"I have seen more films by Hitchcock than by any other director. Lately I have been trying to conscientiously and systematically fill in all kinds of viewing/reading/listening gaps, including my Hitchcock gaps. Hitchcock films I have watched lately for the first time, or the first time in a very long time, are Torn Curtain and Topaz (both interesting but problematic); Stage Fright (underrated); Frenzy (phenomenal); To Catch a Thief (light but enjoyable). Gaps that remain to be filled are: all of the silents except The Lodger (which is to say, The Pleasure Garden, The Ring, Downhill, Easy Virtue, The Farmer's Wife, Champagne, and The Manxman); the silent version of Blackmail (I've seen the sound version); Elstree Calling (a marginal film with some Hitchcock-directed sequences); Waltzes from Vienna; Mr. and Mrs. Smith; The Paradine Case; the two shorts Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache; the U.K. version of Strangers on a Train; Family Plot; and all of the Hitchcock-directed TV episodes. (I have seen the 3-D version of Dial M for Murder.) I really need to look at Jamaica Inn and Under Capricorn again, as well; those are the most urgent re-visits."
I've kept at it since then, watching the following:
- The Manxman -- Charles Barr in his excellent book English Hitchcock speaks very highly of this film, which Hitchcock himself dismissed, and I would tend to concur with Barr rather than Hitchcock. The melodramatic elements from Hall Caine's source novel are laid on a little thickly at points, but there is a good deal of visual and narrative subtlety as well. As is often the case in Hitchcock, it's the woman who creates all the difficulty (Hitch really did have a misogynist streak); the coy waffling of Anny Ondra between her two suitors, the strapping Carl Brisson and the proto-yuppie Malcolm Keen, effectively ruins all three of their lives, a less than neat trick. This fact undercuts one of the moments that Barr identifies as powerful and that is certainly cinematically well done, when Ondra is erroneously informed that the less favored man has (conveniently) died. I couldn't care if things turned out well for her, because she didn't seem to deserve it.
- Mr. and Mrs. Smith -- Always cited as an anomaly in Hitchcock's output, his only non-criminous romantic comedy of the sound era. The direction was apparently undertaken as a personal favor to the great Carole Lombard, but the film does her character no favors, because -- again -- she is the problem. This is quite literally one of Stanley Cavell's "comedies of re-marriage" (although I don't believe Cavell cites it), since the couple, Lombard and Robert Montgomery, discover that they aren't properly married and have to re-hitch (the ads for the film made use of the "hitch/Hitch" pun). They would be better off not doing so, especially the weak Montgomery, whose performance is delightful but whose husband is a doormat. The wife manipulates him to the point where he is professionally non-functional and entirely focused on her whims, and the ending puts them back at square one; nothing has changed. The problem for the audience is, comedies of abuse -- and the wife's behavior here is abusive, make no mistake -- just aren't that funny. There's a little bit of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo in this set-up -- and Ball in fact idolized Lombard and modeled herself comedically on her -- but the difference is in the strength of Desi Arnaz (the most underrated actor in television history): Lucy and Ricky are evenly matched.
- There are a few fun scenes scattered throughout Mr. and Mrs. Smith: a nice bit in a restaurant with a cat; a drunk scene with Gene Raymond in fine form; and a breakfast table scene early on with a cute visual trick that I mentioned at the Shadowplay blog (where blogger David Cairns is going through Hitchcock's entire output, one film per week): "Look for a bit of expressionistic technique in the first reel that I’m not sure anyone has noted. During the breakfast table scene between Lombard and Montgomery, she is playing footsie with him under the table, and he is wearing grey ribbed business socks (very becoming with his grey pinstripe suit and black wingtips; Montgomery is always sharp). After Lombard asks whether he would marry her if he had it to do all over again and he answers no, cut back under the table as she withdraws her feet from his — and his socks are quite visibly now in a light/dark zigzag pattern, no longer solid at all! There is no way I can see this as a continuity glitch; Hitch was too careful visually and the change is too expressive of what just happened. It’s a brilliant touch but obviously very subtle — I’m not sure I ever would have noticed it if I wasn’t a total menswear geek who pauses DVDs on wardrobe details."
- Bon Voyage / Aventure Malgache -- Hitchcock's World War II "propaganda shorts" for the French, which were impossible to see for many years, are fascinating little exercises, of considerable narrative complexity for their half-hour apiece lengths. Bon Voyage shares the climate of The 39 Steps in its story of a downed RAF pilot assisted by the Underground in his attempt to escape France. Aventure Malgache, set piquantly in the distant French colony of Madagascar, is framed as a shaggy dog story told by a former colonial attorney in a theater dressing room, and represents Hitchcock in a very sly mood, a la The Trouble with Harry.
- Speaking of The Trouble with Harry -- that's the apt point of reference for the underrated Family Plot, Hitchcock's last film, which turned out to be a much wittier and benign note to go out on than if he had finished his career with the bleak Frenzy, or gotten to make his aborted final project, The Short Night, which was going to return to Frenzy's preoccupation with rape. The cast of Family Plot -- Barbara Harris, Bruce Dern, Karen Black, William Devane -- makes an engaging group. (Harris and Black had just been in Nashville for Altman the year before, although I don't believe they have any scenes together.) Although the film is far from heavy, it's not so light as to be without menace; in fact, I kept expecting worse things to happen than did, but that kept me very alert. There are a couple of marvelous scenes in a cemetery, the latter of which makes very effective use of geometric patterning from a high camera angle (unsurprisingly, the crew confirms that this flourish, like the splayed dress in Topaz, was very important to Hitchcock).
- It is said that Barbara Harris's famous wink to the audience at the end of Family Plot was her improvisation, happily embraced by Hitchcock. As a gesture to end a career, the only equal I can think of is the last scene of Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, where Virginia Madsen's Angel of Death appears about to pick one of the expectant actors -- but you know she is really selecting the director himself, and that proved to be the case.
Sabotage, shot by Bernard Knowles, is also one of the most visually beautiful features of Hitchcock's career, and of its decade.
UPDATE (6/17/2009): David Cairns just posted an excellent, detailed, and funny essay on Foreign Correspondent at his Shadowplay blog, as part of his "Hitchcock Year." Despite my fairly frequent carping about critics, I am grateful to writers like Cairns who undertake lengthy examinations of films with energy and verve. I could never do it; as earlier mentioned, I'm a terribly lazy writer. Don't let the relatively high frequency of posts here at PMD fool you; short blog posts are perfect for me, because I can get in and out of a subject quickly. I have no stamina, and tire of description especially fast; I always marvel at the loving, precise descriptions in my friend Robert Kennedy's online reviews.
So keep up the good work, guys!
UPDATE (6/24/2009): David Cairns posted on Mr. and Mrs. Smith and included pictures of Hitchcock's sock trick, to which I responded:
Thanks for posting the side-by-side visuals of the socks! I'm a little buzzed over the fact that between us, we have brought to light a Hitchcockian detail (and a really fun one at that) that no one else seems to have noticed or commented on before now. Since Hitchcock's films are among the most "looked at" and painstakingly analyzed ever, it is pleasing to realize that discoveries can still be made. Also that my menswear fetish has paid a dividend.
A commenter wrote that "The sock thing's a bit of a stretch," and I, totally missing the pun and the accompanying "wink" emoticon, laboriously and unnecessarily explained it all again. Really, I should just stay out of "Comments" sections (which is why I don't have them here).
In tribute to Robert Montgomery, I selected a dark gray pinstripe suit, medium gray ribbed socks, and black wingtips for my outfit today, reproducing Cairns's first photograph.
UPDATE (5/14/2009): Here are the two screen captures of Robert Montgomery's socks, seconds apart:
