Young and Innocent (1937) - Hitchcock Friday #4

Young and Innocent was one of the series of great suspense films that Alfred Hitchcock made in Britain in the mid to late 1930s in which he established himself as one of the major creative talents in the world of motion pictures. The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes are recognised as masterpieces but Young and Innocent is still often, very unfairly, dismissed as Hitchcock Lite. In fact it’s one of the key movies of his career. All the classic Hitchcockian features are there and he’s in complete control of his craft.

A young man named Robert Tisdall (Derrick de Marney) finds a dead woman washed up on a beach. He runs off. Moments later two young women see the body, and they see Robert running off. The police arrive and decide that Robert is the obvious suspect. They don’t believe his story that he thought the woman might still be alive and was running to get help.

We can see how a not very competent policeman inclined to jump to conclusions would see Robert as the prime suspect. We have strong reason to believe that Robert is innocent. We also have strong reason to believe we’ve seen the actual murderer. And we’ve seen the first clue.

The dead woman is movie star Christine Clay. And Robert knew her. That will count against him.

This is an early example of Hitchcock’s dislike of the police. In this instance the police are not malevolent. They are merely stupid, incompetent and lazy. With an obvious suspect in custody they are not interested in investigating the case properly.

The whole criminal justice system is farcically incompetent. Robert escapes from custody with contemptuous ease. Now he sets off to find a vital piece of evidence. On the road he encounters Erica Burgoyne (Nova Pilbeam) in her little motor car. She’s the Chief Constable’s daughter and he had already made her acquaintance while being questioned by the police. Now Erica has to decide whether to turn him in or help him. For various reasons she decides not to turn him in. Erica considers herself to be very good at identifying criminal types and she doesn’t think he looks like a murderer. She’s also kindhearted, the sort of girl likely to have more sympathy for the fox than for the hounds. Robert is also a good-looking charming young man which might have influenced her decision.

You also need to bear in mind the word young in the title. This is not just an attractive likeable couple on the run, they’re also young and rather naïve. Which of course makes us more sympathetic to them. Nova Pilbeam was just eighteen when this movie was made and we assume that her character is about that age. Her behaviour in the movie becomes completely plausible when we realise she’s a teenaged girl. Her whimsical romantic decision to help Robert becomes believable. She’s really not much more than a kid. We assume she’s probably never had a serious love affair before. When she finds that she’s rather attracted to Robert we can believe that she’s been carried away by a romantic fantasy. It’s the sort of adventure the heroine of a romance novel might have. Falling in love with an innocent man on the run!

While Robert is a little older he’s only slightly more mature, or perhaps even just as immature. But we forgive them both.

It might sound like I’m dismissing Erica as a silly child but what makes her so engaging as a character is that she’s simultaneously intelligent and experienced, resourceful and naïve, sensible and impulsive.

I like the relationship between Robert and Erica. It’s playful and affectionate and rather tender but without being sentimental or insipid.

I like Nova Pilbeam a lot in this movie. She’s definitely not a Hitchcock Ice Blonde. She’s too warmhearted for that but she’s lively and amusing.

Maybe de Marney and Pilbeam don’t have the star quality of Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps but they both have charm and they have extraordinary chemistry. You feel that Robert and Erica are just destined to fall in love. And this is a different type of couple on the run movie, it’s a more lighthearted movie with the emphasis more on the romance.

It could be objected that a weakness in the film is that there’s no initial antagonism between the two lead characters. It’s pretty much love at first sight. But that’s the sort of film this is. They’re like two children united against the adult world represented by Erica’s father. It’s not that her father is a bad man. He seems to be a loving and indulgent father but he represents the system of police and courts and laws that can destroy the lives of innocent people. He’s an authority figure and to Hitchcock authority figures are inherently suspect. Both Robert and Erica are somewhat child-like. They both have a childish faith that they will win out in the end because they’re young and in love.

Erica never wavers in her belief in Robert’s innocence. Again it could be objected that it would add dramatic tension if she had a few doubts but much of the enjoyment in this movie comes from the fact that it’s Erica and Robert vs the grown-up world.

The bond between Erica and Robert makes perfect sense. It’s established early on that she’s a sensitive girl who is horrified by violence. Her ideal man is clearly going to be Robert, who is unfailingly gentle towards her. And Robert wants a woman on whom he can shower affection, and he doesn’t mind at all that sometimes she mothers him.

Hitchcock was already ware that he had to appeal to female audiences and this is to a considerable extent a women’s picture. It’s a female coming-of-age movie. At the start Erica is just a girl. She’s had a safe and comfortable but very narrow and very sheltered upbringing. She unquestioningly accepts her father’s view of the world - that the innocent have nothing to fear from the police, that she should accept her father’s authority, that she should obey all the social rules. She believes her father is always right. By the end of the movie she is a woman. She now knows that life is much more complicated, that the innocent do have reason to fear the police, that social rules don’t have to accepted without question, that life is full of shades of grey, that her father can be wrong, that she has to choose the man she wants. And she chooses a man very different from her father. She has, in a couple of days, grown up.

The alternative title, The Girl Was Young, makes it quite clear that the film is all about Erica. She is indeed young but she’s about to enter the adult world.

Young and Innocent was based on Josephine Tey’s novel A Shilling for Candles. Tey was a second-tier mystery novelist who is now quite highly thought of although personally I can’t imagine why. In any case, as with most Hitchcock adaptations, the movie differs markedly from the novel. Charles Bennett and Edwin Greenwood wrote the screenplay.

Network’s DVD offers a reasonable transfer and includes a short documentary on Hitchcock’s British films.

This is also both a “wrong man accused of a crime” story and “couple on the run” movie but, as I said earlier, it’s very much a coming-of-age movie.

The famous visual set-piece in this movie is the wonderful crane shot at the end but the slightly earlier set-piece in the old mine is in its own way just as dazzling and it’s refreshingly original. Hitchcock was already very confident of his ability to pull off these moments of visual brilliance. This is a movie made by a man who had already achieved an extraordinary mastery of the art of film-making. Everything works the way it should and everything works the way Hitchcock knew it would work.

Young and Innocent is a wonderful romantic adventure thriller. This is a genuine feelgood Hitchcock movie. Very highly recommended.

Time Lock (1957)

I have absolutely no idea how Time Lock came to be included in a film noir boxed set (it’s in Kino Lorber’s British Noir II set). This 1957 British thriller has no conceivable connection with film noir. It’s not even a crime thriller. The film noir label gets attached to all sorts of movies that have nothing to do with film noir but this may be the most spectacular case of mislabelling that I’ve ever come across.

That’s not to say that Time Lock is a bad movie. It’s just not a crime movie. It’s a “rescuers racing against time” thriller.

It’s Friday afternoon and the manager and chief accountant of the South York branch of the Crown Canada Bank in Toronto are closing up the vault. The accountant, Colin Walker (Lee Patterson) has just set the vault’s time lock. Just as they’re about to swing the door closed there is a car accident. While everybody is distracted Walker’s six-year-old son Stephen sneaks into the vault unnoticed. The door is swung shut before anybody realises the boy is inside.

The time lock means that the vault cannot be opened until 9 o’clock Monday morning - that means the boy will be locked in the vault for sixty-three hours. But there’s nowhere near enough air in the vault to last sixty-three hours. The air might last ten hours. It might last a little longer than that, there’s no way of being sure.

And there’s no way to open the time lock. As Colin Walker explains, that’s the reason banks use time locks. They’re fool-proof.

The time lock cannot be opened but if the boy is to be saved they’re going to have to open it.

The main hope lies in contacting Pete Dawson. He’s the bank’s vault expert. If anyone can find a way to defeat the time lock it’s Pete Dawson. That’s if they can find a way to contact him on the weekend, which means they’d have to know where he is and that’s exactly what they don’t know.

The police have been called but they have no way to open the time lock either.

Until Pete Dawson can be found the only thing to do is to try to cut through the vault door with acetylene torches. The problem is that the vault was specifically designed to make it impossible to cut through the door. The door isn’t just steel, it’s steel backed by layers of other metals which apparently makes it all but impossible to burn though.

The other option is to go through the walls of the vault but the walls are composed of fourteen inches of reinforced concrete interspersed with four layers of steel bars. Again, the walls were designed to be impossible to break through. The vault is in fact impregnable.

There doesn’t seem to be any weakness in the design of the vault but if there is a weakness Pete Dawson will find it. But Pete Dawson has not yet been found.

This movie puts the parents of the boy, and the audience, through the emotional wringer. The people working feverishly to rescue young Stephen Walker have no idea if he is still alive, and the audience doesn’t know either.

The drama has become a huge news story, with a huge crows gathered outside the bank and with countless people following the drama on the radio. That proves to be an advantage - the radio station is able to broadcast messages which makes it possible to assemble the equipment needed for the rescue bid, and volunteers are recruited from the crowd to work on breaking through the vault.

The acting reaches no great heights. Lee Patterson was a fine actor who could play villains or heroes or simply men caught up in nightmarish situations but he simply isn’t given anything to work with here. The characters are undeveloped. Which may perhaps have been intentional - it’s the race against time that matters here and too much focus on the characters would have been a distraction. Look out for Sean Connery in a small part.

The setup for this movie is vaguely reminiscent of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole but the tone couldn’t be more different. Ace in the Hole is a deeply cynical misanthropic movie. The characters in Time Lock by contrast are all decent people doing their best. Even the radio reporter is genuinely anxious to help. The mood might be grim and tense as time runs out for the boy but Time Lock has a certain optimism about human nature. Whether the boy will be saved or not we don’t know but in this crisis people work together to at least try to save him.

Director Gerald Thomas was best known for the Carry On movies but he was actually quite versatile. In the same year he directed Time Lock he directed the extremely good crime thriller The Vicious Circle (also included in this Kino Lorber set). In Time Lock he certain shows that he knew how to build tension. His brother Peter Thomas wrote the script, based on a play by Arthur Hailey (better known for his novels Airport and Hotel).

Kino Lorber’s transfer is excellent. The movie was shot in black-and-white in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio.

Time Lock is a very effective emotional suspense thriller with no crimes and no villains. It’s a low budget movie with only a couple of sets. It works because it’s so basic - the central idea is excellent and the movie is tightly focused on that one central idea. There’s no characterisation and no bravura acting performances to distract from what is a very simple but very effective plot. This is movie-making stripped down to the bare essentials. And it just works. All it has going for it is a good story, and that’s enough.  Highly recommended.

Hitchcock Friday #3: Marnie (1964)

Hitchcock was well and truly on a roll at the time he made Marnie. North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds - not just major successes but movies that to some extent redefined their genres. North by Northwest took the spy film out of the shadows and the fog and sleazy back alleys and brought it out into the bright sunshine and added lots of style and wit. This was a world of rich sophisticated spies. It upped the ante for action-adventure spy movies. Psycho was a sensation, a 1960 feature film not merely made in black-and-white and in the old Academy aspect ratio but made in the style of his successful TV series. And it upped the ante in screen violence. The Birds challenged genre definitions - is it a science fiction movie or a horror movie? And Hitchcock dared to make such a movie without providing the audience with any explanations. The events depicted in the movie are as enigmatic at the end as they were at the start.

And then came Marnie. To some it’s the last truly great Hitchcock film. And it was also something of a sensation. It’s a psycho-sexual thriller with the emphasis on the sex. The whole movie is about sex.

Marnie (Tippi Hedren) is a thief and a liar. Having just stolen $10,000 from one employer she gets a job with the Rutland publishing company. She’s intending to rob them as well. She has however reckoned without Mark Rutland (Sean Connery). Her previous victims had been easy. They’d been entranced by her beauty and had no idea she was setting them up to rob them. Mark Rutland is certainly not indifferent to her feminine charms but he has Marnie’s game figured out more or less from the beginning. He’s playing a game with her. It amuses him and it excites him.

The key scene in the movie is the one in which Marnie sees a photo of a cat on Mark’s desk. He tells her the cat is a jaguarundi and that he’s trained her. When he tells her that the only thing he has trained her to do is to trust him Marnie is unimpressed. Mark points out that learning to trust is a very big thing if you’re a jaguarundi. He clearly intends to train Marnie the same way. He intends to train her to trust him.

It all sounds vaguely sinister but in fact, in both cases, Mark’s intentions are not sinister at all. It is in the best interests of the jaguarundi to learn to trust him. His feelings for the cat are entirely tender. He likes caring for frightened wild animals. And it’s in Marnie’s best interests to learn to trust him. She is a frightened wild animal and he genuinely cares for her.

As you may have gathered the political incorrectness levels of this movie are off the scale. These days you would hardly get away with a movie in which the hero trains a woman the way he trains an animal.

Marnie feels the way the cat felt at first - trapped and bewildered.

Training Marnie proves to be quite a challenge. It’s obvious from the start that she is terrified of men and that the reason for this is that she is terrified of sex.

They end up marrying, possibly a bad decision for both of them. The marriage is, predictably, a disaster. Marnie refuses to have sex with him. Mark is determined not to give up, he is convinced that her problems can be solved, but he soon finds he has even bigger problems to deal with as Marnie’s past catches up with her.

Casting Sean Connery was a masterstroke. Mark has to be incredibly charming and sexy. We have to believe that he is so charming and masculine and sexy that Marnie, in spite of her fears, cannot help being attracted to him, and that in spite of her terror of sex she does feel some physical attraction towards him. In 1964 there weren’t too many women who could have resisted Sean Connery. But Mark also has to be fundamentally kind. He really does not want to hurt Marnie. Connery gets this across very effectively.

Tippi Hedren has a tricky rôle which she handles extremely well. Marnie has to be convincingly sexually repressed, a woman who never lets her guard down around men. At the same time we have to believe that under the repressed exterior she has a woman’s normal emotional and sexual feelings. She is the iciest of Hitchcock’s Ice Blondes but she has to convince us that there’s fire beneath the ice. Marnie is also a very unsympathetic character. The root cause of her problems is not her fault but she won’t let anyone help her and she reacts nastily and aggressively when someone does try to help her. And she just goes on lying. It’s probably a realistic portrayal of such a disturbed woman and you have to give Hedren credit for being prepared to let us see Marnie’s unpleasant side.

Marnie fits into a sub-genre of which I’m strangely fond - the psychoanalytic mystery thriller. The delicious thing about Hollywood psychoanalytic mystery thrillers is that they always get the psychoanalytic stuff hopelessly garbled and throw a lot of delightfully nonsensical psychobabble at us. In Marnie the psychological motivations are at least plausible. Sexual dysfunction resulting from some shocking event in the person’s past is plausible enough.

At the time audiences would also have been quite willing to see Marnie’s kleptomania as sexual in origin.

Marnie changed the rules of this genre by putting the focus squarely on sex. Marnie is not mad. The only thing wrong with her is her sexual problem, but it’s a problem that is blighting her life. She does love Mark but their marriage is not going to work until she learns to embrace the sexual side of marriage.

The film was based on Winston Graham’s novel Marnie which gives a lot more of Marnie’s backstory. The novel is worth reading.

My theory on Hitchcock is that he made his 60s movies at the wrong time. Torn Curtain was made in 1966 at the height of Bond Fever but it feels like a 1950s spy movie. Marnie should perhaps have been made a couple of years later. In 1964 the Production Code was crumbling but Hitchcock still had to pull his punches a little when dealing with the sexual aspects which are the core of the movie. A couple of years later he could have given it just a bit more of a sexual charge.

The extras on the DVD include fascinating interviews with Joseph Stefano, who wrote the original treatment, and Evan Hunter who was hired to write the screenplay and subsequently fired by Hitchcock. Both writers disliked changes that Hitchcock made to the story. When you watch the movie it’s obvious that they were dead wrong and Hitchcock was right. Hunter disliked the scene in which Mark rapes Marnie. Hitchcock, correctly, saw it as crucial. Stefano was unhappy that the psychiatrist character was eliminated for the movie. Personally I’m thankful that Hitchcock again made the correct decision and eliminated a character who could only have been tedious, unnecessary and annoying.

Marnie basically works because Hitchcock knew how to make the story work. His instincts were correct, and the movie had quite an impact at the time. It’s one of Hitch’s most interesting films and it’s highly recommended.

Other great psychoanalytic mystery thrillers are of course Hitchcock’s own Spellbound and (to a lesser extent) Psycho, the obscure but interesting Bewitched (1945), Shock (1946, with Vincent Price) and Otto Preminger’s criminally underrated Whirlpool (1949).

Lisbon (1956)

Lisbon was Ray Milland’s second picture as producer and director and he starred in the film as well. It was made by Republic Pictures and was shot in Republic’s budget version of Cinemascope and in colour. With an impressive cast and a lot of location shooting in Portugal this was a fairy ambitious production.

Aristides Mavros (Claude Rains) is a very rich and very successful businessman operating entirely on the wrong side of the law in Lisbon. In a clever opening sequence we learn everything we need to know about him - he is smooth, manipulative, ruthless and totally lacking in any sense of morality. He is also charming and intelligent.

Mavros is concerned about the activities of a rival smuggler, Captain Jack Evans (Ray Milland). He decides that he needs to find out a great deal more about Jack Evans so he offers him $10,000 to carry out a simple errand.

All Jack has to do is collect a package from an American woman when she arrives in Portugal. The woman is Sylvia Merrill (Maureen O’Hara). We discover that Mrs Merrill is in Portugal to try to get her husband back. Mr Merrill is a very wealthy businessman who is currently in prison in an Eastern Bloc country. Sylvia Merrill has tried to get the US State Department to help her but she has become impatient with their unsuccessful efforts. She has decided to pay Mavros a quarter of a million dollars to arrange for her husband’s escape.

Mavros proudly tells Sylvia that his family have been thieves for six generations. He is a thief, but he is a reliable thief.

Mrs Merrill really does want her husband back. Of course Mavros points out that if Mr Merrill were to meet with a fatal accident Mrs Merrill would then be a beautiful and very very rich widow. Sylvia Merrill is horrified by the suggestion. Such an idea had never occurred to her.

This movie proceeds in a somewhat leisurely manner but that’s necessary in order to make us aware of the conflicting motivations of the characters and the complicated situation in the Mavros household. Mavros has a secretary named Selwyn who carries out all the duties such a post requires. Mavros also has four other secretaries, all young and female. They don’t appear to have any actual duties at all. At least, no secretarial duties.

Mavros treats his employees with a mixture of generosity and whimsicality with some dashes of emotional manipulation and cruelty. He buys the four girls gorgeous dresses but if they misbehave he burns their favourite dresses.

One of these secretaries, Maria Madalena (Yvonne Furneaux) misbehaves frequently. The situation quickly becomes more complicated. Mavros’s very dangerous bodyguard/henchman Serafim (Francis Lederer) is obsessed with Maria Madalena but Maria Madalena is becoming obsessed with Captain Jack Evans. And there’s a bit of a mutual obsession developing between Evans and Mrs Merrill. There’s plenty of potential here for trouble.

Captain Evans has the job of picking up Sylvia Merrill’s husband, having been chosen for this task because his boat, the Orca, is fast enough to outrun any official vessels that might try to interfere. And at this stage we’re not quite sure which way any of the key characters is going to jump.

The exotic settings (the movie was shot entirely in Portugal) help a good deal. Milland handles the directing duties very capably although the pacing is just a little slow at times.

The acting is a major plus. Claude Rains has the plum rôle as the charmingly immoral Mavros and he makes the most of it. Ray Milland is an effective hero as Evans, a man who is a bit of a villain himself but who is not quite sure just how villainous he’s prepared to be. Maureen O’Hara is nicely ambiguous as Mrs Merrill. Yvonne Furneaux is, as usual, extremely good as the feisty eccentric and totally unpredictable Maria Madalena.

Kino Lorber’s DVD release (they’re released this one on Blu-Ray as well) looks pretty good and this is apparently the first time the movie has been available in a decent transfer in the correct aspect ratio. There’s an informative audio commentary by Toby Roan.

Lisbon is not a great movie by any means but it’s an entertaining low-key thriller with some very fine performances. It’s definitely recommended, especially for those who like their thrillers set in exotic locations.

Another pretty favourable view of this movie can be found at Riding the High Country.

Hitchcock Friday #2 Rear Window (1954)

There aren’t too many films more daunting to review than Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, released by Paramount in 1954. It is almost universally regarded as one of Hitchcock’s best films (there are those who rate it as his best) and apart from Vertigo it’s unlikely that any Hitchcock movie has had so much written about it.

The plot is simple and since there are very few people who haven’t seen this movie it can be disposed of quickly. L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (James Stewart) is a news photographer recuperating from a broken leg. He’s basically immobile and he’s bored and grumpy. His only amusement is watching the neighbours in the apartment building opposite. He thinks he sees a murder and the question then is what to do about it and how to convince the police that there really has been a murder. His girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly) gets caught up in the drama that then unfolds.

That this is a movie about voyeurism is of course perfectly obvious, and it’s equally obvious that not only is Jeff a voyeur, we in the audience become voyeurs as well. As does Hitchcock. But then movie-making and movie-viewing are essentially voyeuristic. This movie does go a bit beyond that - what matters is that voyeurs often misunderstand what they see.

It has to be emphasised that Jeff is not just a guy who happens to notice the goings-on in the apartments opposite. He watches his neighbours obsessively. And given that several of those neighbours are attractive young women who are often unaware that they are being observed while they wander about their apartments half-naked (and we assume that at times they’re probably completely naked) it’s fair to say that there is an element of sexual voyeurism in Jeff’s apartment-watching activities. Hitchcock emphasises this right at the start by including what is as close as you’ll get in a 1954 Hollywood movie to a nude scene. Although the woman (Jeff refers to her as Miss Torso) has her back to the camera she is clearly topless. It’s an important moment because Hitchcock is making it quite clear that one of the attractions of this voyeurism hobby for Jeff is seeing young ladies naked.

The 50s was the decade in which Jimmy Stewart shed his wholesome homespun image and started taking darker rôles for directors such as Hitchcock and Anthony Mann. Often very dark rôles. This change of image started badly with Stewart being horribly miscast in Hitchcock’s Rope and making a complete hash of his performance. By 1954 Stewart had however discovered how to really burrow into the darkest recesses of the souls of his characters.

Let’s be honest. Jeff is not a nice guy. Given his frustration at his immobility we can perhaps excuse his being bad-tempered but he is frequently cruel to Lisa. She is a woman whose feelings are easily hurt and Jeff seems to delight in hurting her. OK, we get it that he is worried about being trapped into marriage (he hates the idea of giving up his globe-trotting lifestyle as a roving press photographer) but he’s obviously keen to continue the relationship without marrying her. This was 1954, when married couples in Hollywood movies still slept in separate beds, so we can’t be given any indication that Jeff and Lisa might be sleeping together. Even if we forgive him for stringing her along it’s hard to forgive him for being rather nasty about it.

One thing you have to do with Hollywood movies made during the days of the Production Code is read between the lines when it comes to personal relationships. The relationship between Jeff and Lisa had to be portrayed, on the surface, in a way that would not upset the moral busybodies of the time. So, on the surface, Jess has been too busy with his career to be distracted by sex and Lisa is a virgin who is saving herself for her wedding night. Given the social milieus that Jeff and Lisa inhabit we might be inclined to be very sceptical that their relationship has remained non-sexual. There is one tantalising hint. When Lisa makes her first appearance in the movie she just suddenly appears in Jeff’s apartment while he’s dozing. The most logical explanation is that she has a key and she let herself in, which would imply that their relationship is more intimate than it appears to be on the surface.

Hitchcock teases us about their relationship. Lisa decides to stay the night in Jeff’s apartment and we’re obviously meant to doubt whether they’re going to be able to keep their hands off each other. Hitchcock wasn’t allowed to be overt about sex but he sure knew how to tease.

Jeff is a middle-aged man who wants the carefree irresponsible lifestyle of youth. And of course he’s a Peeping Tom. So not a very sympathetic character at all, although he does soften as the film progresses. Maybe he starts to grow up, or maybe his feelings towards Lisa become a bit more protective.

Rear Window resembles Suspicion in being a movie about the obsessive nature of suspicion and the way it grows, often based on very thin evidence. If we could all see glimpses into other people’s private lives we would probably misinterpret everything we saw and construct wild fantasies about those people’s lives. Jumping to conclusions is human nature.

Rear Window is also about relationships and the difficulty of finding a relationship that satisfies both parties. In those apartment that Jeff watches there are failed marriages, stormy marriages, lonely people who wish they were married and happy marriages. Jeff’s conclusions about the lives of the people he watches are usually wrong. He likes watching people but he doesn’t understand them too well. He certainly doesn’t understand women. He will have to learn to understand Lisa.

And maybe Lisa needs to learn a bit more about Jeff. At the end we’re left thinking that maybe they’ll learn to compromise, and maybe they won’t. Their love has been strengthened but we can’t help feeling that they’re still wildly incompatible.

Rear Window is of course a technical triumph. That huge amazing set was built was knocking out the floor of a sound stage - they needed the basement as well to accommodate the set. What really matters is the way Hitchcock uses that set. He uses it to give us information but the information is sometimes deliberately misleading. Like Jeff we can watch these people but we’re likely to misinterpret what we see.

One of the things that I find really intriguing is that at the end of the movie we don’t know much more about Jeff’s neighbours than we knew at the beginning. We’re still only seeing them through Jeff’s eyes and he’s been wrong before. We get what appears to be a resolution of Miss Torso’s story but it’s actually very very ambiguous. We never hear Thorvald’s side of the story. And most crucially we don’t even know if Jeff and Lisa are going to get married or whether their relationship has a future. We don’t get a neat Hollywood resolution for anything.

This is a movie about murder, sex and love. Three things that Hitchcock was extremely interested in (and of course he knew that audiences shared these interests). And it’s just about perfect.

Barnacle Bill (1957)

Barnacle Bill (AKA All At Sea) is a very late Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness. It was directed by Charles Frend with a script by T.E.B. Clarke. Guinness apparently wasn’t pleased with it but it’s actually quite charming.

Guinness plays Captain William Horatio Ambrose, a man whose ancestors all had distinguished careers in the Royal Navy. Ambrose naturally joined the navy himself but then made an appalling discovery. He suffered from seasickness. He suffered so severely from seasickness that he was unable to go to sea at all. He spent the war in a shore posting (testing seasickness remedies for the Navy). He remained in the Navy after the war, reaching the rather high rank of Captain. But due to his disability he naturally never held a seagoing command. Having now retired from the service he has decided it is finally time for him to have his own command and he invests his life savings in his new ship. Only it isn’t a ship, it’s a rundown seaside amusement pier. But he can at least derive some vicarious enjoyment from the presence of the sea all around him.

Captain Ambrose naturally decides to run the pier on strictly naval lines, much to the amusement of most of his employees (apart from Tommy, an ex-Navy man who is delighted to be appointed as First Officer).

Ambrose decides he’s going to live aboard the pier and he takes up residence in the Crazy Cottage.

Ambrose has plans to revitalise the pier but he runs into strong opposition from the corrupt and petty authoritarian local council. Ambrose is not dismayed. He has the Nelson spirit. He presses ahead with his plans, which lead to increasingly zany situations including an epic bloodless naval battle.

The town of Sandcastle is a rather dull place, mainly due to the fact that the council is as moralistic as it is corrupt. Fun is hard to find in Sandcastle. Ambrose intends to change that. He has plans for a dance hall and a bar. The young people of the town seem at first to be juvenile delinquents but actually they’re just bored. Captain Ambrose converts them from enemies into friends and allies.

Amrose could have been merely a ridiculous figure but he’s not played that way. He is actually a man of firm resolve and steely determination. Britannia did not rule the waves by surrendering to tyrants. Guinness manages to make Ambrose a very amusing figure but with genuine dignity. We laugh with Captain Ambrose, not at him.

The supporting cast is more than adequate.

The pier itself is a star attraction, being gradually transformed from a seedy run-down semi-ruin to a kind of luxury cruise liner, albeit a stationary one.

This is in fact a very good-natured movie. Apart from the local councillors, who are a cowardly, pettifogging and money-grubbing lot, the characters are all played in much the same way - they are humorous but very likeable.

There’s a mix of verbal and physical humour and while it’s not always laugh-out-loud funny it is is consistently chuckle-inducing. It even has a message - never back down to petty tyrants and never give up. But the message is never laboured and the emphasis is on lighthearted amusement.

The problem with this movie is that you’re likely to be tempted to compare it to the truly great Ealing comedies. It isn’t quite in that league. It has a certain charm, it’s an amusing feelgood movie, it has some fine visual moments and it has Alec Guinness in fine fettle.

Kino Lorber have released this one on DVD paired with another nautical-themes Alec Guinness comedy, The Captain’s Paradise. There are no extras but for a reasonable price you get two movies and you get excellent transfers.

If you enjoy the 1950s style of British comedy then you’ll want to buy this set. And you’ll find Barnacle Bill rather delightful in its own low-key way. Recommended.

Hitchcock Friday #1: Suspicion (1941)

The first thing that needs to be said about Suspicion is that it’s a very difficult movie to discuss without revealing spoilers. Most online reviews of the film are loaded with spoilers. I’ve tried to give spoiler warnings where they’re strictly necessary but any discussion of the film is likely to offer hints about the ending. Ideally it’s a movie to watch before you read anything at all about it.

Suspicion is an Alfred Hitchcock movie that produces strongly polarised reactions in people and among more serious cinephiles it has to be said that the negative reactions outweigh the positive.

There are a number of reasons for this. This film is one of the more notorious examples of the combination of the Production Code and studio timidity forcing a film-maker to make a movie that was radically different from the one he wanted to make. Hitchcock himself was extremely frustrated by studio interference in the making of the film, and that in itself causes many Hitchcock fans to judge it harshly. It’s also a movie that differs in very significant ways from the novel on which it was based (Before the Fact by Anthony Berkeley writing under the name Francis Iles) and that’s something of which many movie fans strongly disapprove.

It’s possible that some of the negative feelings towards this movie stem from the fact that not only does it differ from the source novel, it belongs to an entirely different genre. The novel is both an inverted mystery and psychological crime novel. The movie is a romantic melodrama with suspense elements. It’s very much what was known at the time as a women’s picture.

It is always a mistake to judge a movie based on its fidelity to the source novel. The novel and the film are such radically different art forms. I personally think that the secret to appreciating Suspicion is to forget the source novel completely. Before the Fact and Suspicion tell totally different stories. Suspicion needs to be judged as an entirely separate work of art. It’s also worth pointing out that Before the Fact is not the brilliant book that some critics of the film would have us believe. It’s a deeply flawed book.

I think we also need to judge the movie as it exists. Hitchcock wanted a completely different ending that would have made Suspicion a completely different film. Perhaps that film would have been a better film, perhaps not. What matters is whether the film as it exists works, and whether the ending that was finally chosen works.

Before the Fact who focused on a planned murder - a man is very definitely planning to kill his wife. Suspicion is focused on a woman who thinks that her husband may be planning to kill her but she cannot be sure, and the viewer cannot be sure. It is only a suspicion. It is as its title suggests a film all about suspicion. It is about the effect that suspicion has on a marriage and most of all it is about the effect of her suspicions on the woman.

The woman is Lina, played by Joan Fontaine. And that brings us to another controversial aspect of the film. A lot of people don’t like Joan Fontaine. In her two best-known films (this one and Rebecca) she plays a mousy vulnerable female at the mercy of a possibly murderous husband. There are those who find Miss Fontaine’s performances insipid. Personally I just think that she was very very good at playing these sorts of rôles and that she played them with skill and finesse.

Lina has just met Johnnie (Cary Grant). Johnnie is handsome, debonair, charming and funny but he is also very definitely masculine. And he has a reputation as a bad boy. No woman could resist him and Lina certainly has no chance at all of resisting him. Especially when she has just discovered that her own parents think of her as spinsterish and have resigned themselves to the fact that she will never find a man. There is no way now that she’s going to let Johnnie go - whatever people think of her she has the handsomest most virile most charming man in the district pursuing her, and if he doesn’t pursue her hard enough then she’ll pursue him.

Lina isn’t just trying to prove that she’s not the eternal spinster. Johnnie excites her as no man has ever excited her. It’s an excitement both sexual and romantic.

The first part of the movie is wildly romantic. Johnnie sweeps Lina off her feet and she loves it and we share her joy. Then the movie switches gears as Lina discovers that Johnnie is irresponsible, unreliable, untruthful and not very honest. But he’s still charming and funny and a jot to be around and this section of the movie is essentially romantic comedy, and it’s delightfully amusing. This is where Beaky (Nigel Bruce) enters the picture and adds even more touches of comedy.

Lina has Johnnie that Johnnie is a scoundrel but he’s a loveable scoundrel and we understand why she can’t stop loving him.

Then the movie switches gears yet again and we find ourselves watching a mystery suspense thriller. Lina has put certain pieces of evidence together in her mind and they add up to murder. She suspects that Johnnie is, or could be, a murderer. Perhaps he plans to murder Beaky. Perhaps he plans to murder Lina. There are pieces of evidence that support both theories.

One of the interesting things about this movie is that we see everything entirely through Lina’s eyes, but it’s Johnnie’s motivations that matter. We only know what Lina knows and we only see what Lina sees. Some of Johnnie’s actions certainly seem suspicious but that’s partly because we never see them from his point of view. If we did they might seem totally innocent. And of course Lina cannot cross-check her interpretations of events with Johnnie. She cannot come right out and ask him to explain certain actions, because Johnnie is by nature secretive and a liar and his explanations of his actions could never be entirely trusted. Johnnie is secretive about things and lies about things even when they are in fact relatively innocuous. We inevitably come to share Lina’s suspicions because we’re totally inside her head. We know that she’s right to consider Johnnie to be a scoundrel and a liar but is he a murderer?

The biggest question that needs to be raised is whether the movie cheats a little. Is Cary Grant’s performance at times deliberately misleading, making Johnnie seem either too obviously sinister or too obviously innocent and harmless? His performance just doesn’t seem consistent. OK, so Johnnie has a dark side as well as a sweet amiable side but Grant’s performance veers too sharply and wildly between the two to be totally believable. There were times when I expected him to start twirling his moustache like a Victorian melodrama villain. Cary Grant’s performance in this movie has been much praised but I’m going to be a heretic and suggest that it’s the film’s weak link. A lot of people don’t like Fontaine’s performance because Lina’s behaviour exasperates or angers them (a lot of modern critics want Lina to behave like a woman of the 21st century) but I think Fontaine is brilliant and carries the film.

The justification for all this is I suppose that we are seeing things through Lina’s eyes and by the halfway point of the story it is possible that her suspicions have made her slightly deranged, so what we’re seeing is not reality but Lina’s distorted version of reality. If we accept this interpretation then we are in fact dealing with an unreliable narrator, which means we can’t trust anything we see. Lina constantly shuttles back and forth between extreme (possibly excessive) suspicion and extreme (possibly excessive) credulity.

I imagine that everybody reading this knows how the film ends (and in what follows I’m not revealing explicit details about the ending) but just in case I’ll add a spoiler warning anyway.

*spoilers follow*

Almost everybody considers the ending to be a contrived cop-out and this is true to some extent but the ending is not necessarily as bad as some would have us believe. There are two things to bear in mind at the end. Johnnie has been caught out lying over and over again and he always comes up with another plausible lie to excuse himself. Does he do this again right at the end? And at the end we’re still seeing things through Lina’s eyes, so we may still be seeing a distorted view of reality. There is a degree of ambiguity about the ending.

*end spoilers*

Suspicion is nowhere near as bad as its detractors claim but it is a flawed film. When watching any of Hitchcock’s 1940s movies you always have to bear in mind that what you’re watching is not the movie Hitchcock wanted to make. That’s the great tragedy of Hitchcock in the 40s.

There's another interesting discussion of this film at discussions at ahsweetmysteryblog.