no one seems especially ruffled even when men are dying all around them, and images of war ships smoothly gliding through the water beneath dramatically lit skies. The film's climax occurs right at twilight — "the twilight of the gods," one observer in Montevideo remarks dramatically — as the long-awaited showdown between the Graf Spee and the ships amassing to prevent its escape occurs against a blackening sky, the flames of an exploding ship lighting up the night while red and purple hues fill the sky above.

The Tales of Hoffmann

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's version of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann is a brightly colored, theatrically decorative celebration of lavish imagery and ecstatic dancing. This was the next logical step for Powell and Pressburger after The Red Shoes, their classic tragic romance about a ballerina torn between her love of the dance and her love of a man. The gorgeous, elaborate dance sequences in that film are here extended into a full staging of an opera/ballet, with everything sung, and all the drama embodied in graceful dances. As in that earlier dance film, despite the theatrical aesthetic of the sets, this is a dazzlingly cinematic adaptation, taking place in a sumptuous world of unreality, its time-spanning love stories leaping without warning down to the scale of dancing puppets or blurring the boundaries of reality with supernatural interventions.

It's the story of the poet Hoffmann (Robert Rounseville), who in the framing story begins relating a trio of tales from his past, each of them concerning a woman he loved and lost. Each of these segments is a self-contained story in itself, providing further opportunity for Powell and Pressburger to vary the aesthetics and tone of the film. Throughout each of these stories, continuity is provided by the recurrence of actors playing multiple roles, particularly Robert Helpmann, who in each of the film's segments, including the framing story, plays Hoffmann's diabolical nemesis. In the first segment, the young Hoffmann falls in love with Olympia (Moira Shearer), a doll constructed by Spalanzani (Léonide Massine) and the mad inventor Coppelius (Helpmann). They present her as Spalanzani's daughter, and Hoffmann, still an innocent youth, untutored in worldly things, falls completely for the ruse, bowled over by the beauty and elegance of the doll — a rather elegant metaphor for youth's tendency to seek perfection in love, to elevate the loved one to the pristine, passive perfection of a porcelain doll. This section's aesthetic is sugary and bright, a fluffy confection with frilly yellow drapes circling the room where Hoffmann falls for the fake girl while watched over by an audience of other puppets.


The songs are often spiked with an edge of naughty wit, as when Hoffmann's friend Nicklaus (Pamela Brown) comments that Olympia is preparing "to show off her technical pieces," a double entendre that earns a collective shocked glance from the assembled puppet audience, and prompts Nicklaus to smile at the camera, as though acknowledging the naughty pun about the mechanical girl. A perverse undercurrent runs through this whole sequence as the besotted Hoffman obliviously pursues the doll, delighting in her clockwork dancing and gestures of love, all of it playing out with the kind of kinky strangeness that motivated Ernst Lubitsch's rather similar silent comedy Die Puppe. The perversity of this set-up reaches its climax in the surprisingly chilling final scenes, where Coppelius and Spalanzani fight over Olympia and wind up tearing her to pieces limb by limb, knocking her head off, tearing off her arms and legs, leaving behind just a single leg dancing gracefully in the void, and her head on the floor, blinking with mechanical clicks, as the final image of this sequence.

In the film's second segment, Hoffmann is seduced by the alluring Giulietta (Ludmilla Tchérina), who steals the unsuspecting man's soul by getting him to glance into an enchanted mirror. In contrast to the bright primary colors of the previous segment, this story is draped in lush shadowy textures, its colors dark greens and purples. There are mirrors everywhere here, reflecting the dishonesty and trickery of this false love, culminating with Giulietta's sensuous, snake-like dance of triumph, in a mirror where she is reflected but Hoffmann, his reflection stolen along with his soul, does not appear. It's a masterful sequence, the woman's moves making it seem as though she's weaving her body around the man, dancing triumphantly around him, even though he does not appear in the shot, his absence structuring her dance anyway.

Later, Hoffmann descends a gloomily lit staircase and takes a ferry ride into the underworld, pursuing his missing reflection. This whole segment is steeped in gothic imagery, culminating in a duel in the underworld, overlaid with an image of Giulietta's beautiful but deadly face superimposed over the river of the dead with its black-robed ferryman. Tchérina's performance as Giulietta exudes a raw sexuality that infuses the entire segment, giving it the stormy, passionate, dangerous quality of a doomed romance.


In Hoffmann's final story, he loves the sickly opera singer Antonia (Ann Ayars), who's subjected to the dubious medical care of the sinister Dr. Miracle (Helpmann). In a dazzlingly surrealistic sequence, Miracle, looking like the vampire of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, stalks after the girl through a surreal, distorted dreamscape, as she fruitlessly flees the menacing figure with his pale white face, black-rimmed features, and black robes. She runs through a maze-like set, running into one door and suddenly appearing out of another, always returning to the room in which Miracle looms threateningly over her bed, with Antonia unable to escape.

This sequence reaches a fever pitch with an even more spectacular sequence in which Miracle tries to seduce Antonia into breaking her vow to Hoffmann: she's been forced to choose between her love of music and her love of Hoffmann, and Miracle offers her a career as a famous opera singer to make her forget her lover. As Miracle tries to win the girl's soul, he enlists the spirit of her mother, a famous singer herself, and the music becomes ecstatic and frenzied, with multiple overlapping voices, as the setting shifts into a hazy, unstable dreamworld with Antonia dancing amidst the chaos, finally being almost swallowed by flames as the music reaches its wild, intense peak.

As Antonia's tragic tale reaches its conclusion, it fades seamlessly back into the framing story through a series of images in which Helpmann appears in his various guises as the film's multi-named villain, embracing each of the film's women in turn, before a brief coda in which he enacts his final revenge on his enemy Hoffmann, by stealing away the last of the film's women, the dancer Stella (played again by Shearer). Throughout all these parallel romances, the emphasis remains squarely on the colorful, at times downright avant-garde visuals that Powell and Pressburger apply to this material. The film's aesthetic vibrancy allows even those who might not connect to the operatic music — like me, admittedly — to get swept up in the emotional intensity and garish beauty of the film anyway.

A Matter of Life and Death

A Matter of Life and Death is an utterly charming fantasy of mortality and the afterlife, as well as a cross-Atlantic romance that considers the essence of Britishness as juxtaposed with and contrasted against the essence of Americanness. This collaboration between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the Archers, is a moving, inventive surrealist love story that, as the introductory voiceover announces, has its feet firmly in two worlds, poised between life and death. Set during World War II, the film concerns a mistake on the balance sheets of Heaven, involving the RAF pilot Peter Carter (David Niven), whose plane is destroyed and his parachute shredded, his crew ejecting at his orders, leaving him behind to bail out without a chute, seemingly to certain death.

The opening scenes, in which Peter shares his presumptive last words over the radio with the American dispatcher June (Kim Hunter), are remarkable and affecting, with Powell and Pressburger cutting back and forth between the faces of June and Peter as they bond in the final moments before the pilot bails out. June, bathed in shadows and red light, tries to keep from breaking up as she realizes what's happening, her voice thick with emotion. On the other end of the line, Peter's face is lit by the glow of the flames consuming his plane, his face black with grease, but his bravado unaffected, his face illuminated by a charming grin. Their words fly back and forth in a rapid patter, Peter displaying an unflappable grace under pressure, a willingness to go his death with a smile on his face and a few flirtatious words going out over the wire to the American girl. This scene sets the tone for the whole picture, establishing a cavalier, flippant attitude towards the end, a stiff-upper-lip bravery that doesn't allow for any tears, any sadness, not from Peter at least, who prepares for his presumably fatal leap without the least bit of sentiment. Those moodily lit, sensuous closeups connect these two people at a crucial moment, and the unforgettable effect of this scene lingers over the entirety of the film.

Peter makes his leap into the choppy ocean below, but as it turns out, he doesn't die: the heavenly conductor (Marius Goring) meant to usher him into the afterlife loses him in the thick British fog, and Peter washes up on shore, briefly believing that he's actually dead, that he's woken up on a heavenly shore. Instead, he's washed up near the country house where June is staying, and they meet for the first time, instantly falling in love, their emotions primed by their deeply affecting radio contact. This creates something of a problem when the conductor finally tracks Peter down, since now Peter, who had been prepared to go to his death with a quip and a smile just hours before, has something to tie him to Earth, something to live for. Peter, suffering from headaches and other signs of a concussion, struggles in two worlds, facing an appeal for his life in a heavenly court as well as preparing for a brain operation under the worldly care of Dr. Frank Reeves (Roger Livesey).


The film alternates between these two worlds, with the earthly scenes shot in sumptuous, brightly colored Technicolor and the surreal heavenly scenes in stark, plain black-and-white, which has the effect of rendering the real world vivid and sensuous, while Heaven has a no-nonsense logic to its management of souls — there's even a massive data center, managed by angelic clerks, with files on the living and the dead. Jack Cardiff's cinematography is gorgeous throughout, and the transitions between realms are handled with slow fades, color slowing returning to the world of the living as Peter funnels from life into the land of the dead and then back again. The imagery consistently reflects the ideas of two worlds that can interact. Dr. Reeves even has a camera obscura, a glowing oval in the darkness that he pans across the village as though watching a movie, gazing down from a heavenly perspective, providing a running commentary on everything he sees. When he opens his doors to let June in, the oval goes blank and a yellow light is cast over the room; light, as always in Powell and Pressburger's films, is used like paint.

At the crux of the film is the "special relationship" between America and Britain, one-time enemies who had become allies, an alliance particularly tested during the war that had just ended when this film was released. Powell and Pressburger don't miss an opportunity to tweak the cultural connections and differences between the two countries, as in the scene where a group of American servicemen with thick New York accents act out Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream, getting into their parts despite the accent disconnect. Peter's trial becomes a British versus American conflict, as his prosecutor is Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey), the first American killed by the British during the American revolution. Hilariously, Farlan holds up a sleepy-sounding British cricket announcer as evidence of British cultural bankruptcy, while Reeves, acting as Peter's defense, counters with American jazz to demonstrate how out-of-touch Farlan is with what's currently happening in the world, and to show that the two countries are simply speaking different languages, culturally speaking, though they're unified in other ways. Reeves chooses a jury made up entirely of Americans, which turns out to be embodied as a series of stereotypes, demonstrating the melting pot of American culture. And the push/pull nature of American/British relations is encapsulated in the small touches too, like the way that, after Reeves cites the possibility of a British serviceman falling in love with an American girl, an American GI in the audience looks over at the rows of British nurses nearby and wistfully adds, "or vice versa." The film pokes fun at various cultural stereotypes — the lugubriousness of the British radio announcer, the gangster-type mannerisms of the Americans reciting Shakespeare, the series of multicultural clichés on the jury — in order to suggest that cultural differences and historical grievances can be set aside, both for the sake of true love, and on a larger scale in forming new national alliances that draw together countries that had started out being at odds with one another.

This is an utterly charming, whimsical film that's also infused with the complex emotions of a romance that's on the verge of being torn apart from the moment it begins. The film's melancholy, sumptuous beauty is perhaps best embodied in the poetic image of one of June's tears, preserved as a ripe dew-drop on the petal of a flower as prospective evidence in Peter's heavenly trial. Powell and Pressburger expertly weave this kind of sentiment together with the film's occasionally goofy comedic sensibility and the fantasy aesthetic of the Heaven sequences. The result is a bittersweet comedy with an overriding feeling of impending loss balancing its charm and its humor.

I Know Where I'm Going!

Moving, romantic, and utterly magical, I Know Where I'm Going! is one of the great collaborations of the Archers, writer-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. This is a delightful romance of the Scottish isles, totally charming and sweet, shot with an eye for the natural poetry of the land, the beauty of sea and sky even in their darkest, most threatening moments. This charming love story concerns the determined, materialistic Joan (Wendy Hiller), who knows precisely where she's going in life. As the opening credits whimsically show, she's wanted things ever since she was a baby, and she's always gotten them eventually, thirsting for silk stockings and fine dinners. She has plans for her life, and she's about to fulfill them by marrying the wealthy industrial magnate Bellinger. She's traveling to the Scottish island of Killoran for her wedding, but when a bad storm strands her for several days on the nearby island of Mull, she begins falling in love with Torquil (Roger Livesey), a local lord who's rich in titles but poor in cash, something that is decidedly not in her plans.

There are signs even before this that Joan isn't necessarily as happy as she pretends to be with her well-planned life and her cunningly ambitious impending marriage. On a train journey, as she sleeps, Powell and Pressburger project her dreams onto the plastic wrapping of her wedding dress, hanging nearby, with the crinkly plastic overlaying her dream images, as though she's surrounded in it, trapped by it, about to be preserved or suffocated in plastic. Voices chattering about her wedding and the plans surrounding it are synced up with the chugga-chugga rhythm of the train's wheels, a manic clatter of voices that seem to be mocking her with their talk of schedules planned down to the minute. She's haunted by the rigidly planned life she has ahead of her, everything planned out, everything safe and scheduled, a life seemingly dedicated only to getting the wealth and prestige she'd always thought she'd wanted. Later, when she's getting off the train, Powell and Pressburger mock the stuffed-shirt assistants who greet her by segueing from one man's top hat to a shot of a train's smokestack, so that the smoke briefly seems to be erupting from the top of the man's head. Even before the storm delays her, Joan seems to be having second thoughts, she's just too stubborn to ever admit it.

When Joan arrives at the island of Mull, a gorgeous, moody atmosphere settles over the film, with voices calling through the fog, and men silhouetted on the rocky shore, set off against the tumultuous waves of the sea. None of Joan's stubbornness and determination can overcome the weather, and though she insists on standing by the water waiting for a boat that, it's obvious, is not coming, she can't will the wind to stop blowing or the sea to calm. She might know where she's going, but she's finally confronted something she can't control; the winds and waves are as stubborn as she is. And then she meets Torquil, with whom she immediately forms a warm and obvious bond, even though her standoffish instincts keep trying to reassert themselves. Even if Joan herself thinks she knows where she's going, the audience knows she'll be going somewhere else altogether. The pleasure lies in the grace and beauty with which Powell and Pressburger document this blossoming love, juxtaposing it with the majestic rural expanses of the Scottish islands and the foreboding splendor of the overcast weather.


The film powerfully captures the feel of Scottish culture, steeped in the Gaelic language, with its mysterious sounds and cadences, so like music. One of the film's loveliest scenes is the anniversary celebration that Torquil and Joan attend, leaving behind the stuffy society bridge game of Bellinger's friends to listen to music and watch the dancing of the servants. The floor shakes, and the bagpipers play, and the dancers couple off and swap partners, laughing and drinking and have a great time, such a far cry from the lame tea party upstairs, where one woman kept interrupting any potentially interesting conversation with questions about when they were going to play bridge. The film continually contrasts the folksy ways of the island dwellers against the high society manners of the crowd that Joan is soon going to be marrying into. The people of the island, Torquil says, are "not poor, they just haven't got any money," which he insists isn't the same thing, though Joan doesn't see it — what Torquil means, of course, is that they just don't need any money.

When Joan first arrives on the island, her buttoned-up manners and assiduous politeness are contrasted against the local woman Catriona (Pamela Brown), who makes a grand entrance preceded by her wet, shaggy, exuberant dogs — contrasted later against the sedate true-breeds of the rich folk — with the woman herself bounding into the room with the same enthusiasm, her hair wet, her eyes fiery and a broad grin on her face as she embraces her old friend Torquil and exclaims her welcome in Gaelic. Catriona is so different from the prim and proper Joan; when Joan says that she and Torquil should eat lunch at separate tables, he says that she's the most proper girl he ever met, which she decides to take as a compliment even though there's more than a note of irony in his tone.

The film deals broadly with the theme of rural decency versus elite sophistication, with Joan's stubbornness set off against the locals' familiarity with nature and connection to the earth and the sea, and against the local legends that add mystery and myth and a sense of history to their lives. In contrast, Joan's prospective husband tells her over a radio that only one family in the area is worth knowing: a family of elitist snobs just like him, of course. He's not interested in communing with nature or learning about local history, and Joan is ultimately seduced as much by the land, the people, the culture, as she is by Torquil himself.

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.