Alfred Hitchcock is perhaps the most venerated and studied film director of all,
yet quality presentations of his early work are still hard to find. Public
domain copies of
The Secret Agent and the first version of
The Man
Who Knew Too Much can be difficult to watch, not only because they are dupes
of duplicates, but because the printing stocks and audio reproduction of films
from the early 1930s was often quite poor, New American dupes of
The 39
Steps and
Sabotage may have had heavy contrast and indistinct audio.
Lionsgate's
The Alfred Hitchcock Box Set presents five relatively
unheralded Hitchcock pictures in prints of excellent quality. The development of
"The Hitchcock Touch" is easily debated in the context of these two silent films
and three early talkies. Not yet "The Master of Suspense," we see Hitchcock
taking on ordinary melodramas as well as murder stories, adapting the
expressionist touches he admired in German pictures.
The Ring (1927) shows what separated Hitchcock from his fellow English
filmmakers in the silent era. The story is a straightforward melodrama about two
boxers competing for the same woman. "Round One" Jack (Carl Brisson) is a
carnival prizefighter and his girlfriend Nelly (Lillian Hall-Davies) the
ticket-taker; he loses his job when handsome Australian champion Bob Corby (Ian
Hunter, later of
The Long Voyage Home) beats him. This spurs Jack to go
on the circuits to win a championship of his own, but Nelly seems to prefer the
company of the accomplished Bob.
How Hitchcock tells the story is everything.
The Ring's visual inventions
communicate points normally covered by un-cinematic inter-titles. When Bob sees
Nelly from afar, his interest is illustrated by a superimposed image of her face
flying toward him over the heads of the crowd. Subjective point-of-view
constructions pop up frequently: we're invited to see through the eyes of the
characters. A symbolic snake-like bracelet conveys the tension in the love
triangle. Nelly tries to hide it but it keeps popping back to remind Jack of her
interest in the other man. Distorted POV shots figure in a drunken montage
sequence and express the experience of being knocked out in the ring.
As Jack's career in the ring progresses, his name rises from the bottom of fight
cards to the top of the bill, a familiar motif in sports and musical bios that
Hitchcock takes credit for inventing. Hitchcock felt that some of his ideas were
too subtle, like the champagne bubbles that go flat as the hero realizes his
girlfriend has stepped out with his rival. But most of the visuals are easy to
read. Jack sees Bob's face materialize on his punching bag, and hits the bag so
hard that it breaks.
Written by Hitchcock's wife and collaborator Alma Reville,
The Ring plays
itself out in true English fashion. The competition for both the title and the
girl (who hardly seems worth the effort) is a model of good sportsmanship.
Hitchcock stays in control of every aspect of this pat little story.
The Manxman (1930) is a sober melodrama with fewer inspired camera
tricks, but an improved dramatic sense. Carl Brisson returns as Pete, a poor
fisherman unaware that his best friend Philip (Malcolm Keen), a lawyer, is also
in love with Kate (Anny Ondra), the publican's irresistible daughter. Pete goes
away to earn a fortune and asks Kate to wait for him. She and Philip have
already begun an affair when word comes that Pete has been killed in Africa,
freeing the lovers from their guilt. Pete then surfaces, safe and well. Kate
marries Pete to fulfill her promise, but no easy solution is available when Kate
realizes she's going to have a baby.
Hitchcock tells the story straight, focusing on the beautiful German actress
Anny Ondra. Ondra addresses the camera with pixie eyes and bee-stung lips, and
sometimes seems to copy the style of Brigitte Helm. Brisson is the jolly dumb
fool throughout, learning the score between his best friend and his wife only at
the very end. It's difficult to empathize with the illicit lovers. Kate seems a
ditz and Philip shows a lack of judgment unbefitting a candidate for the job of
the island's head magistrate.
Hitchcock has few opportunities to employ his cinematic experiments. When it
comes time to reveal that Pete is still alive, Hitchcock simply irises in on the
big lug's grinning face. Yet the director's dynamic blocking of actors, often in
depth, gives strength to the drama. Kate, Pete and Philip are often positioned
in patterns that immediately express the state of affairs between them.
Anny Ondra's popularity was such that Hitchcock retained her as the star of his
next film, his first talkie,
Blackmail. The director determined to
overcome Ondra's heavy German accent by more technical sleight-of-hand. He
stationed an actress off-screen to dub Ondra's lines as she spoke them, as sound
editing and multi-channel dubbing hadn't yet been perfected. The trick worked,
but just barely.
With 1931's
Murder! we take a quantum leap ahead, noticing first that the
play adaptation and screenplay were again the work of Alma Reville. The
Hitchcock Touch is here in force, from humorous bits of business to clever play
with technique. An actress has been accused of murder. The raising of a theatre
curtain cues a vertical wipe that reveals the prisoner in her cell, as she
'imagines' her role in the play being taken by an understudy. Later, the sunset
shadow of the gallows creeps up the condemned woman's chamber wall.
Murder! introduces themes consistent with later Hitchcock works.
Courtrooms dispense dubious justice, police rush to easy conclusions and a
dissenting juror is pressured to conform to the will of the majority. Children
represent untidy disorder in an amusing scene with Una O'Connor. Blurring the
line between the theater and reality, the film presents a world of moral chaos.
Hitchcock would return time and again to the tale of the falsely accused
innocent. The young actress Diana Baring (Nora Baring) is found in a
compromising position at a murder scene. Diana's loss of memory keeps her from
providing a convincing defense at her trial. Juror Sir John Menier (Herbert
Marshall, in his first talkie), himself a dean of the theater, personally
investigates to uncover the real killer. As he is personally known to the
accused, we wonder why Sir John has been permitted to serve on her jury. He
solicits help in his investigation by the suspicious means of promising to hire
two show people (Edward Chapman of
Things to Come and Phyllis Konstam),
knowing full well that they'll agree to whatever he says.
Hitchcock and Reville handle the delicate play between the stage world and
'reality' with great relish, encouraging both their characters and the audience
to confuse the two. The details of the crime make a thematic leap decades ahead
to the Italian
giallos and especially the pastiche slasher movies of
Brian De Palma. (spoiler) Esmé Percy plays Handel Fane, an actor
specializing in cross-dressing performances, even in his second job as a circus
aerialist. With hat, cane and gloves, Fane enters Sir John's study almost
exactly as did Peter Lorre in John Huston's
The Maltese Falcon. Fane's
unspeakable secret turns out to be that he's a "half-caste", a dodge that fools
nobody. Interestingly, Esmé Percy's ambivalent performance has more
subtlety than the twisted lunatics in De Palma's thrillers, made in more
'enlightened' times.
Hitchcock has almost nothing to say about
The Skin Game (1931) in
the Francois Truffaut book. It may not be a good 'Hitchcock' movie but it's
definitely a good play adaptation. A skin game is a dirty fight, in this case
between families in rural England. The aristocratic Hillcrests oppose the
new-money industrialist Mr. Hornblower (Edmund Gwenn), who connives to ruin the
verdant meadows by constructing an ugly pottery factory right on their doorstep.
Nobody screams Not In My Back Yard louder than English landed gentry; they'll do
anything short of murder to circumvent Hornblower's plans.
We can understand immediately why Hitchcock would choose Gwenn as a comic
villain for the later
Foreign Correspondent, as his excellent performance
lends credibility to this high-toned version of the Hatfields & McCoy feud. The
acting elsewhere varies, with Jill Esmond and John Longden making a good
impression as youngsters on opposing sides of the feud.
Edward Chapman and Phyllis Konstam repeat from
Murder! Chapman's hired
man for the Hillcrests is used to prove the author's point that 'people of a
lower class' cannot be trusted, even after taking a solemn oath on a Bible. Ms.
Konstam is Gwenn's tormented daughter-in-law. Her sordid past is used as a
weapon in the struggle over property rights.
Smoothly directed,
The Skin Game doesn't appear to have engaged Hitchcock
mightily; he says the film was imposed on him. It may be part of the original
play, but almost the only cinematic touch is to end the show with a mighty tree
being felled, surely representing the spiritual end of a mighty family.
Rich and Strange (1932) is an odd story about a middle-class couple that
uses an inheritance to travel around the world on vacation. Being Englishmen of
their time, they mostly stare (or shout) at the 'funny' natives and show disgust
for customs different from their own.
Freddy and Emily Hill (Henry Kendall & Joan Barry) say they're after adventure
but have little aptitude for new experiences. Freddy suffer from seasickness. In
Paris they're shocked at the Follies Bergere and can't handle their liquor;
Emily's only contact with a Frenchman is when one pinches her. On the boat to
Indonesia, Henry is attracted to a sultry 'Princess' (Betty Amann). Emily is
wooed by Gordon (Percy Marmont), a planter. Emotional upsets and a disaster at
sea eventually heal their relationship.
It is indeed a strange movie. As a satire
Rich and Strange is no more
organized than a series of cartoons, tied together with stock footage. Hitchcock
passes the time with weak gags, as when Henry tries to set his watch to the
moving hand of an elevator's floor indicator. The meaning of other visuals isn't
as clear, such as a shot that emphasizes Emily and Gordon stepping over chains
and ropes when they walk on deck.
Marooned on a sinking ship, the complacent couple show themselves incapable of
dealing with harsh realities; it's a defeatist version of Buster Keaton's
The
Navigator. The cure for the marriage is both dated and unpleasant. Henry and
Emily driven back into each other's arms by the danger of the shipwreck and a
desire to escape the 'disgusting' Asians. Their Chinese rescuers watch one of
their own drown with 'inscrutable' dispassion, and then serve up a stew of
freshly killed cat. The fade-out showing the marrieds bickering once again is
more depressing than funny.
Hitchcock's visual experiments aren't all comedic. He begins with an elaborately
designed shot that begins on the page of an accountant's ledger and then widens
to show an entire workforce leaving an office. Henry's little street is as
stylized as a setting in a Jacques Tati film. Seasickness is conveyed by a POV
through Henry's weaving camera viewfinder, followed by literal spots that float
before his eyes. Other comedy touches have a slightly sadistic edge. Hitchcock
seems to enjoy watching Emily and Henry drift into infidelity; it certainly
looks as though Henry has slept with his predatory 'princess.' In one scene a
sailor walks through the foreground singing a song about his wife back home.
When the word 'wife' pops up in the lyrics, the sailor spits resentfully.
Hitchcock said that he wished he had bigger actors for
Rich and Strange
but the leads do quite well. Joan Barry is a full-fledged Hitchcock blonde with
a mischievous smile and a high forehead like Madeleine Carroll. Her suitor Percy
Marmont played the title role in a silent version of
Lord Jim and
returned in two more Hitchcock films.
Lionsgate's DVD of
The Alfred Hitchcock Box Set presents attractive
transfers of the five features, all of them distinct improvements on earlier
public domain copies. Image damage does occur and odd cuts to black show up in a
couple of the films. The early talkie soundtracks can be murky as well. The set
clearly uses the best surviving elements. For some reason the main titles of
The Skin Game have been vertically squeezed, resulting in a letterboxed
image with squat lettering and an off-round copyright symbol.
The third disc contains a featurette entitled
Pure Cinema: The Birth of The
Hitchcock Style. Interview subjects Dr. Drew Casper, Peter Bogdanovich, Pat
Hitchcock and others discuss Hitchcock's early career, which had as many flops
as successes. Alma Reville's collaborative input is given its proper stress.
Hitchcock claimed that for the shaving scene in
Murder! he placed an
orchestra on the set, and that Herbert Marshall's interior monologue was
pre-recorded and played back. Watching the disc, we're not exactly sure how the
scene was done; we hear the music, Marshall's voice and small sound effects
perfectly clearly. The music continues to the next scene in Marshall's study,
with full dialogue and matched cuts. It looks as if Hitchcock employed a minimum
of two cameras, isolated for audio.
For more information about
The Alfred Hitchcock Box Set, visit
Lionsgate DVD.
by Glenn Erickson
