Rebecca

The sensual gothic daydream of Rebecca has always fit oddly alongside Alfred Hitchcock's other works. The director resented producer David O. Selznick's heavy hand and expressed mixed feelings towards the end result—"Well, it's not a Hitchcock picture," he told Truffaut—but who can resist this intoxicating blend of Jane Eyre and Bluebeard, spiced with a dash of Alice in Wonderland? (Is it just me or do the doorknobs get higher as the film progresses?) Our heroine, played by Joan Fontaine, is a gawky young woman so unformed that she lacks even a name. We know her only as the first-person singular in the film's opening narration, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Without prospects or family, she is an eager bride to Maxim de Winter, a broody old-money type sulking his way across the French Riviera with the ghost of his dead wife. The young woman becomes the second Mrs. de Winter and moves into the extravagant Manderley estate, where the dead wife's initial is branded upon everything in sight. Impostor syndrome seems the only possible outcome in a place where you can't even blow your own nose without being handed your predecessor's monogrammed handkerchief. The unseen Rebecca looms large as an impossible standard of femininity—breeding, brains, and beauty, Maxim glumly notes—that the younger woman can never possibly match.

From this sinister fairy tale of a young woman's coming of age we shift to plodding procedural in the film's later moments. To satisfy the production code, the filmmakers contort the plot in sometimes baffling ways—I never knew one person could die by murder, suicide, and natural causes simultaneously—but ghosts are harder to appease than Will Hays. The second Mrs. de Winter loathes her predecessor but also feels the seductive pull of that personality, with its promise of beauty, glamour, and a secure place in the world. The narrator is all but drowning in the luxury of Manderley—she clings to the walls as if the polished floors could swallow her whole—and Rebecca torments her like a distant shore. Introduced to viewers as a dream, the entire film can be seen as a young woman's overwrought fantasy of married life, poised somewhere between excitement and dread. "We're happy, aren't we? Terribly happy!" she pleads with her husband, and neither looks terribly convinced of the sentiment. Instead, they watch film footage of their honeymoon and tell each other that images of married bliss can stand in for the real thing, while the narrator looks back on this sad moment from an indeterminate present, chasing a fleeting happiness through these layers of fantasy and memory. Manderley is gone, all traces of Rebecca consumed by fire, and still the place holds the narrator in its thrall. Perhaps birds sometimes dream of their gilded cages too.

Rope

Eight years of faithful service to Hollywood apparently drove Alfred Hitchcock to the experimentation of Rope, his first self-produced feature. Drawn from the Leopold and Loeb case, the film’s plot is very much Hitchcock in black comic mode: two bright young men murder a college chum, stash the corpse in a trunk and then invite the dead man’s friends and family over for fine dining and innuendo (every second line of dialogue is laden with morbid double entendres). But the stylistic conceit—the entire film consists of 10 shots stitched together to look like one long take—marks it as a key inflection point in the director’s career. Rope would serve as a corrective to the disappointing commercial and critical failure of The Paradine Case, much like how the low-budget experimentation of Psycho years later was partly spurred by the unfortunate reception of Vertigo. Even if it doesn’t qualify as major Hitchcock, the film remains a tribute to his willful perversity and restless creativity.

John Dall and Farley Granger work reasonably well as the ambiguously gay duo—the ultra-smarmy Dall is particularly fine in his role as an arrogant young killer—but Jimmy Stewart would do better work for Hitchcock than his performance here as Rupert, a rather unlikely fount of Nietzschean wisdom. When Stewart speaks of offing people to get better tickets for the theatre, his winking manner turns the entire speech into a tongue-in-cheek provocation from someone’s eccentric uncle. Confronted by the persuasive power of this philosophy, he renounces his ideas with almost inexplicable vehemence. Who knew he actually believed this stuff all along? I assumed he was just making conversation. The bemused tone Stewart brings to the film is at odds with the darker undercurrents of the story, where murder becomes a sublimated sexual act for the repressed killers. After strangling their victim, the pair slump into a post-coital haze, with Dall smoking languidly as Granger whimpers, “Can we just stay like this for a while?” I guess he wants to cuddle?

Stoker

Someone must have been pissing in the DNA samples, because something has gone horribly wrong with this Shadow of a Doubt clone. If Stoker is supposed to evoke the Hitchcock classic, then it does so only as a Frankenstein-style re-creation, built out of spart parts left over from South Korean horror films and The Paperboy. Regardless, there are now two sociopathic Uncle Charlies stalking the corridors of cinematic history, and we must contend with Park Chan-Wook’s contribution to this proud tradition of avuncular terror. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare Hitchcock and Park—making his North American feature debut here—but the contrast is illuminating. Shadow of a Doubt pours acids on the idylls of middle America; Stoker looks at the scarred remains and suggests everything is precisely as fucked up as it seems. Park et al. have arrived to point out that damaged loners and isolated eccentrics are kind of nutty, which is as dramatically satisfying as declaring a spade is a spade. The gulf between the two films is written in the faces of the men who play Uncle Charlie. When Joseph Cotten’s gentleman-killer smiles, he looks like he’s going to offer you a drink. When Matthew Goode smiles, he looks like he’s going to brain you with a rock.

Despite a few elegant visual touches here or there, Stoker only occasionally rises to the heights of coherence, while its stately pace and artful splatter veers ever closer to camp with each twist of the plot. For such grisly sex-and-murder mayhem, the film is surprisingly bloodless. The fault lies partly with Park’s smothering style and partly with the performances. Goode, as mentioned, is little more than a smirk in a sweater, while Mia Wasikowska (as India, Charlie’s equally deranged niece) is reduced to petulant sulking for much of the film. As for Nicole Kidman: future scholars will write of this film when discussing her camp-vamp phase, so I will defer to their expertise. However, what could any performer do with this ripe nonsense? Self-realization in the film is intimately twined with sex and violence, which amounts to masturbating in the shower after your uncle has killed your would-be rapist—with your father’s belt, I should note (wouldn’t want to lose any of the psychosexual nuances, after all). The film pushes so many buttons at once it smashes the remote. Even when the film gets it right, it gets it wrong. Yes, children do often reflect the madness of their families, but that doesn’t typically apply to distant relations you don’t even know exist. Or is strangling people with a leather belt some sort of hereditary condition now?

Hitchcock

Fame is often the cruelest fate inflicted upon an artist, as Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock so aptly, if unwittingly, proves. This film may very well represent a turning point in the history of Alfred Hitchcock in popular culture, when knowledge of the director’s personality outstrips knowledge of the director’s films. Note the moment in the film when Hitchcock disdainfully remarks upon “that television show,” lamenting how it has cheapened him. So why would Gervasi use the familiar theme to Alfred Hitchcock Presents and even frame the story—about the marital tensions between Hitchcock and wife Alma Reville during the filming of Psycho—much like an episode of the series? Because that’s what the public will recognize, of course. Hitchcock has become an oversized personality that an actor can slip into as readily as the fat suit Anthony Hopkins dons for the part. By equating the man’s public persona to his private life, the film makes a muddle of itself, while Gervasi’s flat-footed style is a poor substitute for his subject’s graceful orchestration of images. With so little insight into the primal, unsettling Psycho on display, all the film can offer is the faint voyeuristic thrill of gossiping about dead people. The stale odour of ossified art that so distinctly emanates from the screen is more noxious than anything out of the basement of the Bates home.

Champagne

Alfred Hitchcock once described Champagne as the lowest ebb in his career, and that may well be the chief distinction of this thoroughly lackluster 1928 effort from the director. There’s certainly little else to distinguish this shapeless, rambling romantic comedy. Following a spoiled heiress from riches to rags to riches again, the film is at once spry and exhausted, a madcap farce on barbiturates. The girl—a veritable font of teeming womanhood—finds herself caught in a love triangle with two men, who apparently do little other than smoke and drink fiercely while glaring at each other. (They would have made a lovely couple were it not for the dame.) This jet-set romance is interrupted when mega-rich daddy tells her he’s broke, and suddenly her world of cocktails and snappy gowns goes up in a puff of smoke. In a plot twist that recalls the earlier Downhill, she winds up working in young Alfred’s favored den of iniquity, a Parisian dance hall.

Surely this is the most superficial rendition of the eternal Hitchcock plot: a woman reduced to living doll for the edification of a neurotic, controlling man. You see, daddy was faking bankruptcy all along just to help his daughter learn a bit of responsibility and scare away any gold-digging gigolos scoping her inheritance. Rather delightfully, this is revealed when the girl’s father hands her a newspaper where the front-page headline reads, “Daring daughter to be taught lesson she’ll never forget, millionaire declares”—the film is a lovely paean to the diligence of the daily press, if nothing else. Yet there’s something creepy about the whole screwy setup, with father fabricating her entire world just to teach a few life lessons about love and money. Down and out, she learns her only option is to pursue her own objectification—no more of this unseemly independence that so bothered father. She settles for the wholesome career of toothpaste model, but the agency prefers her legs to her smile. Soon she’s in the dance hall, handing out flowers and looking for a new sugar daddy to rescue her from the awful place. The only lesson she learns is her own market value.

The Farmer's Wife

The Farmer’s Wife, a 1928 silent from Alfred Hitchcock, is an almost terminally quaint romantic comedy about a pompous jackass who learns the only woman who could ever love him is a salaried employee. Or is that too harsh a description for a film that strains so desperately to be merely innocuous? It all starts innocently enough, when a widowed farmer goes into mid-life crisis mode and begins propositioning the local bachelorettes willy-nilly before eventually settling for his long-suffering, remarkably patient maid. At times, the humour is surprisingly raw—a fact not helped by its general lameness—giving the film’s ambling, pastoral pacing an occasional jolt of crass energy. “You know, her back view’s not a day over thirty,” muses the farmer of one prospective bride, in what amounts to fairly representative dialogue. Later, he insults another potential mate’s millinery with such force she collapses into a hysterical fit. Understandably, the man has good reason to believe he will die unloved and alone.

I remain confident in my belief that even lousy Hitchcock has its charms, and The Farmer’s Wife is surely not without its merits. Shackled to a weak script—based on a stage play, as is common with so many of his weakest early efforts—Hitchcock adds a bit of life to the proceedings by setting his camera loose to nestle in strange corners. The director pokes and prods this little world to life through sheer cinematic brio, if nothing else. Too bad his efforts are saddled to so much plodding slapstick and all of these dull, emotionally stunted characters. At every rejection, the farmer descends into a rage that turns him into a kind of human blowfish, his cheeks puffing up as if he were allergic to the word, “No.” Worse yet is his manservant, the improbably named Churdles Ash, who offers wincingly broad comic support. Groaning and grimacing, he lurches stiffly through each scene on a desperate hunt for the slightest sip of liquor to ease his unending torment through a waking hell of servitude and humiliation. Ha?

The Ring

People looking for insight into the mind of Alfred Hitchcock might well turn to The Ring, a 1927 boxing film that sports a rare solo writing credit from the director (although his wife, Alma Reville, also had a hand in it). Imagine their surprise when they discover the film is, at first blush, little more than an anti-climactic melodrama, largely devoid of suspense or the darker passions that course through his strongest work. Talk of circles and rings aside, the film actually offers little more than a quaint triangle. A promising boxer dubbed One-round Jack comes under the wing of heavyweight champ Bob Corby, who flirts with the youngster’s wife in-between sparring rounds. The girl, not even afforded the distinction of a name, is bandied about as a prize between the two men—a fact so explicit that the film even assigns her a monetary value (she’s worth more than two quid, at least).

The tension between the two men is played as pissing match, complete with all the expected warning signs of machismo run rampant. The most obvious is the armband Bob gifts to the girl, who hides it from her husband-to-be in embarrassment (the wedding ring Jack gives her is notably dwarfed by the shiny bauble). Every scene unfolds at an unhurried pace, but the confidence of the film—particularly after the muddled, self-conscious efforts of Easy Virtue and Downhill—is striking. The outcome of the final fight is never in doubt (love rallies for the knockout in the fourth round), but the sequence itself is a perfect showpiece for Hitchcock’s talent. He skillfully cuts between the two small figures in long shot, framed in a patch of light amid the darkened rabble, and the disorienting close-ups of the two bodies slamming against each other. It’s visceral and yet poetic without ever feeling precious. Here, at last, is Hitchcock moving beyond merely throwing style at the screen to see what sticks. He’s in full command of his abilities, a prizefighter that knows how to pick his shots.

That confident mastery of the material invests the slight scenario with surprising nuance. While the film at time seems blandly obvious and even anti-dramatic, Hitchcock approaches it with a detached, quizzical attitude. It ceases to be an old-fashioned love triangle and becomes instead a more tricky study of paranoia. Significantly, Jack never really sees any sign of infidelity, only the flirty familiarity between his wife and his mentor. Out of doubt springs despair, and the affable Jack devolves into a sullen primitive, sometimes listless and other times snarling with so much rage he can knock over photographs at ten paces with a single glare. Yet the film is filled with faulty vision, calling into doubt everything we see. Key events are hidden behind crowds, while point of view shots are typically blurred, either punch drunk or liquor addled. Little actually happens in the film, and the crowd brays for more blood; the performers oblige for their (and our) benefit. Optimists might say the film ends with the girl renouncing her fickle love for whoever’s on top, learning empathy by admitting her love for Jack when he is at his lowest point. The more cynical might say that it doesn’t matter who wins or loses—all the audience wants is a fight.

Easy Virtue

Released in 1928, Easy Virtue finds the young Alfred Hitchcock still casting about wildly, fishing for his subject matter and landing himself a bit of a stiff. The film is adapted from the Noel Coward play about Larita, a high-society woman who divorces her abusive, drunken husband yet finds that she is the one to be tainted by scandal and infamy. All the elements necessary for a righteous assault on small-minded bourgeois hypocrisy are readily evident here, but the results are strictly lightweight. Lacking comic edge or tragic gravity, Hitchcock’s tone is too mellow to even qualify as melodrama. It’s The House of Mirth reduced to a lukewarm potboiler.

There are at least some glimmers of skill from the director, for whatever that’s worth. The opening courtroom sequence interweaves flashbacks with great brio (young master Alfie appears to have discovered the match cut, and likes his new toy very much). A later scene involving two lovers chatting over a phone conveys the substance of their conversation entirely through the changing expressions on the face of an eavesdropping operator—a lovely conceit native to silent film, and a sweetly innocent expression of the voyeuristic tendencies that crop up throughout Hitchcock’s work (well, Norman Bates was sweetly innocent in his own way, too). Notably, these stronger moments rely little on the weak central cast, most particularly Isabel Jeans as Larita, who lacks the substance to ground the film in real human pain. Instead, she bounces between insouciant defiance and weary resignation, sometimes the provocateur and other times the victim. A story like this lives or dies by its central character, and Hitchcock unsurprisingly detaches himself from the results, amusing himself with the finer points of craft while biding his time for a stronger cast and script.

Downhill

Alfred Hitchcock followed his success with the The Lodger with Downhill, an aptly titled retrograde effort. Much of the credit—or blame, perhaps—belongs to Ivor Novello, who wrote the script and stars as a somewhat bewildered, prudish playboy. An all-star rugby player at a boarding school, the jaunty young Novello proves irresistibly attractive to women, including the sinister sexpot who lures him to “Ye Olde Bunne Shoppe” in the hopes of seducing him (ye olde bunne in the ovenne). She fails and settles for his chum, but puts the blame on Novello anyway in the hopes of tapping his family wealth. From there, his life—apparently as sturdy as the hideous cardboard sets where most of the action takes place—collapses in mild chaos, light depravity, and slight madness.

Hitchcock has never really been what you might call a feminist director, but he could still muster some strong, intelligent female characters throughout his career. Unfortunately, the sex-panicked script lays the blame for Novello’s fall at the feet of a series of shrill, callous gold-diggers and floozies, with rock bottom being a hairy-lipped lady in a dingy Parisian dance hall. If there is any reason to watch this film—and really, there probably isn’t—it would be for Hitchcock’s technique, which betrays an intelligence far livelier than the surroundings. Some elegant lighting, a few judicious tracking shots, and even some point-of-view perspective shooting add to the visual interest of the film, but do little to enrich the material. Mostly, these touches serve as an occasionally pleasant distraction from the finger-wagging, tongue-clucking moralizing of the dreary script.

The Lodger

Made during the tail end of the silent era in 1927, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger lays out the director’s concerns with all the clarity of a street lamp piercing the London fog. The barebones plot is primal Hitchcock—a serial killer is prowling the London streets for fair-haired victims, while the titular lodger takes the rap, due to an outrageous series of coincidences (and, it must be acknowledged, his own general air of creepiness). Many of the familiar obsessions are already fully evident here: dim-witted cops, blondes in peril, and the prototype for dozens of unjustly accused and needlessly pursued Hitchcock protagonists, the original Wrong Man.

Yet the film’s greatest strength lies in its skewed love triangle, with the lodger and a policeman vying for affections of the landlord’s daughter Daisy. Sexual repression becomes interchangeable with police oppression, and the paranoid mistrust of the lodger is impossible to separate from everyone’s attempts to micromanage Daisy’s love life. Tellingly, the smarmy cop comes on to the girl by equating a wedding ring to a hangman’s noose, and then slaps a pair of handcuffs on her (smooth operator, he). Little wonder she prefers the lodger, who lustily kisses her golden locks and doesn’t make his love conditional upon a hanging. But in an icky twist that oddly recalls Vertigo, Daisy is revealed to be the spitting image of the lodger’s murdered sister, meaning she is essentially a recreation of his lost love (his, um, sister). Unlike Vertigo, there’s a happy ending, but only of the most sour and peculiar sort. Somehow, the murderer seems less perverse than our putative hero.

Under Capricorn

Under Capricorn has always had a tough time finding a place in Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre, not fitting in with the psychological thrillers or high-spirited adventures for which he is best known. Even Rope—his 1948 murder drama employing a comparable long-take style of filming—has been granted more attention as a “problem picture,” while most people prefer to politely overlook the supposed failure of Under Capricorn.

To be fair, Under Capricorn is actually an easy film to pass by based on description alone. A period romance set in 1830s Australia as directed by Alfred Hitchcock: was anyone clamoring for this? As subject matter, this is pretty suspect terrain for any director (19th century Australia hardly seems ripe for weepy dramas filled with flouncy dresses and embroidered hankies and all that), but for someone as acidic as Hitchcock a disastrous outcome seems a foregone conclusion.

But the lure of this film proved too much for me and I had to give in, regardless of the dubious concept and seemingly ill-conceived marriage of subject and director (but then again, ill-conceived marriages are Hitchcock’s normal terrain, aren’t they?). Luckily, the film can be downloaded from Archive.org’s mammoth collection of public domain films, and in a decent quality version no less (although you can watch it in streaming video at the bottom of this post, I recommend downloading the 1.3 gigabyte MP4 file, which is of a higher quality). No harm in trying something for free, right?

As I discovered, Under Capricorn is far better than its reputation would lead one to believe. Even if it doesn’t possess the queasy, obsessive power of something like Vertigo, the film is so masterfully conceived and executed that it stands with the best of Hitchcock’s work. The genteel tone of the film at first feels peculiar for a director so fond of the perverse and violent in human nature, but there is a powerful tale of poisoned passion buried within the restrained romantic anguish. The pitfalls of marriage are a running theme that reoccurs throughout Hitchcock’s films—sometimes as the main subject, and sometimes as a side gag, but almost always present in some form. Under Capricorn proves to be one of his definitive depictions of marital hell.

The film begins with Charles Adare (Michael Wilding), cousin to the newly appointed governor of the colony, landing in Australia in the hopes of making some sort of fortune for himself. Opportunity comes in the form of Sam Flusky (Joseph Cotten), a local landowner and man of wealth who approaches Adare with a business proposition. Flusky invites the newcomer to a dinner party at his mansion, and a rather tense evening ensues: the wives of all of the other guests are conspicuously absent, as is Lady Henrietta, Flusky’s own wife, until she suddenly appears, drunk and confused and in bare feet.

Having known Henrietta when he was a child, Adare is distressed by the current state of the woman: an alcoholic mess hiding from the world in Flusky’s mansion. Adare—with the consent of Flusky—begins the difficult process of restoring her self-confidence. And as the enthusiastic Adare brings Henrietta back to life, Flusky watches anxiously, at first with hope for his wife’s recovery and then with jealousy as he sees her grow closer to the charming young man.

However, the relationship between Flusky and his wife is more complicated than just another aging marriage on the rocks. Flusky is a former stable boy who eloped with the aristocratic Henrietta back in Ireland; he was convicted of murdering her brother and has spent the years since his release cultivating a life as a respectable, wealthy citizen. This is a marriage built on sudden passion and death, and the pair are linked in a complicity far stronger—albeit more painful—than anything Adare can offer to Henrietta. The couple remains dedicated to each other, and yet, under the burden of the past, they find themselves unable to love each other even as they acknowledge that they cannot live apart. The same love that nourishes poisons as well.

This sounds rather harrowing, but the cobbled-together colonial gentility of the film’s atmosphere forces restraint upon the extreme emotions running through the story. Hitchcock’s depiction of these characters is carefully observed and humane as he ruefully addresses their plight without condescension or moralizing. Telling the story primarily through a series of carefully constructed, elegant long takes, Hitchcock achieves something quite moving—even lyrical—out of the sex-death perversity that runs through so much of his work.

As I watched the film, I thought back to Rope quite often. Made in 1949, Under Capricorn is very much an extension of the methods employed in the earlier film, but with greater refinement and intelligence. Rope is largely a gimmick—a fun and often intriguing one, but a gimmick all the same. The conceit was to make a film in a single shot, even though less than 10 minutes of film could be contained on a single reel. In order to accommodate his desire to make the film at least appear that it was done in a single take, Hitchcock engaged in some elaborate staging tricks that allowed him to switch the film mid-scene unnoticed. Unfortunately, this required many awkward close-ups of people’s backs and other distracting attempts to blank out the image and allow for the reels to be changed. The technique constantly calls attention to itself and never really meshes with the material as a result. Rope is a marvel of staging and timing, but Hitchcock is too pre-occupied with playing games to pay much attention to the particulars of the story.

By contrast, Under Capricorn is a work of nuance and maturity. Hitchcock discards the vain conceit of the single-take film, but he retains the intricate staging and lengthy shots he had mastered in Rope, making the earlier film seem now like a warm-up for this more judicious and thoughtful follow-up. Instead of serving as a distracting, self-conscious experiment in style, the long takes of this film elegantly draw out the emotional tensions between the characters.

In one particularly fine scene, Charles is taking down a message from Henrietta to include in a letter to his sister Diana. Henrietta stands over him and dictates a letter that explains how much she appreciates everything Charles has done for her; the moment glows with warmth and mutual feeling. The camera drifts away from the pair and slowly pans over the empty room as Henrietta’s voice continues to speak softly, a lulling music for this serene image. The searching eye of the camera finally settles on Sam, back turned, walking away down the hall.

There’s a kind of suspense here, albeit not the type Hitchcock fans are typically accustomed to expecting of the master. The pan over the empty room builds up a sense of peace that is broken by the sight of Sam walking away, and that disruption in the mood creates a subtle yet ominous chill in the midst of this delicate moment. In a single visually eloquent shot, Hitchcock uses physical space and camera movement to convey Sam’s increasing emotional isolation.

The easiest dismissal of this film is that it is “talky,” an argument which might make sense when coming from a blind person, but which otherwise I have little patience for. Listen less and watch more. If the film seems too windy to you, then put it on mute, because you’re missing the point. The talk is purely illustrative. As is the case with many a great film, the dialogue elaborates the story without being absolutely essential to the telling. All of the real action in this film occurs on the visual level, and even if you never heard a word spoken, the basic emotional truth would still come through loud and clear.

The quiet elegance of the letter scene is typical of Under Capricorn, which prizes small gestures and glances and the expressive capabilities of staging and camera movement. The film cultivates a tone of ominous tranquility, which is perfect for relaying this tale of murderous, torrid passion entering the late stages of its decay. One could possibly mistake this entropy for a sort of peace—but only if you don’t look too closely.