alfred hitchcock

Hitchcock Quickies

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At the beginning of the year, I had three major projects in mind to guide my film-viewing for 2026. The first was to watch all of the films that had made Swampflix’s annual collaborative top-ten lists that I had not yet seen for myself (which resulted in the publications found here and here); the second was to watch and write about all of Ann Sothern’s Maisie films; and the third was to get the site to a place where all forty (give or take) of the thriller films directed by Alfred Hitchcock had some kind of coverage, in the lead up to an overall Hitchcock ranking. Because the uptown Prytania in New Orleans programs a great deal of classic Hitchcock, Brandon had already seen and reviewed many of them, but I still needed to watch (or re-watch) all of them in order to complete my “best Hitchcocks” list, which sometimes left me without an outlet to talk much about them, and we didn’t always agree. So, I’ve collected my thoughts on the Hitchcock films already covered by Swampflix below.

Suspicion (1941)

When compiling the document for us to keep track of what had and hadn’t already been covered, Suspicion was a film that I noted I hadn’t seen, because once you get into that period of Hitchcock’s work where he had a high density of films beginning with S— (Sabotage, Suspicion, Saboteur, Spellbound, Stage Fright), they tend to blur together somewhat. To my surprise, when I went to my notes in the margins of Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat, I discovered that I had given this one a rating that was quite high, with no date associated. As I watched the film, I slowly began to recall the general outline of the plot, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how a younger, even less patient version of myself was able to get through this film in a single sitting, let alone enjoy it so much. In general, I find Hitchcock’s domestic dramas less interesting than his espionage plots. For every exhilarating Shadow of a Doubt, there’s a plodding I Confess. Suspicion is a film that I felt had a lot in common with Hitchcock’s very early work Number Seventeen, in that it’s repetitive and tiresome for most of its runtime, until it suddenly whips into gear in its final fifteen minutes. No wonder I forgot that I had already seen it; I can now vaguely recall a TCM screening that was so unmemorable that I had long ago assumed that images from it were things that I had dismissed as incorrect recollections of Notorious, most notably the scenes of Cary Grant in a poorly driven car.

Most viewers’ issues with Suspicion stem from what many considered to be a rushed, cop-out ending. Supposedly, the film was intended to end more like the book on which it was based, with Lina (Joan Fontaine)’s suspicions about her husband Johnnie (Grant)’s plans to murder being revealed to be well-founded. Apocryphally, Hitchcock lost a fight with the studio about this ending, as there were concerns that Grant’s performance as a murderous cad would tarnish his marketability as a leading man. I can say with certainty that this is not my issue with the film because the last-minute revelation that Johnnie is innocent in the deaths of his friend Beaky and was only picking the brain of a local Agatha Christie-esque mystery author to find a way to commit suicide is, in my interpretation, an utter fabrication. He was very clearly going to murder Lina, and his sudden apology for his behavior after all of his sinister machinations is yet another in a long line of Johnnie’s fibs that Lina naively falls for. After several rinse-and-repeat scenes of Johnnie being caught in a lie and then having to backtrack out of it, the audience has the understanding that no matter how many times Lina finds one of her family heirlooms at the antique store or someone stops her on the street to “Oh, honey,” her about the fact that her loser husband is not at work as he claims but is instead a frequent fixture at the race track, she’s just going to fall for it again. I don’t understand how the film’s final scene could be read any other way. She’s just getting back on the carousel again, and the next time Johnnie takes her on a dangerously fast coastal drive, he’s going to successfully push her out of the vehicle because she’ll be lulled into a false sense of security. This is not a happy ending by any stretch of the imagination, and that’s almost enough to save it, but not quite. The image of an enshadowed Grant summiting the stairs while carrying a possibly poisoned glass of milk is striking, but it comes far too late in a meandering plot to make much of a difference.

Saboteur (1942)

When we talked about The 39 Steps, one of the things that I mentioned was that ingesting so many Hitchcock films in rapid succession highlighted the fact that North by Northwest was assembled from various ideas, images, frameworks, iconography, and archetypes that he had been sharpening and honing for decades at that point in his career. Specifically, I cited that North by Northwest was all but a remake of 39 Steps in structure and character, with the Hitch staple of an innocent man on the run featuring a similar romantic entanglement and similar climactic finale taking place in a landmark location (although the director was using the last of these tropes as early as 1929’s Blackmail). As it turns out, there was (at least) one link in the chain of Hitchcock’s evolution of this concept that I hadn’t seen at that time, 1942’s Saboteur. In the midst of the U.S.’s involvement in WWII, a domestic terrorist sabotages a California aircraft manufacturing facility, and blame falls on factory worker Barry Kane (Robert Cummings), who goes looking for the real culprit based on a piece of mail that he saw the saboteur carrying. Just as in The 39 Steps, this results in our reluctant hero falling into the hands of a fascist-supporting man who takes advantage of his status as a well-respected member of the community, being forced to take a hostile woman hostage, escaping from police custody on a bridge, and even being forced into turning himself over to the antagonists when his love interest is threatened just when he has the opportunity to expose their nefarious deeds to a large audience. Presaging his eventual use of Six Grandfathers Mountain in North by Northwest, the film’s nail-biting climax takes place at the top of the Statue of Liberty.

What sets this one apart is both how jingoistic it is about America while remaining frank about and critical of its institutions. As always, Hitchcock’s police officer characters are inept, corrupt, and easily-duped, but the series of characters that Kane meets along the way who aren’t surreptitiously fascists are a broad spectrum of kindly strangers who help him evade detection and stay one step ahead of the police. Blind pianists, bearded ladies, long-haul truckers: they are all united in their belief in Kane’s innocence, and each independently contributes more to the successful capture of the titular saboteur than the combined efforts of the systems in place. The system itself is the enemy of the people, whether embodied in the wealthy—composed of coastal urban socialites and wealthy rural land men alike—or in the passive collaboration of a law enforcement which does the bidding of the wealthy and ignores the innocence of the common man. It’s interesting subtext, and although a lot of critics found the performance of Cummings as Kane underwhelming, I found myself rather taken with him in this film. Not as well remembered as either of the films that it serves as the link between, but an exceptional picture nonetheless.

Stage Fright (1950)

One of the many unintended tragic consequences of the “improvement” of search engines over time is that the recommendations for related searches can sometimes pop up and spoil something for you before you get the chance to get to what you were trying to find. This film is not often in discussion as a major work in Hitchcock’s canon, despite the fact that it’s quite good, and is instead only remembered as one of the films that featured an element that Hitchcock regretted. I won’t get into what or why (I’m kinder to you that the Google landing page in that way), but I will say that, just as the director was strongarmed into feigning apologizing for the shocking act of violence that is (for many) the most memorable thing about Sabotage, the public “I’m sorry” that Hitchcock made in later years for breaking the audience’s trust by subverting a narrative convention here should never have come to be. It’s an artist’s job to challenge the observer, and although the outcry from the masses in response to one of this film’s twists must have weighed heavily on his mind for many years, Hitchcock didn’t owe us an apology. Even as early as 1950, the audience presumed that they came to a Hitchcock picture with the expectation that they would be shocked, surprised, and entertained, and they got what they paid for. When I hear about the people who whined about Hitchcock “breaking their trust,” they all look like Annie Wilkes in my mind’s eye.

Dial M for Murder (1954)

This is an oddity in the Hitchcock film canon for a few reasons. Firstly, a lot of the man’s films are either sprawling odysseys that take a character from London to the Highlands or from Madison Avenue to Six Grandfathers Mountain, while he drew attention to his “limited setting” pictures (namely Lifeboat, Rope, and Rear Window) by confining their location. Dial M for Murder is often left out of discussions of the latter, largely because it isn’t confined to precisely one location, but it is noteworthy in that it’s limited to no more than three sets and some rear-projected street scenes. Despite this, it doesn’t do any of the fancy camera work that Rear Window did (that same year, no less). Even when a character is facing trial for a murder, instead of the standard courtroom scene, we get a more expressionistic image of said character standing before a colorful void that reflects their inner turmoil while the charges are read and the sentence is pronounced, all in barely a minute of screentime. It further differentiates itself from the larger repertoire in that, when Hitchcock followed a traditional mystery structure, he usually stuck to the age-old whodunit scaffolding. Dial M for Murder is a howcatchem (like Columbo or Poker Face) feature and it was released theatrically (in 3D!), it more neatly intersects with the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The anthology series began airing the year after this film was released and continued for a total of ten seasons (with the last three featuring episodes of an hour in length rather than the thirty minutes they had spanned in previous years, much to the detriment of the renamed Alfred Hitchcock Hour). Hitch didn’t direct every episode himself, of course (in total, he directed 18 of 361), but the series did have a symbiotic relationship with his film career. The most obvious impact came with Psycho, which Hitchcock shot quickly between seasons of the show and using the show’s crew, which is why it was his first film since Strangers on a Train to be shot in black and white instead of color (other than The Wrong Man, where the monochrome nature is deliberate due to the movie’s docudrama nature). When he did direct episodes of the show, Hitchcock would use the show’s resources to work on proofs of concept for his features, essentially treating the series as an incubator for test runs of certain techniques. The season-two episode “One More Mile to Go” is perhaps the most apparent in this respect, as one can draw a direct visual line from that episode’s use of a dashboard point of view of a traffic stop and the sequence in Psycho where Marion Crane is pulled over by a motorcycle cop. This film also features an appearance from John Williams, who appeared in eight separate Hitchcock Presents narratives (one of which was a three-parter, so he technically was in ten episodes), many of them Hitchcock-directed installments, which goes to show how much the two got along.

This is a lot of information about the technical elements of the movie and where it fits into the oeuvre, which overlooks that, on the whole, this is a delightful little reverse mystery. Ray Milland, the man with the x-ray eyes himself, discovers that his wife (Grace Kelly) has been having an affair with a handsome young tennis star (Robert Cummings) and sets out to have her murdered, but when she manages to kill her would-be-killer in self-defense, he allows her to go to trial for murder, hoping that the justice system will solve all his problems. Small scale and domestic, but still quite good.

To Catch a Thief (1955)

Retired catburglar and jewel thief John Robie (Cary Grant), alias “The Cat,” lives a life of quiet leisure in a French villa, having been paroled for his work in the French Resistance during WWII. When a string of high profile jewelry burglaries is reported along the French Riviera, Robie knows that he’ll be questioned, and fears the loss of his reputation as a reformed man. When investigators do come for him, Robie escapes and makes his way to the restaurant of his friend Bertani, whose staff consists almost entirely of the old gang of thieves, all making an attempt at an honest life. Bertani directs the daughter of the restaurant’s wine steward to take Robie by boat and drop him off at a nearby beach club. Unbeknownst to him, it’s here that he’s first noticed by Frances Stevens (Grace Kelly), an American traveling with her nouveau riche mother, Jessie (Jessie Royce Landis). Robie also encounters a man named Hughson (John Williams again), an insurance specialist with Lloyd’s of London, who is in the area due to many of the recent thefts having been insured by his employer. Reluctantly, he agrees to help Robie try to find the copycat “Cat” by providing information about another set of insured clients in the area, which just so happens to include Mrs. Stevens and her daughter.

I watched this one shortly after seeing both the striking The Lady Vanishes and the non-Hitchcock noir classic Dark Passage, and it couldn’t help but feel a little lackluster in comparison. Reportedly, Hitchcock decided to direct this picture because he wanted to take a vacation in France, and if that’s true, I’d have to admit that it shows. There are glorious, lovely sweeping vistas throughout, but there’s nothing in the film with the inspiration of, say, the zoom in from across a great chessboard-tiled entry hall to a tiny key in someone’s hand in Notorious. When Hitchcock pulls out one of his trademarks, like a climactic rooftop scene at the end, it feels less like he’s playing the hits and more like he’s spinning his wheels. Kelly is magnetic as always, but Grant fails to inspire.

Psycho (1960)

What is there left to say about Psycho? It’s one of the greatest films of all time? That it’s full of unexpected twists and turns that were so famous that they’re no longer unexpected? It was so iconoclastic that it became iconic? My most recent rewatch (of many) was at a repertory screening at my local megaplex, accompanied by a younger friend who had no concept of what the movie was beyond obliquely recognizing the title, but he had some sense of what was going to happen because of his familiarity with the AMC prequel series Bates Motel; there’s something about horseshoe theory and pop cultural penetration to be mined from that, I’m sure. Sixty-six years later, the score is still so iconic that it was used in Primetime. It’s Psycho. You already know everything there is to know about it.

The Birds (1963)

The Birds is my mom’s favorite Hitchcock, but I still never managed to see it until I was an adult. It’s hard to describe the film without sounding like you’re talking about a B-grade schlocky horror, because in many ways, it is one, but like Psycho before it, it was also a genre definer. Tippi Hedren is a socialite who has risen to notoriety after a practical joke got out of hand and resulted in a widely publicized court appearance. She has a meet-cute with a handsome lawyer who is trying to buy a couple of lovebirds for his sister’s eleventh birthday. Hedren, believing that she’s in a romcom, buys the birds and tracks him down to Bodega Bay, where she learns that her new love interest has an overbearing mother (Jessica Tandy) who ruins all of her son’s potential relationships. Were it not for the ominous lack of sound (other than cawing corvids) that played over the film’s opening credits, one could mistake this for any other period romantic comedy, right down to Hedren’s character being a comically bad “woman driver” and her getting a mild injury (via divebombing seagull) that her love interest can tenderly tend. Other than a typically an offhand mention of the lawyer’s mother’s chickens refusing to eat, nothing seems truly amiss until the birds turn on mankind in full force, and we’re suddenly in a very different kind of movie.

(Tippi Hedren is iconic in this part. I remember commercial parodies of her taking refuge in a phone booth airing well into early aughts, and we probably only stopped seeing them because those are a thing that don’t exist anymore; and that didn’t stop a bird figurine based on her from selling out just two years ago.)

The Birds is not as shocking a swerve as the mid-film shake-up of Psycho, but the shot of one of the residents of the small town being discovered with his eyes completely pecked out is a major departure from an otherwise charming story so far, and things only get more exciting from there. There’s a scene in the diner in town that feels like it became a direct inspiration for so many similar tableaux in a great many of Stephen King’s works, where the residents of a coastal village argue and turn on one another when faced with some external evil force. All hell breaks loose moments later when a man gassing up his car is attacked by the birds, causing him to spill a trail of gasoline that ignites and sets off chaos. The final twenty minutes feature an all-out attack on the farmhouse by screeching fowl, and it’s terrifying. A master lesson in classing up a schlocky idea.

Frenzy (1972)

Not just a bad movie because it’s ugly, cruel, and nasty (although it certainly is all of those things), Frenzy is a film that I can’t help but detest for the shadow that it casts over the rest of Hitchcock’s career. Gone are the subtleties and nuances with regards to sex and violence. Instead of the provocative image of stockings being dried near a fireplace in The 39 Steps or fireworks going off over the water outside of a hotel window when Cary Grant and Grace Kelly kiss in To Catch a Thief, we get a graphic rape sequence. In place of the implication of violence in Psycho, where we never actually see a knife penetrating flesh, but the sequence tricks you into thinking you have, we witness stomach-churning violence. When the ending of North by Northwest was considered too risqué for its implication that Grant and Eva Marie Saint are about to consummate their marriage, Hitchcock cheekily thumbed his nose at the censor board by ending the film on the metaphorically graphic image of a train entering a tunnel. Frenzy shows the director in a different moral era, one in which he can get away with more salacious and explicit images and content, and he goes full bore into it at the end of his career.

Frenzy raises the question of whether or not all of the sly playfulness and clever directorial handiwork in Hitchcock’s oeuvre would have existed if he hadn’t had to outwit and circumnavigate contemporary censorship, ratings boards, and public sentiment. We remember Hitchcock as a master of the discipline because of the subtleties of his work, his deft hand at misleading you via cinematic trickery into thinking you’ve seen something that you didn’t, his impudent impishness at pushing the envelope. Even at the height of his career and amidst nigh-universal acclaim for his work during his golden era, Hitchcock had to be cleverer than the people who could (and would) try to stop his vision, and that made him sharper as a filmmaker. Frenzy’s very existence implies that, with those strictures loosened, an unbridled Hitchcock is craven, schlocky, and base. This is the film that fans the flames of those who argue Hitch was a misogynistic asshole. If there was nothing else left of his body of work but Frenzy, there could be no counterclaim.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Rear Window (1954)

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When we discussed the two Men Who Knew Too Much, Brandon and I commiserated that the updated 1950s version starring James Stewart could not hold a candle to the original Peter Lorre-centered film, but he posited that one could list off Alfred Hitchcock’s three other collaborations with Stewart—Rope, Rear Window, and Vertigo—and confidently call them the director’s masterworks without that being much of a hot take. Rear Window was the first Hitchcock film I ever saw, and I immediately fell in love with it. Through viewings of several others, it remained at the top of that list, until sometime in my late teens I fell head over heels for Notorious. I hadn’t revisited it in a very long time, possibly because I became too familiar with it, but after returning to the well after such a long absence, the water is even sweeter than I remembered.

L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (Stewart) is a WWII vet and photographer who is in the sixth of seven weeks of recuperation after a daring shot at a racetrack that resulted in a broken leg. He is attended every day by wisecracking insurance nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter), who encourages him to settle down with his fashionista girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) before she finds someone better than him. Accustomed to a faster pace of living, Jeff fears that Lisa would be ill-equipped for a life of adventure with him in the often dangerous places that he finds himself on assignment, while Lisa hopes that, as he’s getting older, he’ll be willing to take a more stationary position with his magazine in New York, where they can be together. His only entertainment during his medical imprisonment is voyeuristically observing the neighbors whose windows face the same courtyard as his: Miss Hearing Aid, a sculptor; Miss Lonelyhearts, a woman who can’t seem to find a good man; Miss Torso, a dancer; the songwriter, who can’t seem to get his latest composition just right; and two married couples, one with a little dog that they let down into the courtyard with a basket and the other composed of a supposedly invalid wife and the salesman husband (Raymond Burr) who supports her. When he believes that he has witnessed a murder in one of the apartments, Lisa and Stella become his sidekicks in determining if one of his neighbors is a murderer, or if his mind has gotten so bored in his semi-isolation that it’s begun to play tricks on him.

This is an all-time classic for a reason. Although he struggled with the contradictions of his character in Rope, Stewart shines in this performance, as Jeff is a character who’s rough around the edges and a bit of a jerk, but with whom we remain nonetheless empathetic and sympathetic. At this point in his relationship with Lisa, they are explicitly chaste, as Jeff’s cast has immobilized him in more ways than one, and one gets the feeling that without being able to be intimate with one another and mistake passion for love, he’s come to realize that he doesn’t feel like he and Lisa are actually all that compatible. Unconsciously, he’s pushing her away and making up excuses for why, drawing barriers between them in the form of their class differences (she “belongs to the rarefied atmosphere of Park Avenue” while he lives in Greenwich Village with the other poor, starving artists) and trying to warn her away from joining him in his life of wandering by making it seem unsuitable to her. It isn’t until he sees that she gets the same thrills that he does when they leave a note for the possible murderer to see their reaction that he actually sees her and realizes that they could have a potential future together. Since he only comes to this realization when he sees how she could fit into his life, combined with the fact that he doesn’t cry out for help or try to distract the killer when Lisa falls into their clutches, one could find him difficult to like, and it only really works with Stewart in the role. What I see in that scene is that his realization of his helplessness paralyzes him far more than being injured did, and for the first time he has some concept that a life of adventure could actually be dangerous to her, in reality and not just as a fiction to keep them apart, and understands that he’d rather be with her than not.

More academic critics than I have spilled a great deal of ink over the film’s use of Jeff as the audience surrogate, as his viewpoints into his neighbors’ lives are metaphorically like us watching the movie. There’s also been a great deal of writing about the film’s sexual connotations, especially with regards to the prurience of voyeurism and the phallic nature of Jeff’s telescopic lens. One thing that I haven’t seen discussed is the way that each of the vignettes that Jeff observes has only a partial, fragmented view of the participants, to which he ascribes narratives that he has essentially made up, without realizing that they are all reflective of him. Miss Hearing Aid is nosey, just as he is, as demonstrated when she gets into Mr. Thorwald’s business about how much he’s watering his plants, and when she is frustrated by Miss Torso’s loud music and footfalls, she turns her hearing aid down, just as Jeff tunes out what he doesn’t want to hear. The songwriter is a frustrated artist who is blocked creatively while Jeff is a photographer temporarily caged, and Miss Lonelyhearts is a reflection of what Lisa could become if Jeff continues to waste her youth without commitment; Lonelyhearts changes her mind about overdosing when the songwriter finishes his piece and the two of them listen to it together, in perfect time for Jeff and Lisa to (maybe) commit to one another fully. Miss Torso’s similarities to Lisa are textual, as there is a conversation between Lisa and Jeff one night when she has a few men in her apartment and Jeff compares the two directly, only for Lisa to declare that the woman across the way is “juggling wolves” and that she doesn’t love any of her suitors. When Jeff asks her how she knows, she says “You said it’s just like my apartment, didn’t you?” This proves true in the end, when the dancer’s beloved, a short nerd named Stanley, returns from the war and she takes him passionately into her arms, just as Lisa, who could do a lot better than grumpy old Jeff, really does love her flawed man. It also leaves the open question of which of the couples the two will end up like: the happy newlyweds (whose cracks start to appear in the end), the unhappy Thornwalds (with their one bedbound party), or the dog-owning couple, who only seem to need one another. That’s left for the viewer to ponder.

Every performance here is delightful. Thelma Ritter really shines as the take-no-guff nurse with sharp instincts. One of my favorite jokes in the picture is when she’s trying to advise Jeff, who still sees himself as the young flyboy in a photo taken while he was in the service, that he needs to marry the glamorous, youthful Lisa before it’s too late. She does so in the middle of massaging the gray-haired forty-six year old and calling him “young” also, presumably facetiously. Grace Kelly (25 at the time) looks just about as beautiful as a human being possibly can as she lounges around in gorgeous fashions and gets excited about breaking and entering, and she’s a delight. The limited setting for this one also means a limited main cast, as only five characters ever pass through Jeff’s apartment, where all of the film takes place, although the extended cast does a lot with the little pieces of their lives that we get to see, and the fact that this whole thing was done on a soundstage is also unbelievable. The complexity of it all looks so simple, and it’s pure movie magic. Rear Window is a top-tier Hitchcock and a classic picture in its own right.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Strangers on a Train (1951)

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Strangers on a Train is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s truly great works. The larger body of his thriller work can be largely divided into two subgenres: domestic dramas and stories of international intrigue. The director’s recurring explorations of main characters who are wrongfully accused of something fall into both categories, with domestic “wrong man” thrillers dating all the way back to The Lodger and including other notable examples like Young and Innocent, Spellbound, and, naturally, The Wrong Man. It’s also one of his most frequently homaged and parodied works, with Throw Momma from the Train as the most triumphant example. It’s well worth noting that this might be because the narrative passed through two notable authors before it hit the screen, with the story coming from a novel by Patricia Highsmith (of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Carol fame) and the screenplay featuring work from hard-boiled detective novelist Raymond Chandler, seven years after the man’s first script, for Double Indemnity, which he co-wrote with director Billy Wilder.

Guy Haines (Farley Granger, previously of Rope) is an amateur tennis star traveling by train to visit his estranged wife Miriam, who has become pregnant by one of her extramarital affairs, in order to give her the money that she demands in order to retain a lawyer for their divorce. En route, he encounters an eccentric, lazy manchild of privilege named Bruno Antony (Robert Walker), who recognizes him from both the sports and society pages of the newspapers, as Guy has been romantically linked to Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), the daughter of a senator (Leo G. Carroll), in addition to the notoriety of his sports career. Bruno reveals that he wants nothing more than to draw income from his trust fund but that his attempts at a life of leisure are continuously foiled by his father’s insistence that he work, if not for a living then at least to contribute something and learn the value of a dollar. Bruno guesses at the source of Guy’s agitation and suggests that the two of them “swap murders,” so that Bruno kills Miriam and Guy slays Mr. Antony, in the belief that no one will be able to make the connection. Disturbed, Guy laughs off the suggestion and its supposed cleverness, and gets off at his stop. When he arrives home to Metcalf, Miriam reveals that she’s also become aware of Anne Morton and now refuses to divorce Guy, and will instead force him to support her child by another man. Their row over this is very public, which causes trouble for Guy later after Bruno tracks down and strangles Miriam at a fairground. Despite constant police surveillance, Guy finds himself harassed by Bruno to uphold his end of their “bargain.”

Although many of Hitchcock’s films contain noir elements (Shadow of a Doubt and Foreign Correspondent immediately come to mind), never do they come through as clearly as they do in Strangers on a Train. That really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise given Chandler’s involvement in the picture, as Double Indemnity is the codifying work for many of the elements of that genre. Even in his most beautiful and sumptuous B&W pictures, none of them are as gorgeously monochromatically chiaroscuro as Strangers is. That’s not the only genre convention at play here, either. While we talk about Psycho as the ur-slasher, some of the less lurid elements of the genre are taken from Strangers. One could almost draw a direct line from Bruno’s dark figure cast against the white marble steps of a D.C. government building as a frightened Guy makes his getaway in a cab to the ominous sight of Michael Myers stalking Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. There’s even a kind of killer’s P.O.V. shot on the carnival’s “smoochers’ island” when Bruno finds Miriam alone and his hands come into shot with Guy’s lighter. The film also contains one of the best spectacle setpieces in the Hitchcock canon while also remaining one of the most grounded, as it takes something as commonplace and ordinary as a carnival carousel and turns it into a giant, deadly machine. In typical Hitchcock fashion, this is not the fault of the film’s villain, but of incompetent police who fire a gun into a crowd and miraculously only manage to kill the carousel operator.

Rope and Rebecca are usually thought of as Hitchcock’s major works in the queer canon, with Rope having been based on a play in which the characters were explicitly gay (toned down but still noticeable in the film) and Rebecca’s Mrs. Danvers having an erotic fixation on the late Mrs. de Winter that drives her to burn down Manderley. It would be remiss to leave Strangers on a Train out of that discussion, however. In her later years, Highsmith was insistent that Tom Ripley was not written as a gay man (having reread the novel again earlier this year, I call B.S.) and that the queerness of her work was all subtextual. From what I can gather without getting my hands on her novel (I’m fourth in line with a hold on two copies that my library has), the Guy and Bruno equivalents therein have a relationship that is not unlike that of Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf, with one fixated upon the other in a way that transcends their “bargain.” It’s strong enough that, in the book, Guy does go through with killing Bruno’s father, which dramatically changes the ending. I can’t be certain until I give it a read, but I think that I prefer this ending. Why, without it, we wouldn’t get that wonderfully tense scene of Bruno almost losing the evidence he intends to plant in a storm drain!

Ruth Roman is a bit of a cypher here as Guy’s love interest — serviceable, but not that interesting or exciting. However, her inclusion ensures that we get to spend some time with her precocious kid sister, Barbara (Alfred’s daughter, Patricia Hitchcock), who is a total delight. Whenever Bruno meets Barbara, her similar glasses to Miriam’s gives him a flashback to the murder, which almost results in him throttling a socialite at a government function, which is a great scene that calls back to the gorgeous double composition of Miriam’s murder, reflected in both lenses of her fallen glasses. This is one of the larger roles that Alfie gave Pat, and it makes a case that she could have been included more, but perhaps she was too gracious to take the easy nepo baby route to stardom, unlike others who shall remain nameless.

If you’re planning to make November Noirvember, make sure to put this one on your list.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Trouble with Harry (1955)

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I first saw The Trouble with Harry on a VHS that I bought from a video store on Essen Lane in Baton Rouge that was driven out of business by Blockbuster, around 2008. My roommate at the time hated the film when we watched it together, and I, at the height of my first Alfred Hitchcock phase, defended the film against his criticism. Upon rewatch, however, I must admit that he was right; this is not a good movie. 

That’s a shame, because it opens very promisingly. A young boy named Arnie (Jerry Mathers, aka Beaver Cleaver) is playing with a plastic toy ray gun on an autumnal Vermont hillside when he hears gunshots and drops to the ground. As he continues to explore, he comes upon the dead body of a man dressed in a gray suit. When he runs off to tell his mother, retired (alleged) naval captain Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn, of Miracle on 34th Street fame) emerges from the woods, where he has spent the day hunting for rabbits despite the land being posted. Upon discovery of the same body, he believes that he must have killed the man with a stray shot and resolves to bury the corpse to avoid arrest. His attempts to dispose of the evidence are continuously interrupted, however, first by the appearance of local spinster Miss Gravely (Mildren Natwick) who accepts his explanation and condones his course of action before inviting him to tea that afternoon, then by a wandering hobo who steals the dead man’s shoes, followed by the eccentric local doctor, Greenbow, who is so absorbed in his reading that he fails to notice the body even when he trips over it, and finally by Arnie and his mother, Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine), who identifies the body as that of Harry Worp, her estranged husband, before dragging her son off for lemonades.

All are residents of the small town of Highwater, which appears to have only about four other residents in total. Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe) is a gadabout artist with empty pockets, and although he has failed to sell even one of his paintings, local general store owner Mrs. Wiggs (Mildred Dunnock), a widow, finds his work beautiful, if incomprehensible. Her son, Clay (Royal Dano), is the sheriff’s deputy in the town, who supplements that position’s low income by repairing and reselling antique cars. After Sam and Clay have a brief interaction that demonstrates Sam’s lack of respect for law enforcement and Clay’s simple-minded nature, Sam goes to a scenic spot for some charcoal sketches, drawing the dead man’s feet sticking out from behind a bush without realizing what he’s espied. When he goes to inspect the man, he meets Captain Wiles, who tells him the whole story. From there, Harry’s body is buried, un-buried, interred, dug up, buried again, and then retrieved one final time over the course of a single day, as various parties realize that they may be the party actually responsible for his death.

Like Under Capricorn before it, this one barely qualifies as one of Hitch’s “thrillers,” if one categorizes it that way at all. There’s definitely a mystery, but this is a comedy first and foremost, and a screwball one at that, featuring character studies of the eccentric villagers of Highwater, Vermont. It’s odd that it feels so out of place, as the crew was full of longtime Hitchcock collaborators: composer Bernard Herrmann (nine films together), cinematographer Robert Burks (twelve collaborations, including several of the greats), costuming by Edith Head (eleven films together), and screenplay by John Michael Hayes (only four collaborations, but includes Rear Window). This should be running like a well-oiled machine, and several of the pieces do even if the total is less than the sum of its parts, with the standout positive being the visuals. In the special features for North by Northwest, one can find an advertisement for that film that features the director introducing it as if he were a travel agent selling the viewer on a cross-country trip from New York to Chicago to South Dakota; for all that it’s lacking, The Trouble With Harry could almost function perfectly well as an actual advertisement for Vermont during changing of the leaves. The scenery is so gorgeous and so well photographed that, before the film’s actual plot started to chug along, I was already earmarking this as a potential perennial favorite to watch every fall. What Douglas Sirk and Russell Metty did for New England winters in All That Heaven Allows, Hitchcock and Burks are doing for New England autumns in The Trouble with Harry.

Unfortunately, sumptuous scenery does not a great, or even good, film make. Things begin to tank the moment that Sam appears on screen; the wisecracks he rattles off are neither wise nor cracking, and I genuinely am unable to tell if Forsythe is making the acting choice to render Sam Marlow the most annoying character in the entire Hitchcock canon or if he’s simply trying to do the best he can with a bad script and failing. Unlike the audience, the other characters within the film are charmed by him, which is a baffling choice, although it may be chalked up to the fact that he’s the only man in Highwater who isn’t a child, elderly, or dead. He volunteers to guess Miss Gravely’s age and pegs her at fifty despite her only being forty-two, and not a single woman in this town bashes a cider jug over his head for his impertinence. MacLaine plays Jennifer Rogers like a woman blissed out on pills, which one could hardly blame her for if this were the case (her first husband died six weeks before she learned she was pregnant, and her single brother-in-law married her out of a sense of obligation before leaving her alone on their wedding night because of his horoscope), but she seems to just be like that, and it doesn’t make for exciting viewing. The dialogue for everyone is overwritten, which causes the so-called jokes to mostly land with a dull thud, although I did get a chuckle or two every once in a great while. As a result, although this one is only 100 minutes long, it drags along to its conclusion. The only character I really enjoyed was Mrs. Wiggins, whose half-mean jokes about her dead husband and her fascination with Sam’s (hideous, hideous) paintings give her a depth of character that the others struggle to achieve, as they fall back on cliches and eccentricities instead. 

The DVD I got from the library identifies this as part of the Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection Blu-Ray set, with the cover identifying it as an “Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece.” I regret to inform you that this is a lie, and my college roommate was correct. A film that is only for Hitchcock completists or someone who is looking for a movie to put on, muted, in the background at a harvest festival after-party; don’t trouble yourself with it otherwise.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #274: Jamaica Inn (1939) & Hitchcock Blind Spots

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Welcome to Episode #274 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon & Boomer catch up on some personal Alfred Hitchcock blind spots, starting with his final British production, Jamaica Inn (1939).

00:00 Halloween Streaming Report
02:00 Dead Calm (1989) at Barrett’s Too
05:37 Hitchcock rankings
08:06 Jamaica Inn (1939)
30:20 Rebecca (1940)
51:11 The Wrong Man (1956)
1:15:34 North by Northwest (1959)
1:43:18 Hitch quiz

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

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