Review : Stage Fright (1950)

Offering further proof of Hitchcock’s disinterest in the whodunit as narrative trope, Stage Fright sees a return to the theatrical world last seen in the director’s Murder! and Mary diptych of twenty years prior. Lacking the ambiguity or visual élan that marked the climax of those pictures, it’s an uncharacteristically lazy picture, both plodding and conceptually awkward in its telling.

Hitchcock himself was the first to admit that the misleading flashback which opens the picture proved an error of judgement, but at least it falls in line with the rest of the film’s broad thematic plays on the nature of performance and the lies we tell ourselves and each other. Coasting along on a few larger-than-life performances from the likes of Alastair Sim and Joyce Grenfell (providing better value for money than the lacklustre male leads), Stage Fright offers little in the way of suspense, with even Marlene Dietrich making faint impression as the ‘r’-twoubling femme fatale.

If Jane Wyman (The Lost Weekend, All That Heaven Allows) works hard to keep us engaged and Sybil Thorndike entertains in a minor role, it’s not really enough to save the film from slipping into mediocrity, especially when viewed in the chronological context of the two pictures that sit on either side of it.

Stage Fright - 1950 - United Kingdom - 110 mins - Alfred Hitchcock

Review : The Paradine Case (1947)

The Paradine Case was Hitchcock’s last film for David O. Selznick, the famously ‘hands on’ producer who here also took charge of writing duties after expressing dissatisfaction with the original drafts delivered by Scottish playwright James Bridie. It was Selznick who was responsible for the truncated 115 minute cut of the film that made it into theatres, shearing more than an third from the three hour edit initially delivered by Hitchcock. One can certainly feel the loss, both thematically and narratively, even if there’s still plenty here to make one believe that the picture’s maligned reputation is less than deserved.

It’s the eponymous case itself that stands in for the otherwise lacking MacGuffin, an empty centre around which the picture’s real points of interest revolve. The trial makes up most of the latter half of the film, a drawn out whodunit of sorts whose resolution one can see coming a mile off. Did the beautiful Mrs Paradine (Alida Valli) poison her blind husband? Did his valet (Louis Jourdan) with whom she may or may not have been in love help? Gregory Peck is the defence attorney, falling hard for her charms to the chagrin of his adoring wife (Ann Todd).

One would like to think that the many themes and questions The Paradine Case raises but rarely adequately resolves are a result of Selznick’s injudicious snipping. We can see the potential outcome of the increasingly fragile relationship between Peck and Todd mirrored in that of lascivious trial judge Charles Laughton and his long-suffering wife (a magnificent, Oscar nominated Ethel Barrymore). An early warning from the older woman to the younger expressing concern at the effects of a case of such magnitude on their marriage is essentially forgotten once the trials grinds into action, barely re-addressed in the film’s closing scene. That which precedes it however strikes a much more sombre tone, Barrymore’s plea to her husband for compassion cruelly dismissed out of hand by the jaded, disinterested Laughton. It would have made a great final scene, though perhaps too downbeat even for Hitchcock, let alone Selznick.

Peck’s need for victory in the trial is as much a case of peacocking as it is professional pride. With his infatuation with Valli in the film’s existing form spiralling from a single meeting and initially inhibiting believability, it’s one of the few narrative compressions that in many respects works in the film’s favour, especially when viewed as a study of male vanity and dominance as much as it is female sufferance.

There’s still plenty that doesn’t work though. Franz Waxman’s score belongs to a different picture altogether, it’s incessant romanticism undercutting the film’s bite, whilst the trial scenes are less an examination of procedure in the Preminger vein than an over-extended (and over-explained via running commentary by Todd and Joan Tetzel) exercise in narrative closure. That said, aided by Lee Garmes’ beautiful lensing, Hitchcock works hard to bring the court scenes visually to life, a 180 degree turn centring on Valli a highlight to stand beside Peck’s overhead courtroom exit. The Paradine Case may make one work hard to get the most out of it, but viewed with an optimistic eye to what it could have been, the effort is certainly worth more than its reputation may suggest.

The Paradine Case - 1947 - United States - 125 mins - Alfred Hitchcock

Review : Saboteur (1942)

Continuing to refine the ‘wrong man’ thriller that began with The 39 Steps and would reach its apotheosis with North by Northwest, Saboteur is as much a remake of the former as it is a dry run for the latter. Its world of spies and double agents recalls the earlier Foreign Correspondent, but the sustained suspense built over a series of loosely connected set-pieces, as aircraft factory worker Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) uncovers a network of homegrown terrorists whilst trying to clear his name, elevates it above the earlier film’s war time preaching, even if it lacks the psychological depth that distinguishes the best of Hitchcock’s 40s pictures.

It’s certainly a busy affair, crammed with ideas and sequences that often jostle for position. It may lack the clarity of narrative structure and momentum that marks North by Northwest or the svelte perfection of The 39 Steps, leading to a certain sense of disconnection between unfolding events, but much is forgiven in the face of Hitchcock’s execution of key scenes. In fact, it’s difficult to pick a standout moment from Saboteur, given quite how many are up for consideration. The nail-biting final Liberty showdown that prefigures the Rushmore climax toNorth by Northwest may have the indelible imprint of the iconic sewn up, but a party scene that finds Kane looking for an ally and an exit in a room filled with spies is steeped in claustrophobic intensity.

Cummings and Priscilla Lane, as the daughter of a blind man who offers him shelter after his initial escape (in a scene lifted from James Whale’sFrankenstein) aren’t the most charismatic of leads, and Otto Kruger as the villainous mastermind is no James Mason, but Norman Lloyd as the weaselly terrorist Fry steals some of Saboteur’s best moments.

It’s not a film to rank with Hitchcock’s best by any stretch, much is simply painted with too broad a stroke, but as an exercise in suspense and B-movie thrills it certainly has its place. Hitchcock’s former secretary, Joan Harrison is credited as principally crafting the by-the-numbers screenplay, and it’s by no means up there with her collaborations on either Rebecca or Suspicion, so one might like to think that we’ve Dorothy Parker to thank for Saboteur’s most interesting scene aboard a circus convoy populated with carnival performers. In deciding whether to help Kane and his reluctant accomplice, the pros and cons of both sides of the argument are put to a vote. Some choose to abstain, almost allowing the most vocal (and negative) to win out. With the unpredictable irrationality of the war torn world outside, it’s a picture of democracy in microcosm, Hitchcock for once making his humanist position explicit through a coterie of freaks.

Saboteur - 1942 - United States - 109 mins - Alfred Hitchcock

Review : Jamaica Inn (1939)

Hitchcock’s last film before decamping to the US to make Rebecca for Selznick,Jamaica Inn has long been held as one of Hitchcock’s lesser efforts. A retrospective such as this provides the best opportunity for reassessment of such maligned titles, the hope being that within the context of a complete career overview, one might find a few moments with which to make a case for, if not rehabilitation, then at least thematic or stylistic consistency with what precedes and follows.

Sadly, the distinctly unmemorable Jamaica Inn doesn’t prove to be one of those films. Some atmospheric nighttime ‘exteriors’ aside, there’s very little with which to recommend Hitchcock’s first of three adaptations of Daphne Du Maurier novels, least of all Charles Laughton’s grotesquely hammy central turn as Sir Humphrey Pengallon.

Even though they’d go on to work together again on The Paradine Case, the working relationship between the notoriously temperamental star and his director was fraught with tension. Hitch was unimpressed with the actor’s methods, an example of which he gave Truffaut, ‘When we started the picture, he asked me to show him only in close shots because he hadn’t yet figure out the manner of his walk. Ten days later he came in and said “I’ve found it.” It turned out that his step had been inspired by the beat of a little German waltz, and he whistled it for us as he waddled about the room… It wasn’t serious, and I don’t like to work that way. He wasn’t really a professional film man.”

Laughton had brought in J. B. Priestley to beef up his part through additional dialogue, intent on making his role as large as that of the narrative’s heroine, niece of Jamaica Inn’s landlady played by Maureen O’Hara. It does the film few favours, not least because his performance is so horribly judged, but also as it prevents the story from finding a focal point for audience engagement.

The ending may share superficial similarities with the earlier Murder! and Mary, but Hitchcock is clearly working on autopilot throughout, the opening shipwreck seemingly edited with a chainsaw. When held up against the wit and invention of the previous year’s The Lady Vanishes and the haunting atmospherics of Rebecca which would follow, Hitchcock’s disinterest is palpable in what essentially amounts to a director-for-hire project, the kind he’d not embark on again until the equally problematic Topazthirty years later.

In his excellent book English Hitchcock however, critic Charles Barr makes a neat link between the final shot of Jamaica Inn, in which Sir Humphrey’s butler Chadwick (Horace Hodges) shakes his head in exasperation at all that’s preceded, to the knowing wink that closes the director’s final film, Family Plot :

“…Critics have been quick to take up the hint, seeing [Family Plot]’s ending as a telling image of a great illusionist consciously signing off. We can read the final image ofJamaica Inn in a similar self-reflexive way. Through Chadwick, on-screen servant of Laughton’s whims, Hitchcock can express his own exasperation, and relief that the experience is over. In a wider perspective, the final image of the English period becomes, as the final image of the whole career will be, an ironic farewell.”

Jamaica Inn - 1939 - United Kingdom - 108 mins - Alfred Hitchcock

Review : Young and Innocent (1937)

The series of crane shots which mark out the final Grand Hotel sequence of Young and Innocent begin with the most celebrated of Hitchcock’s British period. Starting in the hotel lobby, the camera moves up and across the adjacent ballroom, over the dancing crowd and into the bandstand, settling on a tight close up of a blackfaced drummer, pausing on his eyes as they furiously begin to twitch. It’s a remarkable sequence, unlike much else in what is ostensibly a frothy, frightfully English countryside caper that puts a decidedly comedic spin on the ‘wrong man’ thriller.

We know the twitching drummer is the killer, having been thrust into the midst of an argument between him and his wife in the niftily executed opening moments. When Robert Tisdall (Derrick de Marney) stumbles across the body of the strangled victim on a beach and is seen running for help, he’s arrested and accused of her murder, absconding from the station with the chief constable’s daughter (Nova Pilbeam) in tow. Tisdall’s innocence depends on the recovery of his stolen raincoat, one of Hitchcock’s most throwaway MacGuffins and little more than an excuse to get the young couple together and out on the road.

It’s a film stacked with coincidence and silly contrivances that bear little afterthought, for the most part getting by on its charm and good humour, both of which it possesses in plentiful supply. Whilst lacking the tension or sinister air ofThe 39 Steps, it certainly shows Hitchcock in a much more playful mood, particularly when it comes to showing up the two bumbling policemen on the couple’s tail. Edward Rigby is a treat as Old Will the china mender, the recipient of Tisdall’s raincoat brought along to pick out the killer from the crowd, and Hitch manages to throw in a great little chase scene across some railway tracks that ends in an abandoned, collapsing mine.

Never less than entertaining and often delightfully funny, it bears little weight of comparison to either The Lady Vanishes or the similarly structured 39 Steps. There’s too much fun to be had for Young and Innocent to be filed under ‘minor’, the final sequence alone preventing that from really being an option.

Young and Innocent - 1937 - United Kingdom - 80 mins - Alfred Hitchcock

Review : Sabotage (1936)

Hitchcock’s darkest 30’s picture is also one of his most tightly wound, its central set-piece a masterclass in ticking tension. Offering many parallels to his late silent period (most notably Blackmail in its denouement), character and exposition are delivered as much through Hitchcock’s images as they are through Charles Bennett’s mostly perfunctory script.

Whilst pre-figuring Psycho in its readiness to kill off a major character half way through the film, Hitch was regretful of his decision not to spare the young boy in the bus explosion Sabotage masterfully builds towards, feeling that he’d lost the audience in betraying their trust in the character’s fate. The extended sequence that leads up to the fateful moment is up there with Hitchcock’s best; the boy carrying a package he believes to contain rolls of film across London, generating suspense from the audience’s knowledge that it’s in fact a bomb, scheduled to detonate at 1.45pm. Cutting between the package and a series of clock faces as he dawdles through town, alternately held up by a parade and a market demonstration, the tension builds to breaking point as he finally boards a bus in the final moments. Hitchcock takes no prisoners, throwing in a scene with a tiny puppy right at the end, just before the cuts accelerate and the bomb explodes. Even when you know what’s coming it’s a shocker, ruthless in its willingness to exploit the audience’s trust to the last beat.

At a swift 76 minutes there’s little fat on Sabotage, this despite the lack of balance between the blandness of the romantic lead, Ted (John Loder, an undercover Scotland Yard detective), and the pantomimic villainy of his target, Eastern European saboteur Verloc (Oskar Homolka). Sylvia Sidney fares much better as the sister of the young boy, unaware of her husband’s activities. She has a great scene in the cinema she runs with Verloc, falling into a seat as the realisation of his involvement in her brother’s death creeps across her face. Hitchcock cuts between her and the Disney cartoon playing on the screen, it’s chirpy soundtrack in stark contrast to her emotional trauma.

Verloc’s comeuppance at his wife’s hand is handled through a successive series of nerve-jangling glances and gestures, her fate in the film’s final moments offering a strong echo of that of Anny Ondra at the end of Blackmail. Despite her guilt and willingness to give herself up, it’s left to someone else to take the fall, albeit hardly an innocent this time around.

There’s a great sense of 1930s London in Sabotage, its use of London landmarks and locations include a furtive meeting in the London Zoo aquarium and there’s a bustle to the real and reconstructed street scenes scattered around town. If the characters (Sidney aside) are broadly drawn, and our knowledge of Verloc’s true identity from the outset means we’re simply waiting for the heroine to catch up with us, there’s enough around the edges to keep our interest until the centrepiece sequence and its fallout kick in. Sabotage may not soar to the heights of the previous year’s The 39 Steps, but in streamlining the narrative and consistently flexing his technical expertise, it remains one of Hitchcock’s tautest pictures of the period.

Sabotage - 1936 - United Kingdom - 76 mins - Alfred Hitchcock

Review : Mary (1931)

A German language version of Murder!, shot at the same time and using the same sets,Mary is certainly the lesser of the two adaptations of Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson’s detective novel. Being some 12 minutes shorter than the English version,Mary may possess a tighter narrative, proving more efficient in bringing across the basic expositional tenets of the story, and one could put forward a convincing argument for it being the more technically proficient, but the overall impression is one of Hitchcock simply going through the motions of a film he’d already completed.

Until the final act, Murder! was something of a stagy affair, the greatest pleasures in its dialogue driven screenplay laying in the social and class comedy that derived from the relationship between amateur sleuth Sir John (Herbert Marshall) and his theatrical accomplices, the Markhams. Hitchcock jettisons any such character beats for Mary, blaming his lack of ear for the nuances of the language. As he told Truffaut, “Before the shooting, when I went to Berlin to talk over the script, they proposed many changes that I turned down. As it happens, I was wrong. I refused them because I was satisfied with the English version… Many touches that were quite funny in the English version were not at all as amusing in the German one, as, for instance, the ironic asides on the loss of dignity or on snobbishness. The lead German actor was ill at ease, and I came to realise that I simply didn’t know enough about the German idiom.”

But it’s not only the lack of humour that marks out Mary as the lesser of the two films. Gone are the (admittedly broad) theatrics and role playing games, as well as the references to Hamlet in the trap set for killer Handel Fane. Ekkehard Arendt, here playing Fane is no match for Esme Percy’s performance in Murder!, with all the English version’s ambiguities as to his sexuality and racial heritage entirely removed to the film’s detriment. The aforementioned Hamlet scene is here bereft of all the tension imbued by Percy’s performance, even if the final circus set piece as he takes to the trapeze is similarly taut in its execution.

With Hitchcock still finding his feet with the rapidly evolving sound technology, both films remain very much representative of a cross-over period of his career. Mary has interest as a curiosity, but doesn’t sufficiently diverge from Murder! to show Hitchcock making the most of an opportunity at a second run through of the same material. It’s something of a humour vacuum, with the few Hitchcockian touches present in the English version either absent or awkwardly replicated, and will likely remain one just for completists.

Mary - 1931 - Germany - 78 mins - Alfred Hitchcock