alfred hitchcock

The Paradine Case (1947)

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The Paradine Case is often considered a lesser Alfred Hitchcock picture. The director himself practically disowned the completed product, which was heavily interfered with by producer (and screenwriter) David O. Selznick, who had produced Hitch’s first Hollywood film, Rebecca, and had Hitchcock under contract for the next seven years, which ended with the difficult production of this picture. It was also a financial failure, recouping only half of its budget. It’s mostly left out of the conversation of the director’s successes, but The Paradine Case, despite lacking some of the more exciting features of Hitchcock’s work, proves that even when the man was half-assing it (and fighting the execs), he could still make a damn fine feature. 

The film opens in London with the arrest of beautiful widow Maddalena Anna Paradine (Alida Valli, who would later appear as Miss Tanner in Suspiria) on suspicion of poisoning her husband, a wealthy, blind, retired colonel. The family lawyer, Sir Simon (Charles Coburn), enlists defense attorney Tony Keane (Gregory Peck in his second and final Hitchcock collaboration following Spellbound) to represent her in the Crown’s case against her. Sir Simon’s clever daughter Judy (Joan Tetzel) also happens to be best friends with Tony’s wife Gay (Ann Todd), but Simon insists that his selection of Keane has everything to do with providing the best counsel for Mrs. Paradine, although he admits that Keane has a tendency to lean more on playing to jurors’ sympathies than practicing purely legalistic law. With regards to Keane’s weakness, Sir Simon warns him that he won’t be able to pull off his normal emotional appeals if they happen to argue the case before Judge Thomas Horfield (Charles Laughton, who had previously appeared in the director’s Jamaica Inn and would later go on to direct Night of the Hunter). At a dinner at the Hortfields’, the judge reveals himself to be an utter cad, belittling his wife, the Lady Sophie (Ethel Barrymore), taunting Keane about his upcoming defense, and sexually harassing Gay when the others aren’t looking. 

Matters become complicated when Keane and Mrs. Paradine, despite the latter’s professed love for her late husband and the former’s heretofore happy marriage, find themselves drawn to one another romantically while working on her case. As rumors begin to spread, Gay’s concerns about her husband’s potential for infidelity bloom, and although Keane offers to give up the case, she can see that asking him to do so would only make the tension worse and so spurs him on to see the case through to its end and save Mrs. Paradine from conviction. Keane latches onto the idea of convincing the jury that Colonel Paradine took his own life and goes so far as to suggest that suspicion be diverted to the late colonel’s valet, a French-Canadian man named André Latour (Louis Jourdan), for assisting in said suicide, but Mrs. Paradine refuses to allow Keane to involve him. Convinced of his client’s innocence and desperate for something that might exonerate her, Keane goes to the Paradines’ country estate, where he learns that Latour is still in residence, and is somewhat shocked to find that the man’s room is on the same hallway as the separate suites of both the mistress and the late master of the house, rather than residing in the servants’ quarters. He attempts to make contact with Latour by posing as someone simply looking to rent the house, but Latour evades him, only to come to his inn later that night and tell him that Mrs. Paradine cannot be trusted. Keane refuses to believe this, and returns to London, where he goes to the prison to visit Mrs. Paradine before going home and checking in with his wife. 

The film is essentially bifurcated right down the middle between Keane’s playing detective and the trial of Mrs. Paradine, with the audience heading into the trial without a clear idea of whether or not the accused is guilty of killing her husband. Old Hitchcock stalwart Leo G. Carroll appears for his fourth of sixth collaborations with the director as prosecuting counsel Sir Joseph, and although he only appears in the back half, he leaves quite an impression, and the repartee between the somewhat showboaty Keane, his more staid counterpart on the other side of the courtroom, and Lord Horfield, who does end up presiding over the Paradine trial, is quite a lot of fun to watch. As secrets are revealed over the course of several days of trial, the whole thing unravels, and by the end, Keane is a broken man, uncertain about his future. 

I’m not sure why this didn’t connect with contemporary audiences. In his movie guide, Leonard Maltin wrote of the film that it was “talk, talk, talk in complicated, stagy courtroom drama,” and a more contemporary review from The Nation’s James Agee in 1948 called Paradine Case “the wordiest script since the death of [18th Century ‘father of conservatism’] Edmund Burke.” Courtroom dramas were nothing new at this point, so I’m not entirely certain what could be expected otherwise, and the cheeky dialogue between the three verbal combatants in the courtroom is often much more wickedly funny than either of the aforementioned critics gave it credit for. Like Sam Waterston, Gregory Peck is one of those actors who was born to play a lawyer, and this film was made at the height of his marketability as a star; he got his third Best Actor nomination for Gentleman’s Agreement the same year that The Paradine Case was released, although he wouldn’t win until his fifth nom, for To Kill a Mockingbird. He gets to play a wide range here, from the confident barrister who thinks he can win any case, to a man who’s guilty about the emotional affair he’s fallen into, to an infuriated defender of a woman’s besmirched honor, and finally a determined man driven to excessive rhetoric while trying to save a woman from being hanged. He’s doing excellent work, and it’s a shame that this performance has fallen through the cracks as the film’s overall reputation has remained middling. 

Outside of Peck, the film largely revolves around the performances of Todd, Valli, and Tetzel, who are likewise excellent. Todd manages to invest Gay, who is clearly the less exciting character of the two women between whom Keane finds himself torn, with a lot of pathos. Her standout scene is one in which she acknowledges to her husband that she isn’t happy with the way things are going, but that she would rather Mrs. Paradine get the best possible defense, which she knows Keane is best suited to provide, than let her be sentenced to death and ascend to the point of becoming Keane’s lost Lenore. As she says, it will be easier to fight a free woman for her husband than the woman’s unimpeachable ghost. Valli does great work playing both sides of Mrs. Paradine; she freely admits that her life before she met the colonel was one in which she supported herself by latching onto wealthy men, but that when she met Paradine, she decided she could “be his eyes.” She convinces Keane that her love for the late colonel was genuine, but Valli gives Mrs. Paradine just enough ambiguity to make us wonder if she’s more cold and calculating than she appears, especially after Latour delivers his warning to Keane. Overall, however, I was most taken with Joan Tetzel, whose Judy is, despite being very much a supporting character, connected to all of the events and serves the important purpose of explaining the implications of the various court proceedings to Gay, and thus to us. The relationship between Judy and her father, Sir Simon, was quite an endearing one, with several scenes in which it’s apparent that the old man is consternated by his daughter because she’s already as clever and observant as he is and will only become more so with time. She reaches the same conclusions that he does even as he professes something else entirely, and it’s fun to watch him become flustered that his daughter is just like him. Even as he pontificates that her behavior is unladylike, you can tell that he’s having the time of his life having raised a daughter that he can spar with. Ultimately, the duo serves as the stable, warm heart that helps anchor the film while Keane’s wandering affection affects everything else. 

As previously mentioned, this film is lacking some of Hitchcock’s trademark touches. The Paradine Case does not include any major spectacles or showdowns on or around exciting landmarks, unless one counts the trial itself and its location in an exact duplicate of a real courtroom in London’s Old Bailey. The set took nearly three months to complete and cost $80K (approximately a whopping $1.2M adjusted for inflation), and, since so many of the scenes filmed there would be shot at low angles, it included a ceiling. This no doubt was a technical and logistical nightmare, but even in these circumstances, Hitch was trying something new by running up to four cameras in different locations with each take, which (according to a now-dead link on the film’s Wikipedia page) served as trial runs for Rope and Under Capricorn. It’s not always effective. In many scenes in which Keane is speaking to the court, Sir Simon and another man are sitting in front of him, and it appears that they were superimposed into the shot, which is rather distracting. There are some other attempts at tricky camera work that don’t succeed, with the worst composition being the moment when Latour first enters the courtroom and the camera keeps Mrs. Paradine’s in center frame while it rotates to follow Latour’s entire walk around the cell in which she’s seated. As with Sir Simon, this is portrayed through superimposition of one image on the other, capturing a similar effect to a split diopter shot, but messier and uglier. 

That isn’t to say that there isn’t beautiful filmic storytelling or composition throughout. Although they’re as brief as they are pointless, we get several gorgeous shots of the English countryside when Keane visits the Paradine country home. Once he arrives, Latour’s face is kept in shadow for his entire introduction, and after that he is still seen only at a distance or otherwise unclearly for the entire time that Keane is present, fully revealing himself only when he confronts Keane at the latter’s inn. In that scene, the light fixture in the room, which features several dangling crystals like metaphorical swords waiting to fall, is always framed over Keane’s head. Several scenes find characters facing each other from one or the other side of a set of bars, whether they be the literal ones at the prison in which Mrs. Paradine is incarcerated or various room dividers or lattices. It’s not the most exciting camera work, but it rises far above being merely functional. 

One of the advantages that we have over the contemporary audience is that we have the director’s entire oeuvre to dissect and analyze while they did not. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the pushback at the time, in addition to a lack of confidence in the film from the general public as a result of behind-the-scenes squabbling, was that this is another one of Hitchcock’s forays into the psychosexual, pushing the envelope to see what he can get away with. Keane’s fascination with Mrs. Paradine seems to be at least somewhat stoked by her inaccessibility to him; they never have a moment of true privacy, as every meeting they hold to discuss her defense is in full view of a watchful guard. There’s some intersection of withholding and voyeurism there that deserves to be unpacked by someone who’s better versed in either of those prurient interests than I. When Keane goes to the country estate, he makes his way into Mrs. Paradine’s room, with the housekeeper apologizing for the mess, noting that she was in the process of packing the lady of the house’s things. Inside, Keane finds an intricately carved headboard with an inlaid portrait of the woman herself, and the soundtrack throws in a scare chord when the tracking shot that represents his perspective lands on an open case of her undergarments. Keane grows so uncomfortable that he has to move to a position where the portrait can’t see him. Following dinner at the Hortfields’, when the men in attendance emerge from the dining room after the requisite men’s only, cigar-smoking time, Lord Hortfield is so utterly overwhelmed by the sight of Gay’s bare shoulder that he immediately moves in to sit too close to her on the sofa and move her hand to his thigh under the pretense of admiring a piece of her jewelry. It almost feels like a set-up to have him be more antagonistic to Keane in the trial segment that is to come later, but it’s quickly glossed over instead and makes no reappearance as a plot driver in the second half. Maybe that plot thread was continued in the copious lost footage (the rough cut was three hours long, while the only extant version is 114 minutes), but there’s no way we can ever know. What we do know is that this film has a fair amount of grappling with one’s (and others’) raging sexuality that did make it to the final cut, and it might have been alienating to an audience that didn’t have decades of the director’s work to slot this into as a recurring creative fascination. All in all, however, I think a modern audience will find much more to enjoy here than the film’s reputation might imply. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lifeboat (1944)

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Author John Steinbeck composed four narrative screenplays in his career. One was a fictionalization of real events, two were adaptations of his own previous work (The Pearl and The Red Pony), but the first was drafted upon request from director Alfred Hitchcock himself. The resultant script became Lifeboat, which joins Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur as Hitch’s only wartime espionage thrillers (Sabotage, The 39 Steps, and The Lady Vanishes all involve international spycraft in the prelude to war, but do not explicitly name the Axis or any of its member nations as the antagonists, while Notorious follows a post-war sting on an escaped Nazi scientist). While Foreign Correspondent functioned as a call to arms and Saboteur is about refusing to give in to fascism on the home front, Lifeboat is a survival story about a group of castaways from a freighter that is sunk by a German U-boat and is more interested in the way that seemingly decent people can become bloodthirsty when faced with war, hunger, disease, and death. Steinbeck’s more commonly remembered body of work is mostly about people in the interbellum period dealing with the fallout of the Great Depression. When most people think of him, they remember reading The Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men (or both) in high school, while fewer people are likely to recall Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, or The Moon is Down. (The last of these is, like Lifeboat, an anti-fascist text, about a rebellion against Nazi occupation; if you read it for your book club, it would pair well with a screening of Went the Day Well?) How does Lifeboat compare? 

Lifeboat opens by skipping to the concluding moments of one of Hitchcock’s trademark action setpiece spectacles, as the burning smokestack of a freighter sinks beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. The camera pans across detritus in the water—a deck of cards, a crate of bobbing apples from the American Red Cross, a chess board, a New Yorker with a Eustace Tilley cover—before we land on our lead, a reporter named Constance Porter (Tallulah Bankhead). She’s sitting pretty in a lifeboat with a smashed-up sail, untarnished in her mink coat, seemingly only bothered by a run in her stocking. When she sees another survivor, she immediately takes his picture, concerned only with capturing the moment for her inevitable front-page story. He makes it to the lifeboat and introduces himself as John Kovac (John Hodiak, Maisie’s sweetheart in Maisie Goes to Reno, which released the same year), one of the crewmen on the now-destroyed ship. One by one, they collect several other survivors: Gus Smith (William Bendix), whose leg was badly injured when the engine room exploded; Stanley Garrett (Hume Cronyn), the ship’s British radioman, C.J. Rittenhouse (Henry Hull), a wealthy American industrialist; an Army nurse named Alice MacKenzie (Mary Anderson); and Joe Spencer (Canada Lee, playing the largest role that any Black actor ever got in a Hitchcock picture), a steward. They discuss amongst themselves the war crime that was committed against them, as the German U-boat that sank their vessel also intentionally targeted and shelled many of the other lifeboats, just before they pull in one more survivor (Walter Slezak), who thanks them with a simple, straightforward “Danke schön.” 

This is the first of Hitchcock’s “limited setting” triptych, to be later followed by Rope and Rear Window, and is just as much of a technical achievement as either of his later career efforts. It’s certainly both paradoxically the most confined and the most open, as everything happens on the title craft itself, but also takes place in the biggest, emptiest space imaginable: the open ocean. The desperation of their situation hits early. When it’s just Constance and Kovac at the very start, a baby bottle floats by in the water and Constance immediately moves to take a picture of it, to capture the pathos of the moment, and Kovac calls her out on her macabre callousness, asking if she wouldn’t rather wait for the baby to float by so she photograph that instead. It’s only a matter of time before they rescue a woman and the infant she’s clutching to her, which didn’t survive. It’s grim, dark stuff, and isn’t shy about the hideous nature of war. The vessel itself is a microcosm, containing a couple of working class shipmen, a war nurse, an industrialist, and a steward, one who’s surprised to get a vote in what to do about the German soldier who’s technically their prisoner of war, despite the fact that they’re all trapped together and struggling to survive while waiting for rescue. 

At the time, the film was criticized for being insufficiently critical of the Nazi regime, embodied in Willi, the man they rescue who eventually manages to commandeer the lifeboat, especially with regards to the fact that he retains his physical strength longer than the other characters (which is because he’s been hoarding his own provisions). Other pieces I’ve read take the film’s final moments, in which the survivors unanimously agree that all Germans have to be wiped out, as a strong finale that overcomes the film’s apparent “soft” treatment of Willi. I was a bit surprised by this, since I found the film to be utterly condemnatory of both Willi (as a person and a representation of Nazis as a whole) and also of the radicalization that the characters feel in the end, becoming as filled with hate as their enemy. When I first started to compose this review, one of the notes I made was that the film tackles the alien and inhuman nature of the Nazi mind, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was more important to acknowledge that the evils of fascism aren’t alien, they’re very, very human. The enemy in this film, of which Willi becomes the face, is monstrously evil, but not dependably so; they target civilian vessels and even shell the lifeboats as they depart in violation of international law, they lie to protect themselves while stealing shared resources to maintain their strength while others suffer, and they kill those they perceive as weaker than themselves as a matter of course. 

Yet, while Willi is responsible for all of those things, in whole or in part, he also makes an attempt to save Gus’s life by performing the operation to amputate the man’s leg before his gangrene can spread. He also possesses his own warped sense of honor, demanding that Gus remember that his name is not the Anglicized Smith that he changed it to because of anti-German sentiment but Schmidt, a name to take pride in … moments before he pushes the amputee overboard while the others sleep. His occasional demonstrations of apparent compromise and conciliation are all part of the greater act that he’s putting on, and he has a sociopathic sense of righteousness in his nationalistic pride. Even though he ends up dead before the credits roll, any catharsis we might get from it is undermined by the fact that the characters we’ve spent all this time getting to know are capable of being reduced to the same animalistic cruelty as their enemies. My interpretation of this text is that it’s a warning not to become the thing one hates, and not the uplifting ending that others have found it to be. We must not be cruel, must not let the barbaric things our enemies enact upon us cause us to become them. It might be easier to denounce the mind of the fascist as alien to distance ourselves from it, but we may all be a few missed meals and a lack of fresh water away from violence, we just don’t think that we are because we’ve never been stranded on the ocean. 

Lifeboat is very strong. As the master of suspense’s final WWII era feature, it fits in nicely with Foreign Correspondent, a piece that demands the world not look away while fascism swallows Europe, and Saboteur, which serves to remind that fascism at home supports evil elsewhere that will come home to roost eventually. Lifeboat is the story where we get to spend the most time with the face of evil, to look deep into it and see that it looks like us. Truly excellent stuff. Bankhead is an absolute marvel here in her first return to film acting in over a decade, and her casting is pitch perfect. This one isn’t readily streaming anywhere outside of Amazon, but wait around a while and it’ll pop up on Tubi, TCM, or Criterion sooner or later; it always floats up somewhere. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Spellbound (1945)

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Alfred Hitchcock’s fascination with psychoanalysis and the complex workings of the human mind inarguably peaked with Psycho, but fifteen years earlier, he made an initial foray into the inner lives of psychotherapists and the patients that they analyze with 1945’s Spellbound, starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. Spellbound finds Dr. Constance Petersen (Bergman, in the first of three collaborations with the director) in residence at the Green Manors psychiatric facility, where she is the only woman on the staff, and as such often finds herself having to fend off the unwanted advances of her insufferable colleagues. The hospital is in the process of being handed over from long term head of staff Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carrol, in his third of four collaborations with Hitchcock) to the incoming Dr. Anthony Edwardes, following an event in which Murchison was found to be negligible, possibly as the result of the early stages of senility. Dr. Edwardes (Peck) arrives, and a romance blossoms between him and Constance almost immediately, although their early interactions are fraught with tension when he seems to change into a different kind of man altogether whenever he sees images of parallel lines against a white background: the tracing of fork tines in linen, the pinstripes in Constance’s white dressing gown, train tracks, etc. In short order, it becomes clear that “Edwardes” is an impostor, and he reveals to Constance that he is an amnesiac with the initials J.B., and he flees to New York from Green Manors just before the arrival of the police, who confirm that the real Dr. Edwardes is missing and his unknown travelling companion is suspected of killing him. 

Spellbound decidedly falls into the realm of Hitchcock’s domestic crime thrillers, as opposed to his espionage-oriented ones, but it’s also an example of one of his lesser-considered genre films: melodrama. One needs to look no further than the film’s opening to see this, as this is, to my knowledge, the director’s only film in which there is an overture. It’s certainly a much more successful one than a certain later Hitchcock/Bergman collaboration, however, as the film never quite loses its thriller edge. Although the picture occasionally flirts with going for a full-on soap opera plot, there are enough touches of malice and menace to carry it to the finish line, and the thrills of the second half more than make up for some of the occasionally plodding romance scenes in the first. Although the contemporary audience may not have been primed to view Peck as an actor who was consistently known for portraying characters of high moral fiber (To Kill A Mockingbird was still seventeen years away) to the same extent that a modern audience would be, they certainly would have been able to see the vulnerability, confusion, and occasional hints of danger in his handsome face. We trust that Constance knows the inner workings of the human mind but are less convinced that she’s a strong judge of character, especially as she falls in love for the first time in her life, blinding her to the pieces of evidence that J.B. may, in fact, be exactly the dangerous criminal that the police think him to be. He’s certainly capable of turning malicious in an instant, and when he begins to stalk about the home of Dr. Brulov (Michael Chekhov), in which they’ve found shelter, with a straight razor, we’re not certain that either Constance or Brulov is safe. As such, the film’s narrative structure is superficially similar to that of Suspicion, although Spellbound is a much stronger film. 

Often, when a Hitchcock film becomes hard to find or is somehow neglected, it’s because it contains some problematic element that has caused it to fall out of favor. Secret Agent, which sees Peter Lorre doing a racist caricature in brownface, seems to only exist on bargain bin DVDs with transfers that look like they were remastered by being thrown down the stairs. Even on the Criterion app, no one attempted to quality check the subtitles for Young and Innocent, and one can only conclude that it’s because whoever was working on captioning the thing saw the grotesque Blackface at the end and threw their hands in the air. Spellbound has fallen out of print and isn’t streaming online anywhere, and I wondered over the course of the film if this had anything to do with what could be perceived as pervasive sexism throughout the narrative, although I would argue that the prejudice is on the part of the characters, not the text, since all of the people who underestimate Constance are proven wrong. Her male colleagues at Green Manors all consider her frosty, cold, and unwomanly. When she makes her way to the Empire State Hotel, she is first harassed by a drunken man who propositions her before he’s turned away by the hotel’s staff detective, who incorrectly diagnoses Constance as either a schoolteacher or a librarian and credits himself as being “a bit of a psychologist.” Constance, who actually is, is able to prey on his hubris and play the part of the repentant wife looking for her husband, thus tricking him into revealing what room J.B. is staying in. Among her peers at Green Manors, she’s also the only one to spot the thread that reveals that someone there knew the real Edwardes and thus knew J.B. was an impostor all along, eventually resulting in the downfall of the true culprit and the liberation of J.B. from prison. It’s another example of Hitchcock’s messy relationship with women and feminism. He may have been a terror to women who worked on his sets, but he also never passed up an opportunity to show a woman’s mind was more than capable of matching wits with a man. I’m not sure why this one isn’t more easily accessible or well-remembered; I only managed to catch it the first time on TCM years ago, and was only able to rewatch it on the VHS tape that I used to record it, lo these many years ago now. 

Visually, this is also one of Hitchcock’s finest. The slow establishment of J.B.’s fugue states when he sees parallel lines leads to an utterly fantastic two-minute dream sequence that includes images that were created by Salvador Dalí, and they are utterly beautiful and surreal. When Dr. Brulov tricks J.B. into drinking drugged milk, we see the image from his point of view as he raises the glass and drinks from it, the creation of a pure white horizon foreshadowing the revelation that the traumatic incident that caused his amnesia took place on a ski slope. The entire film is in black and white, save for two frames of red when the camera takes on the point of view of the end of the barrel of a gun as it fires. It’s great stuff, and given that Hitch was feuding with Harry O. Selznick at the time and wasn’t as invested in this as he was in films he was more passionate about, it’s a great insight to just how good the man could be even when he was only half-assing it, at least at this point in his career (his half-assery in his later works does not compare). I’m not sure where you might be able to find this, dear reader, other than perhaps through your library or browsing the thrift stores, but when you do, you’re going to enjoy it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Rope (1948)

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I was a little concerned that returning to Rope after not having seen it since I was a teenager would be a disappointing experience. The Jimmy Stewart version of The Man Who Knew Too Much was a dull, plodding slog, especially in comparison to Alfred Hitchcock’s earlier version starring Peter Lorre, and a recent viewing of Hitchcock’s other experiment in crafting an entire film out of long takes, Under Capricorn, was a similarly dour, unengaging experience. I was pleasantly delighted to find that not only does Rope hold up, it was even better than I remembered in many ways. 

The film opens with a murder. Brandon Shaw (John Dall) and his meeker “roommate” Phillip Morgan (Farley Granger) strangle their old prep school chum David Kentley as the ultimate expression of their Nietzschean philosophy that there are Übermensch and underlings, and that they are solidly members of the former. After they hide the body in a chest, Phillip seems to immediately regret their actions, but Brandon can hardly contain himself, and sets about reorganizing their prepared table, already set for that evening’s dinner party, to the top of the chest. One by one, their guests arrive: Kenneth Lawrence (Douglas Dick), the fourth member of their school days quintet; Janet Walker (Joan Chandler), Kenneth’s former girlfriend and current fiancée of the now-deceased David; David’s father Mr. Kentley (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), who has come to look over a set of books that Brandon and Phillip have set out for him and is accompanied by his sister-in-law Mrs. Atwater (Constance Collier), attending in place of her ill sister, David’s mother. The final guest, whom neither of the two boys is certain will actually appear until he does, is Rupert Cadell (Stewart), an eccentric philosopher and the former housemaster of the prep school that Brandon, Phillip, Kenneth, and David attended. 

Stewart is the nominal star here, and although he claimed in later years that this was his weakest performance in his Hitchcock collaborations (although I would disagree; see above about The Man Who Knew Too Much), it may be because he failed to fully understand Rupert, a character whose hypocrisy and high-handedness makes him more detestable than the actual murderers with whom he shares dinner. Brandon and Phillip’s belief that their membership in an intellectual elite class gives them the right to dole out death to their “inferiors” is entirely born out of being groomed to believe this by Rupert when he was an adult and they were children under his care. Despite the fact that everything the two younger men do is merely the ultimate enactment of Rupert’s own professed beliefs, which we see him expound upon at length during the dinner party, when he realizes what they have done, he accuses them of “twisting” his words. I can see how this would be a difficult thing for an actor to parse, because it’s not terribly believable, and it’s also the film’s primary weakness. In the present, we would call Rupert an “edgelord” who realizes too late that his rhetorical exercises have resulted in the death of a human being, but there was no real roadmap for that kind of character in 1948, and Stewart seems much more comfortable playing the amateur detective element of the Rupert character while struggling to play that opposite side.  

This also makes Rope one of Hitchcock’s more class conscious thrillers, if not the most class-aware. His thriller films generally fall into one of two categories: his domestic thrillers (like The Lodger, Rebecca, Suspicion, I Confess!, and, if one is being generous, Under Capricorn) and his espionage pictures (which are too numerous to name, but include Saboteur, The 39 Steps, Foreign Correspondent, and The Lady Vanishes), with some, like Sabotage and Notorious, straddling the line. All of them have some political statements to make, especially with regards to Hitch’s lifelong antipathy towards the police, his morally correct hatred of fascism, and the occasional jingoism of his wartime features, but he rarely bothers to tackle the inherent violence of a society that is divided into different economic classes. Although there are clear exceptions, like the middle-class focused Shadow of a Doubt, his domestic thrillers usually default to focusing on characters of wealth and status. I don’t think it was necessarily a conscious decision; rich people simply have large houses and estates that come with inherent, built-in gravitas and atmosphere. In Rope, however, the core of the film is about some rich boys thinking that they have the right to choose who lives and who dies, and although there’s much discussion of this being a reserved right of individuals whose intelligence raises them above the cattle of most of mankind, it’s very clear that this is purely a matter of wealth and social station. 

When Janet gets Brandon alone so that she can dress him down for inviting both her ex and her fiance, he teases her (incorrectly) that she had left Kenneth for David because the latter’s family was richer, but this is really only a matter of degrees of wealth. Neither Brandon nor Phillip is employed, but they occupy a multi-bedroom apartment, employ a domestic servant, Mrs. Wilson (Edith Evanson), and they’re all very young adults, given that David is (or rather was) an undergrad at Harvard and that all of the boys went to school together. Thus, we’re talking about a group of rich men, Rupert included, who were born into wealth and perceive themselves as elite because of their supposed brilliance, when in fact this is simply a case of the idle rich justifying their fantasies about having the freedom to murder the poor. It’s incisive stuff, and it’s all played subtextually, making the film all the richer. At the end of the day, Brandon is no more than a bully who kills a lifelong friend less for the thrill of the act itself and more so that he can delight in the positive attention he presumes he will receive for how “clever” he was, despite the fact that he’s not really that smart at all; even with all of his preening and innuendo, the duo would still likely have gotten away with it if he hadn’t forgotten about David’s hat. Phillip is a pushover who can’t hold his liquor and allows himself too many outbursts that arouse Rupert’s suspicions in the first place. As for Rupert himself, he’s quite insistent that he believes in his moral certainty that the brilliant elite should be allowed to commit murder (of the working class, of course — hotel clerks, waiters, and others who are all identified solely by their servile role in society), even when it upsets others, only to be shocked and appalled when the victim is someone he knows personally; he’s almost utterly lacking in empathy, and is no less monstrous than his former pupils. 

All of this discussion probably makes the film sound heady and dour, but it’s quite the opposite; it’s electric, and often very funny. The innuendoes I mentioned Brandon delivering above are often smirk-worthy, but the screen really comes to life the moment that Janet appears. Rope may be one of the shorter films in Hitchcock’s sound career, but that doesn’t mean that the beginning doesn’t sag a little under the weight of the exposition of both Phillip and Brandon’s motivations and their relationships with the dinner guests; as soon as Janet steps through the door and into the apartment, she’s delivering her own witty remarks, even as she pretends that she’s only funny when she’s not trying to be. She’s a breath of fresh air, and it’s a disappointment that the actress had such a brief career. Equally delightful is Mrs. Atwater, who would be an utterly exhausting visitor but is quite fun to watch. Watching her try to remember the names of movies and plays that she’s seen or reciting the astrological signs of the era’s biggest marquee names is very entertaining. It’s less engaging to Rupert than it is to me, but one of the better subtle jokes is the way that he steers this conversation into a topic of his own interest, which happens to be inventing The Purge out of whole cloth, as if her frivolity about Ingrid Bergman’s horoscope is more vacuous that his pomposity about killing for better theater tickets. It’s also fun to see the way that Hitchcock gets around the censors’ insistence on making the two killers seem less gay. One nice bit is that when Mrs. Wilson directs a guest to the telephone, she says it’s in “the first bedroom,” while Brandon directs a different guest to the same location later by saying it’s “in the bedroom” (emphasis added), indicating that there’s really only one room that they sleep in but that Mrs. Wilson remains blissfully unaware. It’s quite good stuff, and the picture moves with such speed that you almost miss it. 

Rope was not terribly well received in its time, only coming to be considered one of Hitchcock’s better pictures by later audiences. It’s worth checking out, or even revisiting if, like me, you’ve already seen it. At eighty minutes, it’s a breeze to get through, even if your eyes will glaze over a little at the beginning and ending faux-philosophy of the main three players. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Under Capricorn (1949)

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In Douglas Brode’s book Edge of Your Seat, he writes of Under Capricorn: “Tepid, uninvolving mishmash set down under, with stars utterly unbelievable as Aussie husband and wife […] in a creaky, soap-operish plot that goes absolutely nowhere and, worse still, takes forever getting there.” Of all of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers listed forty thrillers in the book, this is one of only two single-star reviews (the other is Topaz). In Truffaut/Hitchcock, the master of suspense recalled a contemporary NYT review that stated the first suspenseful moment comes at 100 minutes into the run time. In his autobiography Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, leading man Joseph Cotten called the movie “Under Corny Crap,” and the film’s box office likely suffered due to the scandal surrounding Ingrid Bergman that same year, when she became pregnant with the child of Roberto Rossellini (they were both married at the time). To circle back to Mr. Brode’s notation above, he makes two major errors: first, both Sam (Cotten) and Hattie Flusky (Bergman) are Irish expats living in Australia (though they remain “utterly unbelievable” as Irish folks as well), and secondly, this is not a thriller, but a melodrama that cribs from Gaslight in its final moments. Audiences at the time had come to expect something different from the filmmaker; in the preceding decade alone, he had made Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt (also starring Cotten), and Notorious, just to name a few. Under Capricorn, I would imagine, shares more in common with his earlier British non-thriller dramas like The Skin Game or Rich and Strange, and I would also go so far as to posit that it’s filed with his suspense films less because of the content of the feature itself and more because forty makes for a nicer, rounder number for a list of “Hitchcock Thrillers” than thirty-nine does. 

Not only is this a melodrama, it’s also a period piece, which meant it was already starting on the back foot for me. Taking place in the 1830s in New South Wales, then still a penal colony under British rule, the film finds Charles Adare (Michael Wilding) arriving in Sydney with his second cousin, Sir Richard, whom the crown has appointed as the region’s new governor. Charles is the youngest son of his family, and the practice of primogeniture means that he is set to inherit nothing, so he has come to the colony to seek his fortune. Although he’s a man of good humor, he’s fairly disinterested in honest work. After meeting with a local bank manager to discuss his prospects, he meets Sam Flusky, seeming to recognize the name; the manager tells him that Flusky is a successful landowner but also an emancipist (someone sent to Australia for penal reasons who has since served their time but remained on the continent). Despite being warned against becoming socially linked to Flusky, whose newfound wealth has not resulted in his acceptance in high society (such as it is) in Sydney, and being directly forbidden from associating with him by his cousin, Charles accepts an invitation to a dinner party at Sam’s. The dinner is attended solely by several local gentlemen, all of whom deliver poor excuses for the absence of their respective wives. The reason becomes clear when Sam’s wife, Hattie, descends the stairs in a drunken stupor. Surprised, Charles recognizes her as a childhood friend of his older sister’s, and suddenly recollects that she left Ireland suddenly when she eloped with a man below her station. Said man was her stable boy, Sam, who was sentenced to seven years on the chain gang for the slaying of Hattie’s brother Dermot. 

Sam, recognizing Charles’s immediate rehabilitative effect on Hattie, asks him to stay with them in his manor house; this raises the ire of Flusky’s housekeeper Milly (Margaret Leighton), who has become accustomed to running the household in Hattie’s stead, all while enabling and facilitating Mrs. Flusky’s all-hours stupefaction. What follows is a series of vignettes, as Charles manages, over time, to wean Hattie off the bottle and encourage her to reassert herself as mistress of the house. When Milly purposefully embarrasses her in front of the other servants, Hattie retreats back to her room and locks herself in; Charles climbs up to the balcony and lets himself in, setting her right again. Sam is not entirely unaware of the love that Charles begins to have for Hattie, but he also adores his wife and believes that she deserves to re-enter the society that shunned her while she waited seven years for her husband to be freed from imprisonment. When Charles’s various subterfuges pay off and Hattie attends a ball at the governor’s mansion, Milly poisons Sam’s mind with thoughts of their potential infidelities, resulting in Sam arriving and embarrassing Hattie so thoroughly that her rejection from high society is confirmed. Poor horseman Charles departs the Flusky home on the back of Sam’s wild mare, and the animal breaks its leg, forcing Sam to shoot the old girl and put her out of her misery. A confrontation with Charles follows, and Charles is shot, albeit nonfatally, leaving him delirious and intermittently unconscious; since Sam is a previously convicted felon, he is likely to be hanged for the crime. 

This prompts Hattie to admit that it was actually she who shot her brother, and that Sam took the fall for her. When she confesses to the governor, he tells her that she will have to return to Ireland to stand trial, but Sam refuses to corroborate her version of events. Reluctantly, Sam decides he will return with her and leave his life as a nouveau riche gentleman behind, much to Milly’s chagrin. To keep him in Australia, she tries to poison Hattie, but is exposed, as is her scheme of making Hattie believe she’s losing her mind by leaving shrunken human heads in the lady’s suite. Charles recovers enough to claim that his shooting was an accident, and we all end happily ever after, with Sam and Hattie’s love having conquered all, and Charles returning to Ireland in disgrace, but cheerful. 

Under Capricorn is notable in that, like its immediate predecessor in Hitch’s C.V., Rope, the film is shot almost entirely in long, unedited shots, although the breaks here are a little more obvious than in his previous film. Unfortunately, they don’t end up amounting to much. There’s a credit for the use of Technicolor here, but it feels like a waste of that technology, as this a mostly beige and brown movie; Charles wears a couple of blue and green waistcoats, but the color of them is so muted that it hardly seems like costuming should have gone through the effort at all. That’s not to say that the film looks bad, but it certainly doesn’t leap off of the screen. Since this was a melodrama and not a suspense thriller, I couldn’t help but think about Douglas Sirk’s films in the genre. The snow in All That Heaven Allows is so pure and white that it almost looks blue, and the absurdly pink bedroom of Lana Turner’s daughter at the end of Imitation of Life is doing some excellent environmental storytelling; there’s not a single image in this film that’s as visually arresting as the scenery that Sirk worked with. The extended shots display a mastery of the craft, but it’s no surprise that Hitchcock made precisely two movies composed entirely of “oners” and then went back to using the technique only when it matters. In Rope, the film’s real-time nature makes that work for the entire thing, whereas its use in Under Capricorn feels like a failed experiment. It’s an interesting technical exercise, but nothing more. 

I viewed this as a Kino Lorber release, and while their print looks quite good, the quality control on the subtitles is, frankly, unacceptable. Flusky’s Roger Corman-quality matte painting house is named “Minyago Yugilla,” which supposedly means “Why weepest thou?”, and every time someone translates this for another character, the captions substitute “though” for “thou,” and that’s only one of the many errors that makes one wonder who’s minding the store over there. (I’m personally willing to accept, at a very reasonable rate, any proofreading jobs that any boutique physical media retailer has to offer, if there are any companies that are still offering this kind of work instead of outsourcing it to AI to be botched.) It’s not even as if the dialogue is all that difficult for a captioner to understand; to say that anyone in the film is failing at an Irish (or Australian) accent would be a lie, because it would imply that there is a single person in the cast who’s making the effort to even try one. There’s not much to speak of when it comes to extras on the disc, either, if that’s of interest to you. 

All of that being said, I went into this expecting a much worse film, and perhaps because my expectations were so low, I didn’t despise it the way that Brode, Cotten, Hitchcock, and the film-going public did. It held my interest well enough, even if it wasn’t terribly exciting, and I don’t think that I’ll ever revisit it or recommend it to others. This may be the worst performance of Bergman’s storied career; it is, at least, the worst one I’ve witnessed. Not helping matters is the hideous period dress that she’s forced to don on several occasions. Every bonnet they put on Bergman is more ostentatiously ugly than the last, and there’s a set of nightclothes that she wears that are meticulously decorated with lace that seems strategically placed to make one ask “Why?” There is already a nineteenth century period piece in which Bergman plays a wife driven to madness, featuring the presence of a sullen housemaid and Cotten in a lead role, and in which Bergman is publicly embarrassed at a societal function when she dares to leave the house for the first time in years. It’s Gaslight, obviously, and it’s a much, much better picture than this one. Under Capricorn is for completists only, and only the kind of completist who needs to either (a) see every Hitchcock ever made, or (b) who needs to watch all of the master of suspense’s thrillers while also needing the number of the said films to be an even forty.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Number Seventeen (1932)

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The last fifteen minutes of Number Seventeen are representative of Alfred Hitchcock at his finest: tense, thrilling, laden with spectacle, and very fun. It’s unfortunate that for a film with such a short runtime (under 65 minutes!), it spends its first three quarters treading water in a sloppy, lousy, mishmash of an Agatha Christie locked room mystery and an Oscar Wilde farce. 

The titular location is a seemingly abandoned house where a number of figures converge over the course of a dark and stormy night. There’s an awful lot of farting about during which the difficulty in telling all of the characters apart is made even more complicated by the fact that a lot of proper names are thrown around—Fordyce, Sheldrake, Brant, Barton, etc—among four of the five men, but the characters give false identities at different times and swap them about between each other. Two of the men even have matching hats and identical moustaches! The gist is that a very expensive diamond necklace has been stolen, some number of the men are criminals, one of them is probably a detective, a seemingly dead body is actually alive (twice!), and one of the criminals is accompanied by a woman named Nora (Anne Grey) who is pretending to be deaf and mute, for reasons that are never entirely clear. The only man who seems to be what he presents himself to be is a squatter named Ben (Leon St. Lion, who had previously appeared in the stage version), an alcoholic who has a much-abused sausage in his pocket. It’s all even less thrilling than it sounds. 

The plot gets going at last when the necklace turns up and it’s revealed that the house sits atop an access hatch that allows one to descend to a set of railroad tracks that eventually lead to a train ferry. A few of the criminals manage to board it with Nora in tow believing that the necklace is in their possession despite it having been picked from one of their pockets by Ben, while the man who introduced himself as Fordyce attempts to head off their getaway by commandeering a public bus. This is when things finally get interesting, as the thieves crawl around on the outside of the train to take out its various crew when they refuse to accommodate their demands, leaving a few petty burglars at the helm of a runaway locomotive that they don’t know how to stop. This is intercut with the rapid approach of the bus, as we watch the riders’ initial thrill of it all before they start to get tossed around a bit, and there are even brief moments when it appears that the bus and the train will collide, only for the engine to divert to an overpass while the bus passes through a tunnel that goes under the tracks. All the while, peacefully and inexorably, the ferry ship is coming into port. 

All of this is done with miniature work that most modern viewers would find laughable, but which I find utterly charming. That’s come to be one of my favorite things about revisiting his earlier films of late, from the impressive opening sequence of The Lady Vanishes to Young and Innocent’s delightful trainyard sequences. This was also a young director who just absolutely loved a train derailment, and Number Seventeen has one that involves smashing through a series of gates and crashing into a ship, with the train car bearing characters I presume we are supposed to care about are slowly sinking beneath the surface of the water like one of those convenient submarine air pockets that the photogenic leads on Baywatch were always finding themselves trapped in. It’s a delight, and it’s almost enough to save the film, but not quite. The final fifteen minutes alone in isolation are worth the ticket price, but if you can, just skip to that ending and don’t worry about the plot at all. Hitchcock didn’t. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #260: The 39 Steps (1935) & Hitchcock’s British Spy Thrillers

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Welcome to Episode #260 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Boomer & Brandon discuss a sampling of espionage thrillers Alfred Hitchcock directed in his early British period, starting with The 39 Steps (1935).

00:00 Welcome
01:03 By Design (2026)
08:01 Videoheaven (2026)
11:03 The Forbidden City (2026)
16:06 Flesh Eating Mothers (1988)
23:41 Self-Service Pumps (2025)

26:55 Hitchcock Quiz
42:30 The 39 Steps (1935)
1:23:03 Sabotage (1936)
1:50:11 Secret Agent (1936)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Blackmail (1929)

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There’s an awkward transition period between silent and sound pictures, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail sits right in the middle of it. In fact, it straddles the line between the two. If you look up the film online and click the first streaming link that your search results present, you’ll find yourself watching the film in sound, but this was actually a late-breaking change made well into production. The Kino Lorber DVD release that my library has contains both the silent and the talkie versions of the film, and the silent one was actually more financially successful in its day than the other — largely due to the fact that most British cinemas didn’t have sound technology installed yet, reducing the talkie Blackmail’s overall box office. Blackmail stands at this crux in the leap in film technology, and so we must give it some grace for its issues. 

Flapper Alice White (Anny Ondra) is dating Scotland Yard detective Frank Webber (John Longden), although she finds him a bit of a bore. On the side, she’s also occasionally going on dates with a painter named Crewe (Cyril Ritchard). After an argument at a tea house, Frank storms out, allowing Crewe to offer to take Alice out, and Frank sees the two leaving together. Crewe takes Alice to his artist’s loft and the two flirt for a bit before Alice volunteers to wear a (for the time) racy dancing costume and model for Crewe; he hides her clothes while she’s changing and his personality drastically changes as he attempts to force himself on her. Alice manages to grab a nearby knife and kill Crewe in self-defense, but she goes home in a state of shock. The following day, reminders of Crewe’s death are all around her, and a gossipy neighbor standing about in her father’s newsstand recounting the grisly details doesn’t help. Frank visits the scene of the killing and finds one of Alice’s gloves, pocketing the evidence before anyone else sees it and bringing it to her, where she wants to tell him everything but can’t verbalize the horror of her situation the previous night. Unfortunately, Alice’s exit from Crewe’s building was witnessed by career criminal Tracy (Donald Calthrop), who arrives with Alice’s other glove and announces his intent to extort both Alice and Frank. 

I’m not entirely certain that calling this film a “thriller” accurately reflects the content. The title act of blackmail doesn’t really enter the narrative until quite late in the game, and although the film’s energy picks up in its final act, the first three quarters of its eighty-five-minute runtime is fairly slow-paced. If anything, the film is more of a character study of Alice White than anything else. The film follows her almost entirely and spends a great deal more time on extended examinations of her face as she reacts to things that happen around her. Ondra has the perfect features for this era of filmmaking, with the big eyes and pouty lips that were best suited to convey the outsized emotions that dialogue-free performance required. Her English was so accented, however, that Hitchcock had another actress (Joan Barry) say Alice’s lines off-camera while Ondra lip-synced the dialogue, and the result is a little uncanny. (This was a technological limitation of the time; in Murder!, released the following year, the main character’s internal monologue while listening to the radio was accomplished by having the actor record his lines and then act along to his own voice on the tape, all while a live orchestra played the music that was supposedly playing on his radio.) That slight awkwardness as a result of this method is a little strange, but it unintentionally adds another layer to the performance, as if Alice’s experiences have left her so out of sorts that she’s not entirely in sync with her own mind. 

This is Alice’s story: she’s just a girl wanting to have fun, and she’s bored of her cop boyfriend always taking her to the movies. Crewe, a mysterious artist, shows an interest in her and invites her back to his place, where he shows off his work and even lets Alice express herself on a canvas as well, and it’s all fun and games before he reveals his true intentions. She defends herself but kills him in the process and returns home to wash his blood out of her clothes. On the street, the positions of people at rest remind her too much of the state she left Crewe’s body in, and when she’s trying to have breakfast with her family, she can’t get any peace. Her boyfriend arrives with evidence that she’s been two-timing him and she can’t even speak about the kind of danger that she defended herself from. All of this is before Tracy even enters the picture. This isn’t a thriller, really; it’s a noir, one with an inciting incident that would appear in noirs for decades to come, at least into the fifties with titles like The Blue Gardenia. How much you’re going to be invested in the film depends on how much you like Alice, and although I did, I can see her characterization being a harder pill to swallow for others, even before getting into the strange lip syncing issue that may further turn some viewers off. In the end, Tracy is sought for questioning purely as a matter of having a criminal record and having been in the area, and he flees the police, leading to a chase that winds through the British Museum before he falls from the building’s roof to his death. This leads to Crewe’s death being pinned on Tracy and Alice being free to go, but the film lingers on her face in its final moments in a way that makes it plain that although she may be legally absolved, she’s been forever changed by having to slay a man in order to protect herself from his sexual assault. 

As to the elements that make the film memorable as a Hitchcock text, the final fourth of the film sees Tracy being chased by the police, presaging several images and ideas that would go on to be reliable tricks in the director’s bag. In the British Museum, Tracy descends a rope to escape his pursuers past a giant bust of presumably Egyptian origin. There’s a distinct visual genealogy between this and the finale of North by Northwest: 

The Mount Rushmore sequence is also part of another one of Hitchcock’s trademarks, which was to have the film’s final action scenes lead to a rooftop climax, most famously in Vertigo but also To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, and Foreign Correspondent, just to name a few (although for the last two of these Jimmy Stewart is dangled out of a window rather than off of a rooftop and the fall from Westminster Cathedral tower happens at the beginning of the third act rather than its end, respectively). The chase scene through the museum is also clearly echoed in the protracted sequence that concludes I Confess, although this one is stronger and Hitchcock is already demonstrating his strong eye for composition when it comes to setting up the most interesting version of a shot, sticking the camera in the vertices of an oddly shaped room or taking on an overhead view of a large reading area. He’s also already inserting his sly sense of humor into the proceedings. Despite the relative novelty of the art form, the characters within the film are already talking about movies as if the whole enterprise is old hat; Frank seemingly only wants to go to detective flicks which Alice finds boring and predictable, and Frank admits he’s still excited to see the latest one about Scotland Yard, even if “they’re bound to get most things wrong.” Hitchcock’s lack of respect for the institution of the police overall is on display as well, since the entirety of Scotland Yard does, in fact, get most things wrong; they latch onto Tracy based on circumstantial evidence and chase him to his death, unknowingly doing so in order to cover for a killing (albeit a legally defensible one) committed by the girlfriend of one of their own members. 

It’s all good stuff, but I doubt that Blackmail remains of much interest even to most film-lovers who don’t have an unhealthy interest in Hitchcock’s body of work. Narratively, it’s not in conversation with his other texts, at least not those we think of as the canonical forty thrillers. Insofar as it’s useful as an interpretative tool for his filmography as a whole, this film feels like an attempt at experimenting with techniques and images that he would perfect later and is fascinating in that right, but I once again fear that this fascination extends only to real Hitch-heads. The Lodger is a much more engaging film if you’re interested in what the director’s silent and silent-adjacent work was like, and for experiments with the artform that sound introduced into the medium, Murder! has more fascinating production trivia and smoother tone overall, although I’d go to bat for Blackmail’s value as a noir character study before I’d recommend the 1930 film. This is in the public domain, so hopefully it’s not too hard for you to find if I’ve sold you on it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Murder! (1930)

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Alfred Hitchcock’s 1930 film Murder! entered the public domain this year, which might lead one to think it would be easier for the public to access. I found a copy online and started watching it, only to make it about 20 minutes in before deciding that the degraded audio quality meant that I was never going to be able to make it through the film without subtitles. I then found a subtitle file online and attempted to burn it onto the video using Handbrake, but it was not in sync, and no amount of fiddling would make it work. After I had tried all of that, I found the film on a streaming service heretofore unused by me called Plex, but the subtitles there all appeared to have been auto-generated. Not only were they inaccurate, but the scene in which Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall, who would later appear in Foreign Correspondent) has an interior monologue that plays out in concert (no pun intended) with a radio orchestra broadcast had no captions at all because the auto-caption couldn’t hear the dialogue over the music, making them useless. And so, at last, I turned to our old friend, the people’s streaming service Tubi, where the film was free, the subtitles were mostly accurate, and the Charmin bears were playful indeed.

Diana Baring (Norah Baring) is an actress performing in a travelling troupe in “the provinces” when she is found in an unresponsive state next to the body of another actress; she cannot recall committing any crime but cannot account for her state of mind. She is quickly tried and found guilty, and in a miscarriage of justice that is almost on par with her erroneous conviction, one of the jurors is an acquaintance of hers, the aforementioned Sir John, who is browbeaten into giving a guilty verdict by the other jurors. Sir John feels at fault for what has happened to Diana, as he is a theatrical producer who recommended her for the tour on which the murder happened, and he sets out to try and overturn her conviction by finding the real killer. In this, he is assisted by two of Diana’s fellow actors: a husband-and-wife team named Doucie (Phyllis Konstam) and Ted (Edward Chapman) Markham. 

Murder! was only Hitchcock’s third feature made with sound, and the film itself shows evidence of this in being less dialogue-driven and more image-oriented while also being innovative with regards to this new technology. The aforementioned scene in which Sir John, while shaving and listening to the radio, shames himself in voice over for being so easily influenced by his fellow jurors and recounts his disappointment at being the person who put Diana in the situation where she could be accused in the first place may be the first film depiction of a character having an inner monologue. Soliloquy is nothing new to drama, of course, but film afforded the unique opportunity to have these representations of internality appear as the character’s “thoughts” rather than on-stage asides, and if Hitchcock didn’t create this film language method outright, I have no doubt that he was certainly the first to have the character’s decisive moments align with the crescendoes of the background music. It’s an inspired touch, and one that demonstrates that Hitch really was the master of his craft, even if this film is slow and plodding to the modern eye. At 100 minutes, it’s only slightly longer than The Lodger, which came out three years prior, and a third as long again as the Peter Lorre-starring The Man Who Knew Too Much, which clocked in at seventy-five minutes with a perfect pace. 

If anything, Murder! seems almost experimental, with Hitchcock taking the time to explore all of the ways that he might use sound as part of his films and not worrying too much about whether the runtime could be tightened up a little. The inciting act of violence is relayed via a tracking shot that finds the various performers from Diana and the Markhams’ troupe leaning out of their windows to discern the source of the commotion. The police’s investigation occurs backstage during the next evening’s performances (Diana and the murder victim having been replaced by their understudies, of course), which allows for the sequence to have a lot of life as actors emerge from the dressing room, interact with the detectives, and then get pulled onstage for their scene. Cleverly, this also introduces the fact that two of the characters in the play portray policemen on stage, which plays into a later-revealed clue that Mrs. Markham saw a policeman on the street earlier who was not the same copper who was present at the scene of the crime. If one pays close enough attention, this backstage insight tips us off early on about who the real killer might be. The trial itself plays out very modernly, with montages of witnesses, the judge, and the jury fading into one another before they are adjourned for deliberations, and the jurors discussing the case amongst themselves is good stuff; even though it takes up a solid chunk of screentime, it’s far from the first thing that I’d nominate for the chopping block if we wanted to edit this film down to something more concise. When we find Sir John in his home, we get a series of fade-in/out establishing shots that escort us from his front door to his apartment, which is something that I’m not sure is completely necessary but shows Hitch puzzling out the kind of transitions that will eventually be part and parcel of his unique style as a filmmaker.

The film is not without Hitchcock’s trademark humor, either. Before the Markhams are pressed into assisting Sir John with his investigation, we find them in their boarding house, threatened with eviction by their landlady as their young daughter plays the piano, haltingly and badly, and it’s a fun scene. Sir John also finds himself staying at a boarding house on the road where the landlady’s many children follow her about and climb all over the furniture and luggage, and it’s decently funny. There’s a good energy in the backstage investigation mentioned above that allows for the cast of the play to deliver pithy remarks. Where this remains strongest, though, is in the imaginative use of images and interplay between them; most strikingly, as Diana’s day of execution draws near despite Sir John’s attempts to find the real killer, the montages that show his desperation are double exposed with the shadow of a gallows rising, as the young actress’s fate draws nearer and nearer. This image is then alluded to later when the killer, having returned to their earlier profession as a trapeze artist, realizes that the law has caught up with them and hangs themselves in the middle of their act rather than face trial for their crime. I was also very fond of the shot-reverse-shot scene in which Sir John interviews Diana at the prison, which places them at opposite ends of an almost impossibly long table; they have almost a fisheye lens quality to them that I didn’t expect. 

I also quite like how Murder! is in conversation with stage drama. Above and beyond the obvious elements, it’s a fun idea to have Sir John pretend that he’s planning to produce a new play in order to get all of the actors from the disbanded troupe to interact with him. Even more cleverly, he plans an entire “ripped from the headlines” story in which he’ll be dramatizing the killing, and he catches on the idea of having the man he’s determined is the likely killer play the part of the killer in an audition in hopes of eliciting an accidental confession. He even references the fact that he was inspired in part by Hamlet, which features a play within itself in order to “catch the conscience of the king.” The actors themselves provide a lot of color just by the nature of their profession and their eccentricities. The film’s final moments, in which Diana is freed and is ushered into a room to be embraced by Sir John, are revealed via zoom out to reveal the proscenium arch to all be a stage production as well. It’s playing with a lot for a piece of art in a form that was still so novel and fresh. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: The Men Who Knew Too Much

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss two different films that share the same title and director: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and its loose remake The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

00:00 The Soup
02:50 KPop Demon Hunters (2025)
8:02 The Blue Gardenia (1953)
13:25 Erica’s First Holy Sh!t (2022)
20:06 Cloud (2025)
26:40 The Mastermind (2025)
30:54 Eephus (2025)
37:00 Frankenstein (2025)
44:47 Predator – Badlands (2025)
52:32 Keeper (2025)
1:04:36 Materialists (2025)
1:10:15 Die My Love (2025)
1:14:12 Reflections in a Dead Diamond (2025)
1:17:48 Mr. Melvin (2025)
1:22:12 Sirāt (2025)
1:26:37 Twinless (2025)

1:33:00 The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, 1956)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew