July 9th 2022 - BBC Culture this week ran a tribute to "Frenzy at 50" (text and brief interviews by Mark Allison). In the frame-capture below we see Bob Rusk (Barry Foster) and his Mum (who colours her hair to match her geraniums). Is Hitchcock giving us some sort of character clue here? For example, does the shot hint at a degree of smother-love in the pair's relationship? Bob Rusk, cheerful Cockney greengrocer at Covent Garden Market, will turn out to be the film's villain - none other than the Necktie Murderer who goes around London imitating Jack the Ripper. London is a perfect setting for such a sampling of humanity in much the same way as was the London of Charles Dickens in his time - a melting-pot of people-types. (Both Dickens and Hitchcock became quickly interested in depicting all such people, from the shallowest and most vulgar to the most intriguing and surprising, not least murderers.) The depiction of 'shallow and vulgar' people is quickly got out of the way in Frenzy with one particular couple, clients of the Blaney Matrimonial Agency. The latter is run by the separated wife of the film's nominal hero, Dick Blaney (Jon Finch), whom the film's audience must forgive for being the irritable man he has lately become. At the start of the film, we have seen him dismissed from his barman job by his employer, a mean-seeming Bernard Cribbins (whom I seem to remember in BBC radio comedy, etc.). Ex-Squadron-Leader Blaney is thus unemployed for much of the film, and his behaviour can make audiences dislike him unfairly (I always think)! Hitchcock clearly thought this: in a 1972 interview for France's Ecran magazine, he remarked: 'Blaney is an angry, violent young man: we need time to sympathise with him. Life has been very hard on him. (For example, he has taken Bob Rusk to be one of his friends, and even becomes suspected of Rusk's crimes himself - for much of the film he is on the run. Fortunately a Chief-Inspector Oxford - played by Alec McCowan - takes an interest in Blaney's case and eventually sees that a terrible injustice if being perpetrated. All of this is laid out in an excellent screenplay by Anthony Shaffer, playwright of the big stage-sucess 'Sleuth' which had recently starred a lone Laurence Olivier (and several named others who turn out to be figments). Anyway, I think Frenzy gives Hitchcock ample opportunity to show us a cross-section of humanity, something he had always liked doing. It matched his humanist outlook that he may well have felt he had inherited from Charles Dickens. (Hitchcock had studied several Dickens novels at school, and he and his wife Alma owned a complete set of Dickens.) Finally, in this short blog this time (for which there's a reason - read on), I would simply like to recommend Frenzy to any of my readers who haven't yet seen it. Now, something else came my way recently, sent to me by longtime dear Hitchcock friend Alain Kerzoncuf in France. It is a 1938 profile of Hitchcock-at-home written for 'The New Yorker' by Russell Maloney. A brief excerpt: 'Hitchcock's favourite story is the odyssey, the journey made in a great cause, with the hero beset by plots, accidents, and malign coincidences. The first picture he ever directed [The Pleasure Garden, 1925] involved just such a journey.' Sadly, soon after that piece reached my Inbox, I learned that Alain had passed away earlier this month.



For my Respected Readers:
I have decided that this blog may well be my last.
Thank you for all of the wonderful input that has flowed my way over the years. Ken Mogg

July 2nd 2022 - We didn't finish talking about Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941) in a couple of entries above. On his arrival in America in 1939, under the aegis of producer David Selznick, Hitchcock began to re-think his relation as filmmaker to international audiences and not just primarily to British ones. His films now became increasingly given to experiments with psychological melodrama. Significantly, at least four of his 1940s films concern elements of doubt, as is evident from the plots, and even the titles, of them. Think of Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, and Rope. For example, in the latter, Rupert (James Stewart) becomes increasingly suspicious that his two brilliant young proteges, Brandon (John Dall) and Philip (Farley Granger), are murderers. Quite naturally, as his suspicions mount, so too does the film's suspense. In other words, suspicion is a 'natural' for suspense plots. There is the additional advantage to the director that a shape is almost automatically given to the film's suspense, culminating in a final showdown or resolution - though that resolution is only a prima facie one in Suspicion! There, Hitchcock tips his hand when during the game of anagrams between Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant) and his friend 'Beaky' ((Nigel Bruce) the word 'DOUBT' actually figures. A moment or so later, Beaky wonders if he has the letters to make the word 'MURDERER' - a nice touch on Hitchcock's part! Doubts - initially little ones - constantly arise during the film, perhaps the first being when Johnnie's feet touch those of Lina (Joan Fontaine) in a train carriage as it goes into a tunnel. Soon striking up a friendship with Lina, the apparent ne'er-do-well Johnnie arouses her girlish suspicions about what his intentions are. On a hillside, she pulls away when he leans towards her, for she suspects that he is prematurely trying to kiss her. (Johnnie excuses himself with some explanation about how her 'occipital mapillary is quite beautiful'! That sets her back, for unsurprisingly she doesn't know what he is talking about!) Hitchcock author Robin Wood has pointed out that the shadowy lighting in the Aysgarths' home, after Johnnie and Lina marry, seems to cast web-like patterns, implying the 'shadow of a doubt' that continues to trouble Lina, despite her real love for her husband. For example, she soon learns that Johnnie is penniless and work-shy, with the inevitable doubt arising: has he married her for her considerable fortune that she will inherit when her father (Cedric Hardwick) dies? Also, if she dies before Johnnie, he has taken out an insurance policy designed to ensure that her money passes to him. Someone who does die during the film is Beaky, in Paris, after he has drunk a large measure of brandy (see May 14, above). The Aysgarths have a neighbour, a detective-story writer named Isobel Sedbusk, who discloses to Johnnie that a notorious poisoner in 19th-century England, one William Palmer, had used just such a method of murder to lay his hands on the money of a brandy-allergic acquaintance. Another of the film's impressive characteristics is that it draws knowing parallels not only with the Palmer case but also with the most famous series of paintings/engravings by William Hogarth (1697-1764), namely, 'A Rake's Progress' (aka as 'The Rake's Progress'). (Significantly, Johnnie says he was staying at the Hogarth Club in London at the time of Beaky's death in Paris - but Lina has already learnt that Johnnie was not staying there at the time. Her suspicions mount ...) That famous series depicts the eponymous 'Rake' who won't stop at murder to make his 'progress' in life, and who has many ruses to achieve what he wants - like, seemingly, the lying, cheating, perhaps even murderous, Johnnie. At the end of Hitchcock's film, Johnnie does confess to Lina that 'I'm no good!' Their car does a u-turn (see frame-capture below) as he tells her that he is taking her back home (she had sought to flee to her mother's). What is important to note here is that such an ending resolves nothing. For all we know, Johnnie may resume attempts on Lina's life once back home. (The RKO executives would not allow Cary Grant to play a murderer, so Hitchcock had to outfox them.. One ending he had toyed with was to have Johnnie go off to join one of the so-called 'suicide squadrons' in England during the early days of the Second World War, after he has told Lina - perhaps sincerely - that he really did regret his ne'-er-do-well nature.)

June 25th 2022 - The credits of The Blackguard (1925) say that its Scenery was designed by Alfred Hitchcock. (In other words, he was the film's scenarist.) The film was nominally directed by Graham Cutts, although reports suggest that already the precocious Hitchcock was taking more than his share of that role, too. As far as I can describe the confusing plotline, it has a background of the recent Russian Revolution, although this is something not made eplicit. The exact location of the film isn't clear either - France, I think - although we later learn that Michael has moved to England. The young man, oppressed by his Grannie, turns for consolation to playing the violin. A street musician entrances him. A gentleman who has been watching, comes and introduces himself as an artist and asks to paint the boy. In return, he will give the boy a violin of his own. Just as the painting is about finished, the artist is visited in his studio by a Russian mother and her young daughter, Maria. Maria immediately likes the looks of the boy (who is draped only in a cloth!). Apparently the street musician was once a noted maestro. The mother (I hope I've got this right) arranges for Michael to be given lessons by him. We note that he is a chain-smoker - a neat bit of visual characterisation! The plot now advances by some years, and Michael has himself become a maestro. But his Grannie is as truculent as ever, and hits him over the head with a bottle! Her action looks near lethal, and certainly it dazes Michael, to say the least. Now we see the impressive shot of Michael ascending to Heaven: see the picture below of the set - which is impressive for the way in which Hitchcock has used forced perspective (and whose lessons he would always remember: for example, using it in one or two of the Cuban scenes in Topaz). Cf. the similar shot in the Powell/Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death/Stairway to Heaven (1946) At Heaven's gate, Michael is told to devote the rest of his life to art, and is sent back to the world below. Again he meets with Maria, only to learn that she is now the Princess Lobanoff and is married to the Grand Duke Paul. Nonetheless, Michael and Maria exchange flirtatious glances. Perhaps I should say at this point that the film's plot is basically tosh, although that wouldn't have unduly worried Hitchcock (and presumably Cutts)! Hitchcock simply threw himself into designing the 'Scenery'. At Heaven's gate, Michael had been told: 'You will become the greatest violinist in the world as long as you love only your art.' But now he becomes confused. Meeting Maria again, his playing at a concert the same evening falters. She writes him a note: 'I have to leave you.' Because I became further confused as this point, I will now quote from a brief synopsis issued at the 15th British Silent Film Festival: 'The Blackguard's plot [involves] a French violinist's efforts to rescue a Russian princess from execution at the hands of revolutionaries led by his former musical mentor.' At one point there is a sword fight involving Michael and his former mentor (I think). Meanwhile, Maria and a servant (?) have escaped the country via a birch forest. Michael, although wounded, survives the sword fight. Cut to a French cathedral seen earlier in the film. Michael is seen entering it where an icon of the Mother of God looks down on him. Whereupon Maria puts her hand on Michael's shoulder and they kiss. But has it all been a fantasy since Michael was hit with a bottle by his Grannie? I don't think we know. Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan sums up: 'Seen today, the film has the scope and flavour of a Ufa spectacular, including stirring crowd scenes, magnificent sets, and passionate acting ...'.

June 18th 2022 - The cold weather continues here (cf May 28th above)! I want to blog on an early Hitch film, directed by Graham Cutts, called The Blackguard. Next time?! KM

June 11th 2022 - Alfred Hitchcock's films are full of people spying on others - and not just in the espionage genre (which might have been made for Hitchcock to exploit, as indeed he often did). In the frame-capture below from Sabotage (1936), the plain-clothes detective Ted (John Loder) spies on suspected terrorist Karl Verloc (Oscar Homolka) who runs a seedy London cinema. (Ted is watched by Mrs Verloc's young brother, Stevie - a watcher watching a watcher.) Behind Ted is the cinema screen and on the other side of that is the cinema audience, watching. And remember Sabotage is itself a film, to be watched by its own audience. Kinda complicated, but something Hitchcock would have welcomed, for he was up to it! (Note that in Joseph Conrad's original novel, 'The Secret Agent', Verloc is a shopkeeper.) I'm reminded that at least as early as The Lodger (1926), Hitchcock was already playing with this sort of concept. There, he inserted the pointed visual gag that he described to Truffaut: the back windows of a careering London news van appear like two rolling eyes. In turn, there's the faint suggestion that those eyes are mirroring our own, agog like the Londoners' eyes as they read the headlines about the search for 'The Avenger', a Jack-the-Ripper-type killer on the loose. (I have often written here about Hitchcock's 'subjective technique'.) In a way, something similar is the conceit of Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) where the constant batting of a tennis ball over the net is doubly intriguing, for it mirrors the film's theme of interchanged guilt ('zig-zag'). Of course, the film that best shows this idea in operation is Rear Window (1954) where a bored Jeff (James Stewart) is constantly watching his neighbours Each window over the way is like a cinema screen. When Jeff's nurse/masseuse Stella (Thelma Ritter) comes upon him watching, she exclaims from the doorway, 'The New York sentence for being a Peeping Tim is twelve months in Dannemora [Prison].' But she is honest enough to make a further observation, 'We've [all] become like a race of Peeping Toms'. Once again, the cinema audience readily identifies with these words! We're duly 'punished' when the film's murderer, Thorwald (Raymond Burr), suddenly guesses that he is being spied on by Jeff and gazes straight back - at us! Oops! Back to Sabotage. Hitchcock is forgiving, and understanding, rather than accusing. In this film set in and around a cinema, two movies-related moments are expressive. A screening of one of Disney's Silly Symphonies asks 'Who killed Cock Robin?' - and as the answer shows one of Cock Robin's rivals, another Cock Robin. (We're all in this together.) Later, after a dazed Winnie Verloc (Sylvia Sidney) has killed her husband (for endangering Stevie, who got blown up by one of Verloc's bombs), and Ted is pleading with her to run away with him, a film poster behind them asks ironically, 'Aren't Men Beasts?' - the title of a recently shot BIP (British International Pictures) farce made by Hitchcock's former mentor, Graham Cutts. Still, the real Hitchcock was a humanist at heart (I believe). One of his favourite films was his Shadow of a Doubt (1943), showing a typical small American family who live in Santa Rosa, California. The mother of the family, played by the delightful Patricia Collinge, is brilliantly characterised by one shot in particular. Rather than being secretive, and given to spying or merely watching, she is as open as could be. We see her at an open window where she calls to her brother, who has been distant from her family for many years (and is secretly the Merry Widow Murderer). The expression on her face is happy and trusting. ...

June 4th 2022 - Back to Suspicion (1941), and the comments here two or three weeks ago (May 14th). I want to start this time by referring to an RKO artist's attempt to depict 'a delightful English countryside' or whatever exactly was on his mind for the titles sequence. Clearly, Hitchcock had given him instructions to do something like that, as the film plays on 'Englishness' throughout. (Probably Hitch wanted his typical contrast between the shocking details of the villain's nefarious doings and his surroundings.) But Hitch was ill-served on this occasion. To my eyes, at any rate, the couple of trees and the rolling countryside have an indifferent look. The trees don't look particularly English - more like a couple of Australiam eucalypts! See frame-capture below. (Hmm. Even the DVD's subtitler seems ignorant of the various denominations of English money! He confuses 5/4 - five shillings and fourpence - with £5.0.4, i.e., five pounds and fourpence! See the opening scene in the railway carriage.) After the opening scene, in which Johnnie (Cary Grant) first meets Lina (Joan Fontaine) on a train, and is caught out by a ticket-inspector for trying to use a third-class ticket to travel in a first-class carriage - ah yes, the good old English class system! - he next encounters her when he sees her on horseback about to join some English hunters in the traditional pursuit of a fox. She is totally transformed from the rather dowdy Lina we'd seen on the train. Now she is radiant and all set for the hunt. (Hitch liked to see ladies on horseback, I think! Cf Marnie.) Johnnie seems immediately smitten. He has wangled himself into the company of some ladies - not hard for the womanising Johnnie! - and next turns up with them at Lina's. Hers is a large English country house, where she lives with her mother and father - played by two actors highly suitable to represent the English privileged classes, namely, Dame May Whitty (The Lady Vanishes) and Sir Cedric Hardwicke. Almost instantly Lina is smitten with Johnnie in turn. It helps that she has just seen his picture in the society pages of the prestigious 'Illustrated London News'! Wasting no time, he invites Lina to join him and the other ladies on a trip to church, and she accepts. After all, it was the 'done thing' on an English Sunday! The party approaches the church via its very English covered gatehouse. Now Johnnie shows his hand to Lina. He pulls her aside, remarking 'You're not really intending to go to church, are you?' Before she can say much, he has bundled her aside, telling her that she's coming with him instead. Once thay have found a secluded spot, he starts to play with her (making fun of her hair style and then pretending to 'improve' it). In fact, he is already playing her like an angler with a fish! Which is Johnnie's way, after all. He soon persuades her to go for a ride with with him in her car - where they kiss - then says that he's taking her home. (Her parents must have gone to church, I think.) He invites himself inside for a drink, served by a butler. Then, after bidding her goodbye until next time - which he implies will be very soon - he lets her wait a few days. Lina excuses herself to her mother by saying that she has a headache. In fact, she is already feeling love-sick! However, she miraculously recovers when Johnnie rings her to invite her to the coming Hunt Ball (but of course!). After a whirlwind courtship - and marriage - the couple return to a large house in the countryside that Johnnie claims to have bought for his new bride. But he soon lets slip that he is in fact broke. 'You couldn't let me have £1,000, could you?' He has even employed a full-time maid, Ethel. Soon, too, we meet an old friend of Johnnie's, 'Beaky' Thwaite (Nigel Bruce), whom he has known since their schooldays together. So admiring is the uncritical Beaky of Johnnie's style (we even hear him say that 'Johnnie could lie his way out of any difficult situation'!) that it's easy to suspect that back in boarding-school Beaky had been Johnnie's 'fag'. This doesn't necessarily mean what the word 'fag' means today, but it was a feature of English boarding schools that the fagging-system existed, and notoriously led to gay activity. (Cary Grant is said to have been a bit like that himself.) But back to the maid Ethel. In the Francis Iles novel, Johnnie seduces her, quick as lightning. Nothing could stop Johnnie, although the film has to play this down, just a little.

May 28th 2022 - Dear reader. No blog this time. My computer-room is especially cold today. The blog'll have to keep. Try and forgive! KM

May 21st 2022 - We'll come back to Suspicion (see last time). This week, I'd like to attend to Under Capricorn (1949) apropos what someone has said about all great artworks, that they have 'the dignity of significance'. It's a phrase that I'm sure Hitchcock would have endorsed, and certainly followed. First, some background. The film is adapted from an historical novel by Australian author Helen Simpson (1897-1940) who had worked with Hitchcock previously - she co-authored the play 'Enter Sir John' on which Hitchcock's Murder! (1930) was based, and helped adapt it, as well as writing some of the dialogue in Sabotage (1936). The novel of 'Under Capricorn' may itself have been inspired to a certain extent by a classic Australian novel (1874) by Marcus Clarke. There, too, a person is wrongly convicted and deported to Australia back when it was still a penal colony named New South Wales. Similarly, the character played by Joseph Cotten, named Samson Flusky, in Under Capricorn had wrongfully served time in an 1830s penal colony, i.e., Australia, and subsequently made good as a landowner 'down under'. He had been followed out to Australia, on her own volition, by Henrietta ('Hattie') who had loved him when he was a groom in her aristocratic family's stable in Ireland. In fact, Hattie was actually guilty of the crime for which Flusky was transported - she had accidentally shot her brother when he tried to intervene as Flusky and Hattie attempted to flee to England to be married. In the film, Hattie is played by Ingrid Bergman - never more radiant after her character finally marries Flusky. In the frame-capture below, she is seen with the Hon. Charles Adare (Michael Wilding), cousin of the new Australian Governor, and a bit of a ne'er-do-well. Yet, note, it is Adare who manages to finally put things right again after Hattie begins to feel gnawing guilt for what she has put her husband through, i.e., his serving time in an Australian gaol. She had become despondent and taken to alcohol, and so the marriage had stalled just when it should have rehabilitated the couple. (Adare is himself rehabilitated by helping Hattie, though not without complications ...) Initially, Under Capricorn was not recognised for the masterwork it is - except in France, where several critics of 'Cahiers du Cinéma' quickly placed it on their 10-best-of-all-time lists. It is a stylised film, as befits an historical drama. Everything is drawn out: individual shots and scenes (Hitchcock was still influenced by his experiments with Rope the year before), and even the visual design. For example, Flusky sits at the head of a very long dining table, designed to accomodate the many guests whom he had anticipated would honour his success in the colony. (In fact, the wives of the local dignitatries continued to boycott the Fluskys.) Distinguished Scottish playwright James Bridie wrote the film's scenario, no doubt with input from Hitchcock. In it, people talk endlessly while their real points stay unspoken. (That is the point, though. Almost nothing is quick and easy.) A key line is given to Flusky, who complains about the unfeeling legal process, which 'goes on and on and on'. But some scenes seem to have impressed all of the critics at the time. Notably, nearly all of them referred to the scene in which Adare removes his jacket and holds it behind a glass door to make a mirror impromptu so that Hattie may see that she is still beautiful. She had stopped looking in mirrors years ago, when her guilt made her too despondent. But her radiance is still apparent once she is forced to confront it, as in the frame-still. Adare's gesture may even recall the legendary moment when Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have lain his cloak over a 'plashy place' so that Queen Elizabeth I might avoid getting her feet wet! Here, the aristocratic Adare shows his calibre that he had effectively concealed for so long. As I said, he too is rehabilitated in the course of Under Capricorn! Finally, let me return to my opening remark about 'the dignity of significance'. I was reminded of it this week after reading an essay on Under Capricorn (there still aren't many of those in English) by Robert Bellissimo for Joel Gunz's new publication, 'Hitchcockian Quarterly' - the first issue is online. Time and again, it seems, the film somehow managed to remind Bellissimo of his own life and marriage. Fair enough - and thanks for sharing that.

May 14th 2022 - Hitchcock plays with us constantly in Suspicion (1941), that is, with our suspicions. It's yet another instance of his 'subjective technique' whereby our own feelings as we watch the film mirror those of the characters onscreen - we are not allowed to be merely 'objective'. Those characters include Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant) and his young wife Lina (Joan Fontaine). Another notable character is the gullible Beaky (the novel describes him as 'vacuous'), played splendidly by Nigel Bruce, who had hero-worshipped the far-brighter Johnnie at school. Early in the film we watch Lina appear to struggle with Johnnie on a hillock, a bit like that in Torn Curtain. Is he trying to kiss her (as Lina thinks, finding Johnnie presumptious) or even kill her (as we half-think might be the case)? Perhaps neither: Johnnie says that he merely wanted to fix up Lina's hair. See frame-capture below. The truth is, there are more zigs and zags of plot in Suspicion than a switchback railway has ups and downs! Fast-forward to the end. RKO had forbidden Hitchcock to portray Cary Grant as a killer, but the director seems to have hoped that they'd change their minds. The ending that he wanted involves Johnnie bringing his wife a glass of poisoned milk; just before Lina drinks it, she gives him a letter to mail to her mother. The letter names Johnnie as her murderer. It explains that although she desperately loves her husband, and is prepared to die, she believes that he should not be allowed to go free. As I note in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story', during the film's shooting Hitch artfully prepared the audience for such an ending. In the opening scene, on a train, Johnnie 'borrows' a stamp from Lina; later, the camera repeatedly emphasises the pillar-box in the local village, and we even see Hitchcock himself posting a letter there. And indeed, the film's basis, a 1932 novel, 'Before the Fact', by 'Francis Iles'/Anthony Berkeley Cox, had ended with Lina's death. After she accepts and drinks the poisoned glass of milk that Johnnie brings to her bedside, the novel's last sentence is: 'It did seem a pity that she had to die, when she would have liked so much to live.' Something of an archetypal truth there, one that Hitchcock would have appreciated (see recent items in "Editor's Week", above). As I've just noted, RKO would not allow the film a 'downbeat' ending, and the present ending of the film is consequently a bit of a let-down. Nonetheless, it is consistent with what has gone before - that is, if one remembers Beaky's saying that Johnnie can lie his way out of any tight corner. On the film's internal evidence, and by his own admission, Johnnie really is constantly a liar. For instance, he tells Lina that he went to Liverpool to try to raise money on their insurance policy (specifically, a policy that would indemnify Johnnie finacially in the event of his wife's dying before him), but an earlier close-up of letters from Johnnie's insurers had shown that both had London addresses. So, Hitchcock had wanted Johnnie to be the wife-murderer of Iles's novel, in which he's also a philanderer and a mass poisoner. The character is based on one of the most audacious, and therefore fascinating, of real-life British criminals, William Palmer (1824-56). Both the novel and the film explicitly refer to Palmer. At the tender age of 22, Palmer made his first 'kill'. His victim was a man named Abbey, whom he poisoned one day with strychnine in a glass of brandy simply to see how the poison worked. (Short answer to that: contortedly. Think also of the coroner's description at the end of Psycho: 'An ugly way to die!') Palmer then decided to extend operations to his family. To an Uncle Bentley, he proposed a brandy drinking match; the result was the same as in the case of Abbey - Uncle Bentley died within three days. That incident goes straight into Suspicion (though it necessarily happens offscreen!). Re Suspicion, we might also note that Palmer married the daughter of a colonel in the Indian Army, whom he seems to have chosen for the large dowry she brought him. (Cf. Lina's father, a General Aysgarth, and his legacy to Lina.) Not surprisingly, he decided to poison her, too. Suspicion and its texture still fascinate. More next time.

May 7th 2022 - Many of Hitchcock's films attempt, in their expressionist way, to say 'everything'! None more so than the two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 and 1956). (But I could have cited, say, Stage Fright, 1950, with its levels of 'performance', including the literal ones by the tyro actress and the seasoned professional, and by others ... See also the last sentence of last week's entry, above.) But back to the two versions of TMWKTM. For starters, each pits a family, and family values, against ruthless would-be assassins and shadowy international politics. Which of those things is more important, or, perhaps, do they matter at all (in the wider scheme of things)? Certainly, at the end of the 1956 version, parent Ben McKenna (James Stewart) makes light of the wide-ranging adventures that he and his family have just been through: 'Sorry we were gone so long. We were just collecting Hank!' (Nothing about Hank's kidnapping or an attempted assassination at the Royal Albert Hall or a man's spectacular death tumbling down a flight of embassy stairs!) Similarly, Doris Day as Mrs McKenna sings the film's theme-song, 'What Will Be, Will Be', which sounds a trifle belittling of human powers of intervention, for example. But at the film's climax, we watch war-hero and surgeon Ben slip away from his wife's performance to rescue the kidnapped Hank, hardly a fatalistic resignation to fate on his part. In both versions of the film, a single family is contrasted with spectacular scenery: the mountains of Switzerland and the teeming marketplace of Marrakesh in North Africa. Likewise, 'mere' sport (in the 1934 version - the wife's prowess at a clay-pigeon shooting competition) or a relaxed family vacation in Marrakesh (the 1956 version) contrast with events to follow. Both films set their major climax at the Albert Hall, which is fitting in all kinds of ways. Like Hitchcock's film, the symphony concert effectively tries to say 'everything', featuring a grandiose cantata performed by male and female singers, and entitled 'Storm Cloud Cantata', with appropriate music commissioned by Hitchcock from Australian composer Arthur Benjamin whose career (I have read) was just reaching its zenith. Aptly, the circular Albert Hall thus serves as a kind of microcosm, including of stratified British society, offset by the presence of an assassin with just one thing on his mind. In the 1956 version, he is particularly sinister (Reggie Nalder) accompanied by a young woman to give him 'respectability' as his boss (Bernard Miles) phrases it. (Is he perhaps homosexual like the equally sinister Leonard, played by Martin Landau, in North by Northwest, 1959?) The cantata's very title evokes the world of nature again (like the grandeur of the Swiss Alps, or the endless arid scenery on the way to Marrakesh). So, again, 'everything'! Even the irrational or the less-than-respectable (hypnotism perhaps, as attempted in the 1934 version by another sinister character, the lady associate of the assassins - see frame-capture below) has a place. Minor characters mattered to Hitchcock, as we know. In these two films, they are everywhere, as part of the big tapestry. In the 1956 version, I particularly enjoyed the excitable Assistant Manager at the Albert Hall, played by the bespectacled Richard Wattis. The attempted assassination has just occurred, followed by another man's death by falling, from a box high above the auditorium floor. But the Assistant Manager has his priorities right, so he is mainly concerned with the foreign dignatory, the attempted assassination target! 'It was only a slight flesh wound', he thankfully tells the American couple who have both intervened to foil the would-be assassin (Ben McKenna by tracking him down at the critical moment, causing him to plummet to his death, 'Jo' McKenna by screaming at the same critical moment which has put the assassin off his mark - we gather that normally he never misses!). In sum, both versions of TMWKTM are a lot of fun!

April 30th 2022 - When young Arnie in The Trouble With Harry (1955) 'swipes' an extra blueberry muffin, and, challenged, excuses himself by saying, 'It's more fun swiped!', he epitomises the film's cheeky, amoral tone. This week, I come neither to (wholly) bury Harrry nor to (wholly) praise it. In fact, I might try to sum up the film's progression, from the audience's pov, as one of charm>chuckles>a sense of an 'absurdist' influence>a sense of absurdity>mere silliness. (The Absurdist Movement in the theatre had been gaining fame and influence since 1950 or thereabouts. I think the crossroads scene in North by Northwest, 1959, is also 'absurdist') Nonetheless, the initial charm still hovers for the rest of Harry. Hitchcock's style is everywhere, starting with the faux Paul Klee credits that end with the tracking camera 'discovering' a body (n.b., Hitchcock once said that his favourite painter was Klee). Klee's own style was faux childish, so naturally Harry had to begin with young Arnie clutching his toy 'atomic blaster' and dropping to the ground as he suddenly hears, in the idyllic autumn countryside, the sound of arguing voices and then real gunshots. The dead man will prove to be Harry Worp, ex-husband to Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine) whom she had married in peculiar circumstances: he was the 'noble' brother of Jennifer's first husband who got himself 'killed in a threshing machine'. Oops! Because Jennifer is Arnie's mother, Harry Worp must be the boy's stepfather. But all Jennifer can say when she recognises the dead man is, 'Thank providence! The last of Harry!' Which brings me to my next point. All the main characters are seemingly God-fearing and law-abiding. (The film proper opens with the sound of a church bell ringing.) But repeatedly they are heard invoking not God but some other entity. So Jennifer speaks of Providence in the abstract. Likewise, in the frame-capture below, we see the elderly Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn, veteran of several Hitchcock films), rising unsteadily to his feet and calling his rifle 'Old Faithful', as if it were an object of worship itself, and the Captain has a symbiotic relationship with it. It might as well be a 'pagan' relationship. The Captain is full of superstition. He says he knew that the day would bring trouble when, first thing, he had seen 'a double-breasted robin eating fermented choke-cherries'. If the film has one 'good guy' above all, it is Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe), an artist fittingly enough. He is frank in his own forthright way, like Hitchcock's film. My favourite line in the film may not be Hitchcock's (he said that was the spinster Miss Gravely asking the Captain, as he starts to lug Harry's body into the trees, 'What seems to be the trouble, Captain?') but rather Sam's to the delightful Jennifer when he first comes upon her, on her front verandah: 'You're beautiful! I'd like to paint you ... I'd like to paint you nude!' (He emphasis 'nude' with particular relish!) To which, Jennifer responds, 'Some other time, Mr Marlowe!' Oh well, Alma Hitchcock did once say that her husband was the only person she knew who could tell a dirty joke in mixed company and not offend anyone! Alma might have made an astute film critic apropos Alfred's work! No doubt in private, at home, she was just that. Hitch trusted her to the hilt, and would not take up a project unless Alma - who had worked as a continuity girl and film editor in silent films - approved of it. Another way the film establishes its tone early on is with subtle dialogue references. I'm thinking of when Miss Gravely, in her delicate way, invites the captain back to her house to sample her elderberry wine. Undoubtedly, Hitch would have had in mind the preferred poisoning method in a famous black comedy, Frank Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). And, speaking of subtle movie references, I strongly suspect that Hitch also intended Deputy Sheriff Calvin Wiggs's passion for restoring antique cars to be a clever invoking of the popularity of the English Film Genevieve (1953), about a race between antique-car fanatics. As a policeman-figure in a Hitchcock film, Calvin (Royal Dano) was bound to be made to look foolish before the end. Sure enough, the signs that might condemn Sam (and friends) of having something to do with concealing evidence are all neatly altered or stolen, right in front of Calvin's face or nearly so. He admits to Sam: 'I understand that you have made a kind of a fool of me.' Sweet music to Hitchcock's ears, no doubt! (The script was by the gifted John Michael Hayes, who wrote some of Hitchcock's best films, such as the 1954 Rear Window.) Finally, there are lines in the script that are probably there because Hitch felt they should go in. I have often argued that he felt his films should be about 'everything', if only to maximise their audience potential. (With a possible German Expressionist influence thrown in.) When Sam says that one of his paintings is 'symbolic of the beginning of the world', I think Hitch is hinting that the autumnal world of Harry itself is like a microcosm, which the young child Arnie has 'inherited'.

April 23rd 2022 - Remembrance weekend in Australia, aka Anzac Weekend. Editor's Week returns next time.

April 16th 2022 - The English have always been fascinated by true-life murder, and it features in many of their novels and plays. Sensing that he had a sure-fire readership, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) wrote both 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' (though his confessions did not extend to murder) and 'Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts'. Bless his heart! Even the Bard penned a little-something called 'Macbeth'. My favourite author, Charles Dickens (1812-1870), who started out as a crime-reporter, could hardly keep murder out of his novels. (It was the era of melodrama, which would nourish a huge number of movies next century.) So you see what I mean. Then along came Alfred Hitchcock. He had complete sets of Shakespeare and Dickens in his home library. However, he gave as his principal reason for enjoying a good murder case the fact that the English Sunday papers were full of them. Newspaper reporters would attend the Old Bailey and write up elaborate accounts of all the big cases. Readers, like Hitchcock, lapped them up. Many of the murders contained an element of ingenuity. One reason for this that I have seen suggested, is that England was relatively close-settled compared to, say, the USA. In the latter country, from the late Twenties, gangsters like Al Capone featured in the headlines. But they were seldom very imaginative, preferring to simply send out their henchman with machine-guns in a fast car to do their dirty work for them. (Rat-a-tat-tat, followed by, 'What's next, boss?') Whereas, the crowded English had to do their murders themselves and try not to be detected. Some one like Hawley Harvey Crippen (hanged 1912) thought that he had got clean away after killing his wife and burying her body in the cellar, then absconding to America with his young mistress. However, he was found out and - the first time ever - apprehended by wireless telegraphy: a message was sent to his ship and he was arrested as he stepped ashore. That case intrigued Hitchcock, not least because there was a lot of public sympathy for Crippen, widely considered to be a figure of pathos. Some people asked: well, what does a nagging wife deserve?! (Cf Hitchcock's Rear Window.) On the day of Crippen's execution, the writter Beerbohm Tree went about London murmuring, 'Poor old Crippen!' A thing that had betrayed him was that some people noticed that his mistress was wearing a piece of the wife's jewellery (cf Hitchcock's Vertigo), and told the police. And there's another thing of interest about Crippen. Criminologist William Le Queux reported that he had met Dr Crippen (a courtesy title, one suspects, as Crippen was a dentist) in 1908: Crippen had said that he was seeking information about untraceable poisons for a novel he proposed to write. Hmm! Makes you wonder! And of course it brings us to the Hitchcock film Suspicion. That's exactly the situation that is reprised there when Johnnie (Cary Grant) tries to pump one of the lady novelist's guests, a pathologist, about such a poison. (A moment earlier, the pathologist had exclaimed with relish about the most common poison of all, 'Ah, arsenic!' - see frame-capture below.) Johnnie appears to have grown tired of his young wife, Lina (Joan Fontaine), so we begin to fear the worst for her fate. (True to its title, the whole film is built on appearances.) Even a harmless friend called 'Beaky' (Nigel Bruce) may be one of Johnnie's intended victims. Again we fear the worst when we hear that Johnnie had challenged him to a brandy-drinking contest when they were in Paris, and that Beaky had choked to death. If we know our true-life crimes, we may remember that such a method of poisoning - a brandy-drinking contest - was used by the infamous English murderer William Palmer (1824-1856). Palmer has gone down in history as the Prince of Poisoners. Dickens attended his trial and described him as 'the greatest villain that ever stood in the Old Bailey'. Hitchcock may have felt further licence to make films about murderers because such criminals were a recurring topic in some German films of the 1920s, when Hitchcock worked there. At any rate, murder cases throw a practically unique light on what St Augustine called 'the abyss of human nature'. Melodrama can be edifying.

April 9th 2022 - Film writer and former editor of 'Cinema Papers' (the latter now gone), Scott Murray, sought to describe Marnie (1964): 'Marnie is ...beyond great, perhaps the finest film Alfred Hitchcock ever made. Many were troubled at the time by Scot Sean Connery playing an American East Coast WASP but, better than any other actor could, he captures the perverse desire Mark has for Marnie [Tippi Hedren] and the sexual excitement he gains from thoughts of the illegal things she is up to. But can Mark tame this delicate creature without killing what it is about her that so thrills him?' Unconsciously, probably, Scott's phrase about 'killing' effectively brings to mind Oscar Wilde's famous 'Each man kills the thing he loves'. Indeed, as purveyors of emotion, Wilde and Hitchcock had their particular kind of artistry in common, and Hitchcock is on record as having admired it in Wilde. Marnie can do that rarest of things in cinema, really bring you to tears (as opposed to the sentimentality that commercial cinema from Hollywood often invoked). I'm reminded of a reading of Wilde's poem 'The Happy Prince' that I once heard (the reader may have been Charles Laughton, but I'm not sure). It, too, made my young self cry! I think it's relevant that the entire Hitchcock family (Alfred, Alma, Patricia) was capable of being reduced to tears, notably by hearing about the deaths of animals. Twice, at the studio, Hitchcock saw a dog run over. Both times, he was in shock and unable to work for days afterwards. I can only say that I admire such a trait in Hitch. To feel emotion is a gift, a facility that some people have more than others: for example, being able to love or to feel compassion for both humans and animals. Which can bring us back to Marnie. Initially, Marnie's emotions are all bottled up, though they're sublimated in her affection for her black horse Forio, and in feeling release, a kind of freedom, whenever she rides him. (She pays for him to be kept at a riding stable, Garrod's, and tries to get to ride him herself as often as she can. Forio is part of her secret life.) A key scene, of course, is the hunt scene. But the hunters themselves, their scarlet coats, and the sight of the cornered fox - Hitchcock uses visual sleight-of-hand to make us think that we have also seen it - repel Marnie. Again you think of Wilde's own reaction: 'The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.' Marnie spurs Forio away from the hunters and lets him have his head to gallop for miles across the countryside. But in fact he is out of control. Suddenly Marnie becomes aware of a stone wall looming up. She senses that Forio may not be able to clear it, and tries to rein him in. Sadly, she is too late. The horse crashes over the wall, throwing Marnie off. She lands on the ground nearby. Then she looks back (frame-capture below) and is sickened by seeing the horse threshing about. Marnie's cry of 'Forio!' invariably reduces me to tears, as I say, as surely as hearing Wilde's 'The Happy Prince' read aloud does the same. (I heard it again recently when I started to watch a BBC production dramatising Wilde's last years. They called it The Happy Prince. I intend to return to it soon!) The crucial thing about the hunt scene in Marnie may be how visceral it all is. Marnie's repression has become more and more obvious, perhaps starting with what I call Marnie's 'little girl voice' when under stress, as opposed to her show of sophistication in public, especially once she finds herself married to Mark. The film builds and builds, and - with Mark - we wonder what has happened in Marnie's past to make her like she is. In other words, without our being quite conscious of it, we are subjected by Hitch to a cumulative effect of mystery concerning Marnie. The score of Bernard Herrmann is crucial, certainly the acme of the Hitchcock-Herrmann collaboration that lasted for about a decade starting with The Trouble With Harry (1955). The score's surging and plummeting (and, during the credits, a musical evocation of a 'cry in the night' that could be a little girl's ...) unifies the film marvellously. And, sure enough, Hitch has a final revelation about how Marnie got to be the way she is. Her mother, left alone by a husband serving overseas during the War (and probably killed), had been a prostitute whose leg was terribly injured when a customer fell on it- in front of the little girl Marnie. (Hitch may intend us to equate such male 'cruelty' with the hunters. The fact that it might be an irrational equation is perfectly fitting in this particular film.)

April 2nd 2022 - Hitchcock didn't make many films about fickle women - the Madeleine/Judy character in Vertigo (1958) is a special case, given the plot. But even Mabel (Lilian Hall-Davis) in The Ring (1927) eventually realises where her heart truly lies, and so provides the final climax of the film. It begins in a fairground, where we immediately see Mabel selling tickets out front of a sideshow booth featuring the boxer 'One Round' Jack (Carl Brisson, formerly a real-life boxer from Denmark). Supposedly, Jack has never been beaten despite his accepting all comers. We do see more than one hapless gentleman staggering from the tent, nursing his jaw! Already at this early stage of Hitchcock's career his films were full of comedy - most of it visual gags - as when the hapless gentlemen are pushed forward by their wives, despite the husbands' obvious reluctance! Also enticing them inside the tent (ensuring a good sale of tickets) is Jack's surly-looking manager, played by the comedian Gordon Harker in his first film role. He's forever picking at his nose or flexing his jaw, but is very loyal to Jack whom he will eventually accompany to London and the film's climax at the Royal Albert Hall. The latter venue was familiar to Hitchcock who would attend both prize fights and symphony concerts there, with his wife Alma Reville. The venue lent prestige to all such events, and was clearly a place for its patrons to be seen at. Hitchcock wrote the script of The Ring himself, almost certainly using the celebrated German film Variety (1925) as model. However, he inserted many more gags than the latter contained. (Was this a sign of his Cockney upbringing?) I have many favourites among those gags. One example - though it might not be allowable today - is the one of the fairground's Siamese twins who attend Mabel's and Jack's wedding. One half of the twins wants to sit in the left-hand pew, the other in the right-hand pew! Clearly each twin has a mind of her own! The film is also full of largely visual puns, but centring on the words 'ring' and 'round'. The boxing ring is one element, its complement being the wedding ring that we watch Jack slip on Mabel's finger. However, the film has a villain. He is a champion boxer, Bob Corby, played by Australian actor Ian Hunter and almost certainly based on Australian boxer Les Darcy (1895-1917) who died prematurely from, I think, complications following a bout of tonsillitis. Corby happens to be visiting the fairground with his manager, and is immediately taken by Mabel who - showing her fickle nature - makes eyes at the handsome gentleman and beckons him inside the tent (without knowing that he's a champion boxer). Corby accepts - and soon inflicts Jack's first loss though their match goes for several rounds and Jack is hardly disgraced. Predictably, they will meet again at the Albert Hall. Another clever visual gag comes when, on the evening before the big fight, Jack seeks out Corby at a night club and knocks him down! As Corby lies on the floor, the band keeps playing: Hitchcock shows the slides of the trombones seeming to count the champion out. Jack leaves, telling Corby that he can try to avenge himself on the morrow. Earlier, there had been another boxing 'pun' when two young women at a party in Jack's rooms shimmy voluptuously before collapsing into chairs, and their 'seconds' wave towels in their faces to refresh them. A nice touch is that all of Jack's friends from his circus days come up to London to wish him well for the big fight. (Silently, they note that Mabel is nowhere to be seen: presumably she's off with Corby.) Mabel turns up at the Albert Hall, but even now seems not to know her mind. Before the fight, she visits Corby in his rooms. However, as she watches the match, and sees Jack knocked down, suddenly she knows that it's Jack whom she truly loves! Going to him in his corner, she whispers in his ear - and Jack revives. Soon he wins the match with a knockout and claims Mabel back!

March 26th 2022 - One of my favourite scenes in the original The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) is of Bob (Leslie Banks) turning the tables on the sinister dentist. The latter is sinister in various ways, starting with the light glinting in his glasses, and his surly manner. Surely his manner is not professional! On the other hand, he is a front man for the foreign anarchists led by Abbot (Peter Lorre) who meet in his Wapping surgery to discuss their dasterdly deeds. Hitchcock's wit told him that dentists do appear sinister to anyone who must submit to them - the control they have over their patients, the pain they inflict, and so on - and so he played on such audience feelings. Poor Clive (Hugh Wakefield) who accompanies Bob in his quest to find the latter's kidnapped daughter, young Betty (Nova Pilbeam), straight away loses a tooth for the cause! (Clive is the film's comic fall guy, something I'll elaborate on shortly.) The dentist holds out his palm to Bob, and says, 'Five shillings please!' While Clive holds a handkerchief to his mouth, to quench the bleeding, Bob realises that they can't leave yet, for they haven't found out what they needed before (presumably) calling the police. So he tells the dentist: 'Better have a look at my teeth while you're about it!' Bob settles himself in the dentist's chair, hoping that he won't need the same treatment as Clive. But something arouses the dentist's suspicions. He reaches for the mask used to administer anaesthetic, and starts to apply it. Bob, alarmed, asks: 'Hey, doesn't a doctor have to do that?' (That sounds right. I'm old enough to remember having some teeth out when I was 7yo. And I've never forgotten the young anaesthetist, standing alongside the dentist, who stepped forward and grinned at me in a way I didn't like. Then he quickly went about doing his job and I was out in no time!) Accordingly, it must have been very satisfying to the original audiences when Bob turned the tables on the dentist and sedated him with his own gas! But this memorable scene has by no means finished. No sooner has Bob anaesthetised the dentist than he hears one of the anarchists arriving. Thinking quickly, he manages to strip the dentist of his white coat and then don it himself; then he puts on the dentist's glasses, The dentist had somehow ended up in his own dental chair. (There was some neat choreography involved here!) As each of the anarchists arrive, they ask whether Abbot is there already, and Bob - bending over his 'patient' - gestures to the next room. 'In there.' Finally, Bob manages to slip away and join Clive, waiting in the street below. I've called Clive the fall guy. Having already needlessly lost a tooth, before long he and Bob find themselves at the 'Tabernacle of the Sun' where the anarchists have rooms upstairs. But a service is in progress in the tabernacle, so Bob and Clive wait their time at the back of the congregation. However, another of the film's sinister characters, the versatile 'Nurse Agnes' (Cicely Oates), has spotted them. From the pulpit, she summons Clive forward and proceeds to hypnotise him. It's an amusing-enough incident to us, the audience. Then, with some mumbo-jumbo, Nurse Agnes proceeds to dismiss most of the congregation. Those who remain belong to the assassins' gang. And from nowhere appears the dumpy lady Mrs Brockett (see last time), who sticks a gun in Bob's back. Realising that he's in a spot, he starts a fight with chairs while yelling to Clive to jump through a window and summon the police. Clive wakes from his trance and somehow does what Bob has yelled - although Abbot and his gang will talk their way out of this tight corner and even get Clive arrested, for 'creating a disturbance in a sacred place'. (Typical Hitchcock, making fun of police 'incompetance'!) And so on. FInally, let me remark on the strange relationship between Abbot and Nurse Agnes. It sometimes seems like that of mother and son, and yet is different from that. In the climactic shoot-out with the police, she is shot dead and dies in Abbot's arms (see frame-capture below). His horror and grief are almost palpable. In 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' I suggest that Hitchcock may have been influenced by the incestuous relationship in Howard Hawks's Scarface, released the same year. There, the sister of Tony Camonte is likewise killed by a police bullet at the climax, and Camonte is heartbroken. Their incestuous relationship has been established earlier on.

March 19th 2022 - Back again, to talk about the original The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). (Took a holiday last week. Do forgive, please.) The English reviewers have always admired the film's wit and pace, and so should we. Because it is so fast-moving, Hitchcock couldn't protract the Albert Hall scene in the way the film's remake (1956) does. Both films need appreciating on their own terms. The frame-capture below shows one of the many witty moments in the original. The gang of Abbot (Peter Lorre) have taken refuge in their upstairs headquarters in Wapping, above a seedy 'tabernacle' which serves as the gang's cover. But hero Bob (Leslie Banks), whose young daughter has been kidnapped in order to silence him because he 'knows too much' about a planned assassination of a diplomat, tracks them there. The gang employs a dumpy housekeeper named Mrs Brockett, who lives nearby. But on this occasion, Abbot decides he can't afford to let her return home to prepare her husband's evening meal. Accordingly, he asks one of the gang to ensure that she stays. The resourceful gang member, Rawlinson, hits on a suitable ruse: he orders Mrs Brockett to remove her dress, leaving her in her bloomers! In the frame-capture, what we see is Rawlinson apparently pinching Mrs Brockett on her ample bottom. In fact, he is merely reaching for some hors d'oeuvres on the trolley behind her! The eventual siege and shoot-out with the police was evidently based on a famous historical event of 1911, in which a gang of anarchists fought a gun-battle with police. It was known as the Sydney Street Siege. Hitchcock of course was happy to draw on an actual event which he knew was still in many people's minds twenty years later. Authenticity was something he regularly strove for. On the other hand, if he thought that he could get away with some effect or other, he would go ahead and use it. In the opening sequence, set in St Moritz, Switzerland, he includes spectacular shots of ski-jumping. Feeling he needed to memorably introduce the daughter of Jill (Edna Best) and Bob, he had the young girl, Betty (Nova Pilbeam), run in front of the ski-run just as a comperitor is hurtling down it: her little dog has escaped from her arms into the skier's path as he nears the end of his descent. Implausibly, the skier sees the girl and fears that he will hit her - so covers his eyes. A professional skier covering his eyes just when he should be straining to take effective evasive action?! Come on, Hitch, that's scarcely plausible! Of course, Hitch certainly knew what he was doing: the gesture was perfect to signal to the audience the danger the girl was in. So he kept it! Nearly always in Hitchcock, the visual came first! Now, The Man Who Knew Too Much was one of several 'London' films that Hitchcock made in his country's capital. Besides London's fame as the hub of the British Empire, then at its zenith, it was where Hitch had grown up. Following one of his penchants that he always kept to, he photographed a succession of landmarks that the audience would instantly recognise. Naturally, then, the famous Tower Bridge gets shown. (Cf. the opening credits of Frenzy, 1972.) As for the film's rapid-fire pacing, it too is evident from the start. All of the film's half-a-dozen main characters are introduced here as they stand around watching the winter sports. In fact, Bob's wife Jill (Edna Best) is competing in some of the events. A clay-pigeon shooting contest will bring her up against the man Ramon who will later turn out to be the would-be assassin. She loses the contest because Betty distracts her at a crucial moment with a chiming watch belonging to Abbot; but Jill effectively gets her own back at the climax when she shoots Ramon who has pursued Betty onto a rooftop ... To be continued.

March 5th 2022 - Yesterday on TV I watched a documentary on the architecture of the Golden Gate Bridge. No prizes for why I might have done so! I once crossed that magnificent structure before turning around to go back to explore San Francisco itself - much as Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) explores the city when Scottie follows 'Madeleine' on a virtual tour of its streets and environs. Round and round she leads him, thereby evoking the film's principal motif, that of the spiral. (Even the mission tower at the end has a winding staircase up which Scottie drags Judy/Madeleine to punish her, a return to 'the scene of the crime' as Scottie understandably calls it after he learns how Judy had tricked him as part of Gavin Elster's fiendish plan to make Scottie think that he had witnessed a suicide, which was really a murder.) If Gavin's plan is ingenious, even more so is Hitchcock's film! Again and again, he draws on the film's motifs, often overlapping or merging them. Consider the scene filmed in the church of the Mission Dolores and in its garden/cemetery outside. In the frame-capture below, which is Scottie's subjective view as he watches, watches ..., Madeleine at the far end, nearest the altar, is about to exit into the garden. At least two of Vertigo's visual motifs are shown here. First, Madeleine is constantly leading Scottie into darkness and out of it. (It's no accident that she will later tell him that she knows that one day she will come to the end of the darkness and not come out again, i.e., that she must die.) Think of this as the film's life/death motif - life-versus-death being of course a motif of virtually all of Hitchcock's films, as he well knew. Outside the darkened church is the bright light of the garden/cemetery. Further, note a related motif in Vertigo in which Madeleine is constantly 'disappearing' before reappearing, something that plays on Scottie's anxiety for her safety after he had earlier witnessed her try to drown herself in San Francisco Bay (or so it had seemed to him at the time). Another instance of her 'disappearing act' occurs in the dark Muir Woods (though I believe the scene was actually filmed elsewhere) when Scottie loses sight of her after she has gone behind one of the thick trunks of the Sequoias. He hastens to bring her back into sight, and she plays with him by asking, 'Why did you run?' But we had been as nervous as he was, and Hitchcock wants us to know it! Soon afterwards, she leads him back into the light beyond the forest, and further plays with him by murmuring, 'Somewhere in the light ...' What does she know?, Scottie must be wondering (and us likewise!). Vertigo seems to promise us answers to the truly big questions. Allow me to quote from my book on Hitchcock: 'With its missions, forts, shops and art galleries, the city represents perennial human concerns - in the film it's a city seen sub specie aeternitatus. The scene at the Mission Dolores - originally the Mission San Francisco de Asis - is particularly telling in this respect. The mission was founded in the same year, 1776, as the city to which it eventually gave its name. Further, both here and in the other places Madeleine visits, time and worldly matters seem suspended. Madeleine thus comes to represent for Scottie the eternal feminine, defined by Carl Jung apropos Goethe's Faust (1808/1832), as a figure who "embodies an experience far older than that of the individual".' Now let's come back to the scene where Madeleine throws herself into the Bay. The documentary I watched reports that the currents in the Bay are particularly powerful: the chances of Madeleine surviving her jump would seem minimal, even though she knows that Scottie is watching her and will attempt to rescue her. He too would likely have drowned! But Hitchcock wanted this scene, and went to lengths to include it. The splash of Madeleine's jump would probably have resulted in watery spirals spreading out. More crucially, Hitchcock faked the scene in another way. Filmmaker Richard Franklin (Psycho II) once told me that although Madeleine seems to disappear from our view by going around a corner of the bridge's massive stonework, there was actually no path there that would have enabled it. So this instance of her 'disappearing act' involved some trick photography. We know that Hitchcock would have enjoyed himself doing that. Indeed, his effects-artist, Albert Whitlock, once told me of other instances in Vertigo, et al., that showed the same thing. For example, he recalled a scene in Topaz (wasn't it?) involving a long row of cloisters in Cuba. Hitchcock decided to film the scene in 'forced perspective' so that the people passing along the cloisters had actually to be dwarfs! But Hitch enjoyed 'getting away with' such deceptions!

February 26th 2022 - Downhill (see also last time) is one of Hitchcock's early 'wrong man' films - or in this case 'wrong boy' films. In the frame-capture below, the duplicitous waitress, Mabel, from Ye Olde Bunne Shoppe, fingers young Roddy - recently appointed School Captain - to his headmaster as the boy who had got her pregnant. The word 'pregnant' isn't used but it's implicit enough. Mabel lets on about her deeper motive when she even says, 'His father's rolling in money - he'll see me through.' One of Hitchcock's subtle jokes is to show the title of the gramophone record Mabel plays in the shop where she has enticed Roddy as well as his school friend, Tim, on her half-day off. (She fancies them both, so why not?!) It's called: "I Want Some Money". And, speaking of Hitchcock's jokes, another is purely visual. A young urchin enters the shop clutching a ha'penny, and the camera first 'pretends' not to be able to frame him properly - it initially shoots right over his head, so that we don't see the young chap at all just at first! Roddy has been left alone behind the counter while Mabel flirts with Tim behind the shop. And when the clumsy Roddy rings up '£1' instead of 'ha'penny', he is aghast - but does the decent thing and takes out a £1 note and lays it on the top of the cash register for Mabel to make the takings add up correctly at the end of the day. To the headmaster, she will refer to the note as evidence that Roddy had seduced her for money! Of course, the headmaster then believes that he has no option but to expel Roddy. Tim does not intervene, explaining afterwards to Roddy that he attends the school on a scholarship and that it would 'break my father's heart' if the scholarship were withdrawn. Note: the headmaster isn't the only person to be so morally rigid. Roddy's father is made of the same 'old school' material, and when Roddy tries to explain to him that a mistake has been made his father explodes, 'LIAR!' The film indeed uses all-caps at this point, leaving us in no doubt of the intensity of the father's wrath. In turn, Roddy tells him that, in that case, he must leave home. So Roddy's downhill journey continues. (Already, at the school, as he leaves for home, a high long-shot has shown him, a forlorn figure, crossing the otherwise-deserted quadrangle. There are prefigurings of, say, Vertigo here. Recall the scene in that film after Madeleine has fallen from the church tower, and Scotty, blaming himself for his inability to save her, slinks away in extreme downward-tilted long-shot and round the corner of the tower.) A downhill journey would become the material of other Hitchcock films. In Under Capricorn, we hear Lady Henrietta (Ingrid Bergman) lament, 'Down, down, down, until I could go no further down!' as she recalls her own self-shame for not confessing that she had shot her brother Dermott, a crime for which her husband, Samson Flusky (Joseph Cotton), had been wrongfully deported. There are elements of fairy-tale in Downhill, which, however, Hitchcock balances with hard realism. In exile abroad, Roddy one day receives notification that he has inherited £30,000 from a relative. Promptly he begins an affair with an actress, Julia (Isobel Jeans), and soon weds her. However, she continues seeing her intimate friend (Ian Hunter) in secret, seeming to give him some of Roddy's money. (This is where the line about a coming financial crash figures - see last time. 'Better put them [i.e., banknotes] in your bank before the crash comes.') For a while, the virtual threesome continues, although the Ian Hunter character is happy to pass on to Roddy the task of paying Julia's many bills. However, when Roddy and Hunter's character eventually fight, Julia throws Roddy out! ('You gave the flat to me so you can get out!') So Roddy's journey down the slippery slope continues. At one point, he finds himself working as a gigolo in a dance hall run by 'Madame - la Patronne'. Only near the film's end does Hitchcock put a shape to his sprawling tale. In a dungeon in Marseilles, Roddy hallucinates about all the people who have taken advantage of him - now seen quabbling among themselves for his money. But finally, he returns home, crossing London on foot (prefiguring Blackmail here) and a title tells us, 'Blind instinct led him home!' (A 'homing instinct' is something else that Hitchcock would draw on in later films.) This time, his father welcomes him, saying that he now knows what had happened, and he asks Roddy's forgiveness. Final shot: Roddy scoring a try for the Old Boys!

February 19th 2022 - Hitchcock's Downhill was released in 1927 - which is interesting, because at one point a character refers to the coming Crash. I hadn't thought that anyone had predicted the Great Wall Street Crash (1929), but apparently they had. Perhaps the filmmakers of Downhill saw the fall of their chief character, Roddy Berwick (Ivor Novello), as reflecting such a wider downhill crash. When the film begins, Roddy is a senior school boarder and something of a school hero for his prowess at rugby. He foresees that one day he will be honoured by being able to play for the Old Boys! His ambitions seem no higher than that, and both his father and the school headmaster are right behind him for those ambitions. However, things change. (Hitchcock liked his films to mirror life, call it Life.) When a fellow-student of Roddy's gets a waitress at Ye Olde Bun Shop into trouble, she complains to the headmaster - but, preferring his friend to Roddy (who had seen fit to avoid such trouble, to her chagrin), she points the finger at Roddy - who is immediately told to leave the school. Rather than rat on his friend, Roddy accepts his expulsion. His downhill journey has begun. (Note that the film is divided into three parts, the first part being called 'The World of Youth'. The second part, which is about to begin, is called 'The World of Make-Believe' - Hitchcock's and screenwriter Eliot Stannard's comment on how we all live in such a world. When Roddy returns home, a week before the end of term, his father asks him why. On being told that Roddy has been wrongfully expelled, his strict father explodes and calls his son 'Liar!' (Don't you just love such understanding people as that?!) There is some sort of comment here on the English class-system and the false pride of the upper classes, for Roddy is the child of wealthy parents. He has thus further to fall in the middle part of the film. He now finds himself fleeing abroad via the London Underground (image of escalators going down) and a cross-Channel ferry. Arriving in Paris, he gets a job as a minor actor in a theatre. Initially, Hitchcock misleads us, befitting the title of the film's middle-part. We see Roddy looking reasonably cheerful in evening dress - but he is merely playing the part of a waiter. He is serving a couple at a table. Then the couple get up and move onto the dance floor. Roddy pockets a cigarette-case from off the table. Next, he momentarily appears to have joined the dancers, but the camera continues panning and we realise that he is dancing in the back row of a chorus line. The master-touch in all of this is the cigarette-case. It apparently belongs to the show's leading lady (Isabel Jeans), whom Roddy later visits in her dressing-room. Was leaving it behind, we wonder, part of the show's script? An accident? Or something else again? (Hitchcock is keeping us guessing, you see!) And indeed, in a film that keeps on showing us fluctuating fortunes, Roddy will later inherit money and marry the fortune-hunting leading lady - that is, until the money runs out because of her excessively lavish spending. Whereupon, she promptly drops him! Roddy can do nothing. He had bought her a house, but in her name. She refuses to part with it, having another suitor - played by Hitchcock regular Ian Hunter - already lined up. The women in Downhill are treacherous - Hitchcock's misogyny, anyone? Interestingly, though, the film was adapted from a play by Novello and actress Constance Collier. For me, one of the film's highlights comes in the final part ('The World of Lost Illusions'). It consists of an extended scene of delirium in which a kidnapped Roddy lies inert in the hold of a ship taking him back to England - his kidnappers believe that there may be money in it for them. In a reprise of what has passed, we see the various characters who have exploited Roddy fighting amongst themelves for his money. Then we see through the porthole a docks, with an English bobby patrolling it. (See frame-capture below.) He is wearing the distinctive bobby's helmet. However, in a close-up, it is Roddy's father, still irate, glowering at him. Welcome home, Roddy! More next time.

February 12th 2022 - More on Lifeboat, then. Jo Swerling's screenplay is notable, inter alia, for the speech idioms given various characters. Journalist Connie doesn't exactly compliment Kovac when she calls him 'a twenty-for sheet'! She is referring, I gather, to the old name for a quire of paper: twenty-four sheets of it. Later it became 25 sheets. I interpret her to mean that Kovac has been short-sold on brains! Similarly, the drunken seaman Gus - about to have his smashed-up leg amputated - dares to call the nurse 'loot' ('Hi loot!') instead of his customary polite 'Miss Mackenzie'. (I have transcribed the spelling of these terms from my English-subtitled DVD.) I guess that he means something like 'precious!' I would welcome further information on such terms heard in the film. Now, another aspect of the film - perhaps its most crucial one - is how it portrays 'humanity' (see also last week). Near the end, the other occupants of the lifeboat realise exactly how Willi has been misleading them, even steering them towards a German supply ship. (See photo of cast below. Willi is on the extreme left.) His seemingly tireless rowing, when the boat's other occupants are growing weaker through lack of food and water, is explained by the flask of water and a supply of energy tablets they find concealed on his person, along with a compass. They all turn on him - except for the negro steward Joe, whose faith absolutely bars him from taking another person's life. The normally gentle and quiet-spoken radio operator named 'Sparks' batters Willi with a plank, and then they all push him overboard, still alive. Kovac adds a finishing-touch by picking up Gus's abandoned boot and bashing Willi with it. His body sinks beneath the water. (Hitchcock himself commented that 'they're like a pack of dogs'!) So much for 'humanity'! Next moment, they collectively realise that they have probably killed the one man who might have saved them. The nearest island, Bermuda, is over a month's rowing away, and their one water-bottle, that had belonged to Willi, has been smashed. Connie seeks to come to their rescue. She has the inspiration that her one remaining valuable (everything else had been washed overboard), namely, her diamond bracelet, might be used as fish bait, and that raw fish contains both nutrition and water. (The film doesn't stop to explain whether a fish might really bite on a diamond bracelet. But the plot requires the use of Connie's stratagem ...) In a further irony, just when a fish has taken Connie's bait, the boat's occupants see a potential rescue ship; in their excitement, the fish falls back in the sea, taking Connie's bracelet with it. Moreover, the ship is German. Just then, an Allied ship appears on the horizon and begins shelling the German one. Some of the Allied shells lob dangerously close to the lifeboat. Further peril results from the fact that the German ship nearly runs them down. When it is hit, it rapidly sinks, and the film has come full circle (it began with the sinking of an Allied supply ship). Further, a young German sailor clambers unannounced into the lifeboat, just as Willi had done. He is holding a gun. However, he is quickly disarmed, whereupon he asks, 'Aren't you going to kill me?' The lifeboat's occupants can afford to be magnanimous. 'What do you do with people like that?', Kovac asks, conveniently overlooking how they had all (except for the negro steward with his devout faith) sought to do just that - kill the treacherous Willi. There is little question that filmmaker Hitchcock, along with Jo Swerling, were first and foremost trying to show things as they are. Some critics thought the film had gone too far, accusing Hitchcock of being too nice to the Germans!

February 5th 2022 - Watching the wartime Lifeboat (1944) - a key Hitchcock film - set on the open ocean which functions like a symbol of what a philosopher called the world's 'Will' (roughly, Nature's life-force), I recognised the film as being an index of Hitchcock's own humanism discernible in many of his films thereafter. Using a play on words, one of Lifeboat's characters tells another, who is something of a socialist, 'We're all fellow-travellers in a mighty big ocean.' I notice that last week I wrote here: 'Hitchcock had always been amused by the human condition generally, but not in a strident or harshly critical way. Rather, he accepted it for what it is, and tried to catch aspects of it in his films. Those films never seem to be "about" some simple "topic", but to dramatise a situation both for suspense and to depict the human comedy , i.e., show the limited, subjective outlooks that we all have - and which make us "human".' That's very much Lifeboat for you! Later, Rear Window (1954) put a whole cross-section of society on display, and Hitchcock commented: 'It wouldn't have worked if we hadn't done that.' Even so, some people have found Lifeboat a bit preachy. Indeed it is an allegory, whose immediate purpose was to remind the Allies of their need to be united against a common enemy, Hitler's fascism. Notice that the German character in the film - a Nazi u-boat commander - is named Willi (Walter Slezak), essentially an indication of his 'will-to-power', in Nietzsche's phrase. Yet Nietzsche himself had simply developed Schopenhauer's notion of Will, but had thereby perverted it from the concept of the universal 'force' that drives us all (for good or bad, as Schopenhauer recognised). As my regular readers know, I believe that Hitchcock's world-view was far more akin to Schopenhauer's than to Nietzsche's. (Hitler's Nazis would further pervert the notion for their own ends.) Notice that the very title of Lifeboat tells us that it is about 'life'. Another 1944 film, Lewis Allen's The Uninvited, calls the ocean 'a place of life and death and eternity, too' - Hitchcock would have accepted that. As I'll probably be discussing Lifeboat futher next time, perhaps I should enumerate its characters. Eight survivors of the carrier sunk by Willi's u-boat gather in the lifeboat: journalist Connie Porter (Tallulah Bankhead), ship's engineer Kovac (John Hodiac), radio operator Stanley Garrett (Hume Cronyn), Red Cross nurse Alice Mackenzie (Mary Anderson), rich indudtrialist Charles Rittenhouse (Henry Hull), an injured seaman Gus Smith (William Bendix), negro/black steward Joe (Canada Lee), and a shell-shocked English woman Mrs Iggley (Heather Angel), clutching her dead baby. Soon they are joined by the u-boat's sole survivor, Willi, who pretends that he is just an ordinary seaman, not the commander who must have given the order to sink the Allied carrier. After a sea-burial for the dead baby - whose mother drowns herself that night - the others must face their own prospects. As the days pass, they become increasingly worried. With only a broken compass and limited water, they hope that they are heading for Bermuda - when, in fact, Willi, who secretly has his own compass, is steering them towards a German supply ship. The initial treatment was written by novelist John Steinbeck: Twentieth-Century Fox, the producers of Lifeboat, were happy to hire Steinbeck, being gratified by the success of their adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath (1940). However, things did not work out. Eventually, the film's script was written by Hollywood professional, Jo(seph) Swerling, making use of the earlier treatment. He added most of the film's contemporary references to baseball, trumpeter Harry James, and the like. Besides making the German a Nietzschean superman-figure and calling him Willi, he also added the character of Stanley, known as 'Sparks', a radio operator from Greenwich - no doubt to stress the joint Anglo-American war effort. (Steinbeck can't have been unimpressed. In his 1947 novel 'The Wayward Bus', he used the Lifeboat concept and isolated a group of representative individuals, having them intereact.) More next time.

January 29th 2022 - Undoubtedly Marnie (1965) is a Hitchcock comedy - often of an 'in your face!' kind - but no less does it have a lyricism and quiet melancholy that is quite beautiful. (Bernard Herrmann's score is, as always, fully collaborative.) Hitchcock had always been amused by the human condition generally, but not in a strident or harshly critical way. Rather, he accepted it for what it is, and tried to catch aspects of it in his films. Those films never seem to be 'about' some simple 'topic', but to dramatise a situation both for suspense and to depict the human comedy , i.e., to capture the limited, subjective outlooks that we all have - and which make us 'human'. On this website is an appreciation by Dr Theodore (Ted) Price of Marnie that catches a goodly number of the film's aspects. 'One of the highlights of the film', he writes, 'is the grand Party Scene, the kind that Hitch was so fond of.' Host and hostess at the party are Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) and his new wife, Marnie (Tippi Hedren). Mark had been married before, but his wife had died young. Amusingly, perhaps, the first wife's sister, Lil Mainwaring (Diane Baker), has decided to stay around, for she hopes to marry Mark herself. So when Marnie enters his life, Lil is immediately jealous, even a touch spiteful. Which makes for comedy of the Hitchcock kind. At times she eavesdrops on Mark and Marnie, and thus learns that Mark had 'paid off' a man named Strutt - who had been one of thief Marnie's victims. Mischievously, Lil invites Mr and Mrs Strutt to the party. When Marnie, as hostess, is forced to greet the Strutts, she can only feign that she does not know Strutt - though she had once been employed by him as his personal secretary! Strutt recognises Marnie immediately, and starts to fume. 'I believe we have met before', he tells her, using the constraint that the party-setting demands. Marnie, bluffing, says: 'I don't believe so.' Strutt: 'Think again, Mrs Rutland!' This is one of Hitchcock's 'in your face' comic scenes, in which he even films Strutt in close-up as he addresses the camera directly, which thus momentarily takes Marnie's viewpoint. Price notes the follow-up scene in which Marnie hastens upstairs and immediately starts to pack. For some reason, she chooses to dress in black, in a leotard-like outfit, but Mark finds her and refers pointedly to how she has got herself up 'like a cat burglar'. Price notes how this is reminiscent of Hitchcock's earlier To Catch a Thief (1955), thus reinforcing the parallel between the two films, 'with one member of a couple falling in love with the other because the latter is a criminal'. Hitchcock had a lot of fun with fetishism in his films! Price makes good use of papers by Karl Abraham, a close associate of Sigmund Freud. This can remind us that Hitchcock worked in Germany in the 1920s where he almost certainly saw G.W. Pabst's The Secrets of a Soul (1926), the first film to feature a psychiatric case history, and on which Abraham worked as an adviser. Price notes something else about Marnie: that she has misogynistic, even lesbian, qualities. With contempt she tells Mark, who has blackmailed her into marrying him - Mark has his own fetishes! - that if you say no to a man, 'bingo, you're a candidate for the funny farm!' One of Abrahams's famous papers dealt right at the start with the (unconscious) notion of Robbery-as-Castration: note that at the start of Marnie we hear Strutt exclaim 'Robbed!' Sure enough, it's soon evident that Hitchcock intended some sort of parallel. And here is Price quoting Abraham: We find therefore in the female sex not only the tendency to represent a painfully perceived ... defect as ... '"having been robbed" but also active and passive fantasies of mutilation ..., just as in the male castration complex. ... She wishes to rob the man, "to deprive him of what he possesses".' Of Marnie, Price asks: 'what is the story of the film but how the Tippi Hedren character robs a series of men?' Fair enough question, I'd say! (Frame-capture below shows the ironically decorous titles of Marnie that are, however, overlaid with suitably dramatic music by Bernard Herrmann.)

January 22nd 2022 - Hitchcock appears to have made the second of his two wartime films with the Moliere Players - a French company of actors who had fled occupied France and ended up in England - in order to show the French people that those who remained steadfast to the Allies had full Allied support. It was called Aventure Malgache/Madagascan Adventure (1944), and was commissioned by the British Ministry of Information, but there is no certainty that it received even limited distribution until 1993, when it and Bon Voyage (see last time) were restored by the British Film Institute. The island of Madagascar, off the African coast, served Hitchcock like a microcosm to demonstrate the conflict of loyalties that had torn France when it officially switched allegiance to Philippe Pétain and his Vichy (occupation) government. The two principal characters in Aventure Malgache are 'Michel', wartime Chief of Police in Madagascar, and 'Clarus' (my DVD spells it 'Clarousse'), who sides with the French Resistance. They are essentially baddie and goodie, respectively. The writer of both of Hitch's wartime shorts was Angus MacPhail, who would rejoin him in Hollywood the following year to adapt Spellbound, and would work with him later on The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and The Wrong Man (1957). Aventure Malgache opens in an actors' dressing room, essentially that of the Moliere Players, and we hear one of them complain that he can't get the hang of his latest role, that of a baddie. Another actor offers to tell him about Michel, whom he had known in Madagascar. A long flashback follows, punctuated by occasional returns to the dressing room. This is a very dense film running all of 30 minutes, and not wholly successful as to narrative quality. I'm still uncertain whether I have absorbed all of its content! Normally, Hitchcock's self-described 'hefty' plots run smooothly, with a mounting excitement as the final climax approaches. This is not to say that Aventure Malgache doesn't have its moments of humour. The flashback begins with a courtroom scene in which the lawyers for Michel and Clarus trade insults, and have to be cautioned by the principal judge. Later, after we hear Clarus call Michel a hypocrite to his face, Michel explodes and spits a cloud of rum back at Clarus. Clearly, Michel's plan to placate him with a tot of rum hasn't worked! Being on the side of the Resistance, Clarus doesn't have an easy ride when he does his best to cope with the divided loyalties around him. Even his own lawyer holds to a conservative, Vichy line. After he leaves the room, Clarus calls after him (but not so he hears), 'Bastard! Stool pigeon! Filthy spy!' We are, of course, on Clarus's side. Michel's total inability to hold to a steadfast line himself, reminding us that he is something of a coward, is epitomised when, late in the film, we learn that the English have taken Madagascar. (Meanwhile, Clarus has been thrown into prison, and it is he who, from the vantage-point of a high-up cell window, describes to another prisoner the arrival of the English.) We see Michel hide a portrait of a notorious minister in the Vichy government that had been hanging on his wall (see frame-capture below); next, he stows away the bottle of Vichy water that had been on his desk; finally, he replaces the minister's picture with a large one of ... Queen Victoria! However, we learn that the English weren't taken in - Michel is himself arrested. And so the flashback ends. Back in the actors' dressing room, we hear the call for 'Actors onstage for Act I!' No doubt the actor who was troubled about finding his role will now be on top of it! [Thanks to Alain Kerzoncuf and Douglas Fear for a couple of corrections this time.]

January 15th 2022 - Hitchcock showed himself a master of making wartime propaganda films as early as 1940 with Foreign Correspondent, seemingly designed to inform Americans about the situation in England and to persuade them to enter the War on the side of the Allies as soon as possible (which of course eventually happened at the end of the following year after the attack on Pearl Harbour). Four years later, between the making of Lifeboat and Spellbound, he was again called upon to make propaganda, this time by the British Ministry of Information who wanted to distribute morale-boosting short films in France where the Nazis were now on the run. The two Hitchcock shorts that resulted - Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache (or Madagascan Adventure) - weren't your typical Hitchcock films perhaps, but they remain full of interest. (In the 1990s, they finally received a public airing which they hadn't had for over thirty years, if ever. Bon Voyage may have received limited distribution in France immediately after the War, but Aventure Malgache was held back, then shelved. Soon afterwards, Bon Voyage joined it there, and both were effectively forgotten.) In the next two "Editor's Day" items, I want to look briefly at both films, starting this time with Bon Voyage. Incidentally, both shorts are available on a single DVD from at least one source. The idea of Bon Voyage is simple: two prisoners escape from a German POW camp in Poland and then elude the Gestapo, eventually arriving in London. Because the two prisoners had needed to split up, after travelling some of the distance together, the climax of the film is about the interrogation of one of them, John Dougall, a Scot, in London by a French officer with a British officer listening in. See frame-capture below. The outcome is a surprise ending anticipating those of Hitchcock's TV shows a decade later. (Note: Bon Voyage is about 25 minutes long.) We now get a re-telling of what we had seen before, but now the tone becomes quite different. The French officer, clearly experienced in intelligence matters, tells Dougall that he has been duped by his companion, a Pole named Stefan Godowski, who is really a Gestapo employee whose assignment was to obtain information about the French Resistance. Hearing this, the naive and guileless John is stunned, but is finally convinced, and learns that Stefan has confessed (and, it's implied, promply executed). This may well be the first time that Hitchcock had used the plot device of telling a story twice but from an altered perspective. Spellbound will make brief use of the device at its climax when we learn the truth about Dr Murchison (Leo G. Carroll); later the device will figure strongly in the plotting of Vertigo. There are other foreshadowings of Hitchcock films. At one moment, Stefan suddenly shoots the Resistance member, Jeanne, the lovely daughter of a farmer: the shooting comes as an unexpected shock, not least because it is done with the camera on Jeanne's face, which suddenly jerks back as the shot is fired: note, we had not known that Stefan had taken out his pistol. There are shades here of the shooting of Juanita de Cordoba in Topaz. Stefan is a totally ruthless figure. He even shoots to death a fellow member of the Gestapo to convince the Resistance, who are watching nearby, that he isn't a Gestapo member himself. Hitchcock surely had this incident in mind when, in North by Northwest, Leonard (Martin Landau) stuns his boss Van Damm (James Mason) by shooting him with blanks, just as the Americans had done earlier to remove suspicion from their own agent, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), 'operating right under Van Damm's very nose'. As Leonard explains, 'It's an old Gestapo trick!' Do try and catch Bon Voyage. It's artfully photographed using a dark, shadowy mise-en-scène employing sudden pools of light, even in the cellar where John and Stefan hide at one point. (The film's music track, however, seems too lightweight, although it doesn't get in the way, at least.) And already Hitchcock himself could be brutal. When John is told by the two officers that Jeanne is dead, he admits that he had hoped to return to see her after the War. The French officer puts a steadying hand on John's shoulder.

January 8th 2022 - Topaz sprawls but at the same time is very tight - so much is packed into it. Another of Hitchcock's 'hefty plots'! If I were to suggest a principal motif, I might call it 'signs of human weakness'. Practically everyone in Topaz proves fallible, flawed, sometimes physically. For example, the French traitor, André Jarré (Philippe Noiret) walks with callipers. Also, it is Jarré who blurts out at a dinner arranged by French agent Andre Devereaux (Frederick Stafford - see image below), who works for the Americans, that the Russian Boris Kusenev (Per-Axel Arrosenius) is dead - but does so only out of unthinking panic, hoping to blunt further inquiries by Devereaux. He feels Devereaux is getting too close to the truth, namely, that there is a Russian spy ring - called 'Topaz' - active in high places of the French government, and that Jarré is one of them. But Jarré isn't the principal Russian spy. That will prove to be Jacques Granville (Michel Piccoli), who is thoroughly ruthless and arranges for Jarré's murder, made to look like suicide. (This, he thinks, might stop the Americans from investigating further, because they'll believe that they have got their man.) See what I mean by a 'hefty' (complicated) plot?! And there is much more. Another weak character is the secretary, Luis Uribé (Don Randolph), to the Cuban official Rico Parra (John Vernon). As somebody says of Uribé, 'He can be used'. Rico Parra, as noted last time, is one of the few strong characters. Even Hitchcock, in his cameo, is seen in a wheelchair - although the moment is ambiguous because unexpectedly Hitch steps out of the wheelchair and walks away! (He is effectively saying, perhaps, 'I'm not one of the weak ones!') Also strong in his own way is the ruthless Jacques Granville, who - in one of the film's three endings - escapes the Americans' retribution by finally simply being too smart for them. In that ending, we see two planes at Paris Airport about to depart for their respective destinations. Boarding one of them are Devereaux and his reconciled wife Nicole (Dany Robin), returning to America. And nearby, boarding another plane - this one about to head for the Soviet Union - is Jacques Granville, going scot-free of both treason and murder! Nicole asks her husband, 'How does he get away with it?' Devereaux replies, 'He doesn't miss a trick!' Apparently nothing conclusive could be pinned on Granville, who has always been careful to delegate his dirty work to others. (A sign of strength?!) Another form of strength is shown right at the start, behind the credits, as we see an extensive miltary march through the streets of Moscow, designed to impress onlookers with Russia's military might - and to tell Hitchcock's audience that strength versus weakness is a key motif of the film. Another street scene shortly afterwards, this time in Copenhagen, Denmark, shows a cripple with his crutches - scarcely an unintended nuance by Hitchcock, you feel. For all of its own ruthlessness (and occasional weakness, such as an annoying emphasis on gadgetry in one or two scenes - this, several years after the early James Bond films), the film has many elegances. Many of the characters move in privileged circles, such as embassies, expensive hotels, mansions (such as that of Juanita de Cordoba - Karin Dor - in Cuba: as 'the widow of a hero of the Revolution', she is allowed her privilege, even in Castro's Cuba). And Hitchcock repeatedly includes flowers and fountains in his mise-en-scène, for good measure. At other moments he teases, or titillates, us: for example, with an almost subliminal shot of a woman dressed in green - although we see only a glimpse of her bosom - in the Hotel Theresa where the Cuban United Nations delegates stay when in New York. We may momentarily wonder if she is the wife, or more likely, the mistress, of one of the many Cuban males who make up the delegation!

January 1st 2022 - As so often, Robin Wood's estimation of a film - in this case, Hitchcock's Topaz (1969) - may be the most accurate. Wood wrote: 'Topaz must surely be one of the most uneven films in the history of the cinema, in which something approaching Hitchcock's best rubs shoulders with its very worst.' I find Topaz at times fussy and over-wrought; equally, it is consistently making points - essentially about 'betrayal' by both nations and individuals - suggesting something rather like Hamlet's observation, 'There is nothing either good or bad,/ But thinking makes it so.' (Each character thinks that he/she is in the right.) It would be different in an ideal world, but that's not what is on show in Topaz! The film is full of flowers, and Cuba is depicted as something like a corrupted Eden, a Lost Paradise if you will. In the frame-capture below, we see American agent Michael Nordstrom (John Forsythe) welcoming French spy André Devereaux (Frederick Stafford), and his family, to New York. Nordstrom is hoping that Deveraux will be able, by visiting Cuba, to find proof that the Russians are installing rocket bases there, capable of firing offensive projectiles onto the American mainland. (Americans are not welcome in Cuba following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but the Cuban government has no brief against the French.) Cuba itself is depicted symbolically as one more Lost Paradise; an island, or a closed garden, are two traditional Lost Paradise symbols. John Chapmam, author of the 2018 book 'Hitchcock and the Spy Film', may have a point: 'The only major character who cannot be accused of betrayal in one form or another is the principal villain: [Cuban] Rico Para'. (p. 278) Para is a Fidel Castro look-alike and a man of integrity. However, even he is forced to wilfully shoot his mistress when he realises that a far worse fate - torture at the hands of Cuban political thugs - will follow her own betrayal of what she knows of Cuban inside-secrets, concerning the Russian missile bases, to Devereaux, her other lover, i.e., she is mistress simultaneously to two men. The death of the mistress, Juanita de Cordoba (Karin Dor), is the single most memorable scene in Topaz. Shot from a high angle, it shows Juanita's purple dress (the colour of royalty, but also of blood) spreading out around her as she sinks to the floor. (Note: she has been allowed to keep her mansion as it was a gift of the Cuban government to her late husband, 'a hero of the Revolution' which had brought Castro to power.) The spreading purple dress suggests both the opening of a flower and a spreading bloodstain. And, clearly, Juanita has 'betrayed' both her husband and Castro's government. We further learn that she has hidden supposedly vital strips of microfilm in her gift of a diary to Devereaux, so undetectably that the Cuban Customs don't find them when Devereaux leaves the country. But there is another irony. Nordstrom will tell Devereaux: 'What you have obtained confirms our information from other sources', i.e., the resulting loss of life (including the lives of two of Juanita's loyal servants) wasn't necessary. According to John Chapman: 'In reality it was aerial reconnaissance by high-altitude U2 spy planes rather than field intelligence that provided evidence of Soviet missiles in Cuba.' (p. 277) So that is some background on Topaz; I'll say more about the film next time.