Shadow of a Doubt (1943) - Hitchcock Friday #12

Shadow of a Doubt, released in 1943, is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most admired movies. For some bizarre reason it sometimes gets labelled as a film noir despite not having a single one of the defining characteristics of film noir.

The Newtons are a thoroughly conventional American family living in a small town in California. The eldest daughter Charlie (Teresa Wright) is very excited by the news that her favourite uncle, her mother’s younger brother, is coming for an extended visit. Charlie Newton was named after her Uncle Charlie, Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten).

Young Charlie slowly comes to suspect that her beloved uncle, whom she hero-worships, may be a criminal on the run. She slowly pieces together bits of evidence.

We know that Charlie is certainly on the run from something. That’s obvious right from the start. Of course a man might be on the run from many things - gambling debts, gangsters, an unhappy relationship, an irate husband, a minor scandal. All we know is that two guys have been following him.

We also know that Uncle Charlie is rather secretive. He hates having his photograph taken. He hates being questioned about his past.

Those two guys who were following Uncle Charlie turn up in town. They seem very interested in the Newton household. A bit too interested.

Young Charlie is disturbed by the arrival of detectives. She cannot believe Uncle Charlie could have done anything seriously wrong. But suspicion has taken root.

This movie makes an intriguing companion piece to Suspicion, made two years earlier. Both deal with a woman tortured by suspicions about a man for whom she cares. In both cases all the woman has are suspicions. She has no hard evidence.

Hitchcock was a great believer in the essential ingredient of suspense - the audience should know more than the protagonist knows. The suspense comes from the fact that our knowledge makes us fear for the protagonist’s safety. In Suspicion and Shadow of a Doubt he varied that formula. In both these movies the audience also has nothing but suspicions. We don’t know if the man in question is guilty or not. These are movies that combine mystery with suspense.

Both movies have an atmosphere of paranoia but that is not enough to qualify a movie as film noir. Shadow of a Doubt does not employ voiceover narration or flashbacks. The protagonist is not a true noir protagonist. Shadow of a Doubt is beautifully shot (by Joseph Valentine) but it does not have the classic noir visual style. Both these movies are psychological thrillers as well as suspense thrillers but their noir credentials are very very dubious indeed. If Shadow of a Doubt is film noir then every psychological thriller ever made is film noir.

Hitchcock was notorious for preferring to avoid location shooting but unusually Shadow of a Doubt was shot mostly on location. This was his first movie to have a really strong American flavour. Small town America does not serve as a picturesque background here. It is part of the very fabric of the story. It was as if Hitch wanted to shot on location to immerse himself fully in Americana and it worked.

Joseph Cotten gives one of his best performances. Uncle Charlie may or may not be a murderer but he definitely has a jaundiced view of life and yet he has charm and vitality. He’s complex and contradictory. Cotten manages to make him very likeable and very worrying at the same time. Teresa Wright is OK. The support cast is fine. Young Charlie’s father and his pal Herb (Hume Cromyn) provide comic relief with their shared interest in murder mysteries.

As it stands Shadow of a Doubt is a more successful movie than Suspicion although had Hitchcock been allowed to go wth his original ending for Suspicion then it would have been the better movie. Shadow of a Doubt still stands as one of Hitchcock’s two 1940s masterpieces (along with Rebecca). Very highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray looks great and includes an excellent documentary dating from 2000.

Act of Murder (1964)

Act of Murder is a late (1964) entry in the British Merton Park Studios Edgar Wallace B-movie cycle.

The film plunges us straight into a romantic triangle. Actress Anne Longman (Justine Lord) quit the theatre to marry Ralph Longman (Anthony Bate). This did not please Tim Ford (John Carson). But given that Ralph is charming, civilised and rich and Tim is a whiny loser actor she probably made the sensible choice.

Anne and Ralph live in a farmhouse in the country. They are planning a holiday. They are going to swap houses with a very nice middle-aged couple in London. They’re looking forward to a couple of weeks in a luxury London flat.

The plot twists start early in this movie and they keep coming, and they’re clever and unexpected. Which means I’m not going to tell you anything at all about the plot, other than the fact that there are lots of things that are not what they seem.

Lewis Davidson’s screenplay really is impressive.

At first the plot twists are just odd and puzzling. Then they become creepy and disturbing.

We know that someone has some kind of devious plan but we have no idea which of the main characters that someone might be.

There’s a mystery here but we’re also in psychological thriller territory.

We can think of an obvious solution to part of the mystery but that leaves some nagging questions unanswered.

The paranoia level slowly builds.

Like most of the directors involved in this cycle of films Alan Bridges worked mostly in television but he did a few feature films including the rather good slightly offbeat 1966 science fiction movie Invasion. He does a pretty nice job here. Act of Murder has just a bit more style and polish than you expect in a low-budget movie, with interesting camera angles and a few welcome visual flourishes.

Anthony Bate and John Carson were always reliable actors and they’re both very good here, as is Justine Lord. All three leads manage to be ambiguous, which is exactly as it should be. None of them play their roles as obvious villains, but they don’t play them as paragons of virtue either. All the characters, including the minor characters, are to some degree morally compromised.

I don’t think any of these Edgar Wallace B-movies could possibly be described as film noir but this one does perhaps have just the faintest noir tinge.

There’s also an almost-nude scene which was about as daring as you could be in Britain in 1964. There’s definitely plenty of sexual tension.

Act of Murder is a very well-crafted above-average crime melodrama B-movie with a pleasingly hard-edged nasty streak to it. Highly recommended.

Act of Murder is included in Network’s Edgar Wallace Mysteries volume 6 DVD boxed set. These wonderful boxed sets are unfortunately becoming a bit hard to find now but if you come across them grab them. The 16:9 enhanced transfer (these movies were all shot in black-and-white and widescreen) is very nice.

West of Zanzibar (1928)

West of Zanzibar is a 1928 silent tropical melodrama with a major helping of horror. It was directed by Tod Browning and stars Lon Chaney.

It was remade four years later as a talkie (Kongo), directed by William J. Cowen and starring Walter Huston. Which is the better version? That’s a controversial question. Both versions are certainly outrageous. Sadly no complete uncut print of West of Zanzibar appears to have survived but at least reasonably complete prints have survived. Many of Browning’s most famous silent movies have not survived at all, or only exist as fragments.

West of Zanzibar begins with a prologue. Stage magician Phroso (Lon Chaney) has his wife stolen from him by Crane (Lionel Barrymore). The wife then has a daughter by Crane. Phroso vows revenge on the man who stole his wife, and on Crane’s illegitimate daughter.

Phroso loses the use of his legs in circumstances that are left a little unclear.

Eighteen years later Phroso, now known by the nickname Dead-Legs, is living in the heart of the African jungle, on the shores of the Congo River. He has collected a kind of human menagerie. He’s the physical cripple but his cronies are psychologically crippled. This includes Doc (Warner Baxter). Phroso needs him to keep the pain from his injuries at bay.

Phroso’ menagerie also includes Anna (Jacqueline Gadsdon), a prostitute. Phroso delights in humiliating her. Doc usually leaps to her defence, only to be intimidated into backing down. That humiliates him, which adds to Phroso’s pleasure.

Phroso makes his living by stealing ivory from rival traders. Or rather he steals ivory from one particular trader, whose name happens to be Crane. The local tribe serves Phroso loyally. He uses his skills as a stage illusionist to convince them that he is an immensely powerful witch-doctor. Phroso is a kind of king.

That illegitimate daughter of Phroso, Maizie (Mary Nolan), has been working in a brothel in Zanzibar. She doesn’t know it but that was Phroso’s doing. Now Phroso has lured Maizie to his jungle kingdom.

Phroso is ready to exact his vengeance, and a very cruel and twisted vengeance it is. He has a plan to deal with both Crane and Maizie.

Doc and Maizie start to fall in love but that doesn’t worry Phroso - he despises Doc but he is confident he can continue to wreck Doc’s life.

There are some nasty twists to come. Nasty for everyone concerned.

Lon Chaney is very good, but Walter Huston in the 1932 remake Kongo is a lot better. The acting in West of Zanzibar is a very mixed bag. Mary Nolan’s performance is of the sort that quite unfairly gives silent movies a bad name. In the equivalent role in Kongo Virginia Bruce is much more effective. Lionel Barrymore is less hammy than usual. Warner Baxter is quite good.  

Even though it’s much tamer than the remake this movie is guaranteed to upset sensitive souls.

The surviving print runs for 65 minutes but the original running time was 75 minutes. One can’t help suspecting that this is a censored print. There’s a vague hint that Phroso keeps his human menagerie under control by feeding them drugs but it’s not made explicit. We’re not told that Anna is a prostitute but it seems highly likely. All of the depravity - alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, white slavery and sadomasochism - is made quite explicit in the 1932 version, Kongo. Perhaps it was explicit in West of Zanzibar as well but those scenes were cut.

West of Zanzibar is quite a good movie and it’s worth seeing but Kongo is superb and an absolute must-see pre-code movie. West of Zanzibar is recommended.

China (1943)

China is a 1943 Paramount wartime adventure thriller.

David Llewellyn Jones (Alan Ladd) and Johnny Sparrow (William Bendix) are American businessmen and adventurers in China. This sounds like a setup for a fun movie but as we’ll see there’s not much fun to be had here.

It is 1941 and the Sino-Japanese War is raging. Jones and Johnny Sparrow trade with anyone, including the Japanese. Given that at this stage Japan and the United States are at peace there is of course absolutely no reason why they should not do so but we are constantly told how wicked Jones is to do this.

These two traders encounter Carolyn Grant (Loretta Young), a very moral American do-gooder. She wants them to use their truck to transport a dozen Chinese girls to Chungdu, well away from the advancing Japanese Army.

Jones sees no reason why he should do this. Eventually he changes his mind when he realises that the Japanese are wicked enemies.

Jones turns from a cynical hardbitten adventurer into an idealistic morally righteous crusader for freedom and democracy. We get some speeches to explain all this. Jones ends up deciding to take on an entire Japanese division with the aid of half a dozen Chinese guerrillas.

These girls are trainee schoolteachers who are going to build a new China and we get some speeches about that as well. We get quite a bit of speechifying.

Jones of course wants to find redemption, having previously devoted his life to wicked pursuits such as making a living and chasing girls. He must become a Hero.

This is a movie in which the leading man and leading lady have absolutely zero chemistry. It’s not as if they initially dislike each other. There’s just nothing. When, very late in the picture, we finally get a love scene between them it doesn’t ring true at all. And they still have zero chemistry.

Thee’s also a weird scene in which, totally out of left field, Johnny Sparrow declares his love for Miss Grant. He obviously doesn’t realise he’s the sidekick and the sidekick never gets the girl. Miss Grant however has pigeonholed him immediately as a sidekick and therefore unworthy of her love. And that scene is then quietly forgotten.

This is a very well-made movie. Australian director John Farrow had a great love for long takes and extended tracking shots and there are some fine examples of the latter in this film. Farrow had major faults as a director but he had his virtues as well and he was technically very accomplished. The action scenes are handled well, although they also have a real edge of nastiness. The audience is expected to take great glee in seeing Japanese soldiers mown down by machine guns. They are after all America’s enemies.

I have always disliked war movies and especially war movies made during wartime and this movie reminded me why. They are invariably propaganda and the propaganda in this movie is very crude indeed. The Japanese in this movie are fiendish cartoon villains. The Chinese are all brave and noble and honourable.

China also suffers from an excess of syrupy sentimentality.

Alan Ladd is one of my favourite actors but this is not one of his better performances. To be fair Frank Butler’s clumsy screenplay doesn’t give him much to work with. William Bendix is OK. Loretta Young is all self-satisfied moral righteousness. I love her early pre-code performances but here she’s rather dull and irritating.

China is pure propaganda from start to finish. The story and the characters don’t matter, what matters is bludgeoning the viewer with the message. I seriously advise you to avoid this movie.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray release looks great.

They Died with Their Boots On (1941)

I’m not a fan of historical movies or of biopics and They Died with Their Boots On, a 1941 Warner Brothers release, is both. It’s a movie I was therefore always going to approach with a certain scepticism. I have never understood why anyone would want to make historical movies or biopics that are mostly pure fantasy and I have never understood why anyone would want to watch such movies.

This movie is also a western of sorts and it is very much an epic. That made Raoul Walsh the ideal director. Walsh had directed The Thief of Bagdad for Douglas Fairbanks in 1924 and while Fairbanks was very much the auteur and Walsh’s job was simply to put Fairbanks’ vision on screen it still provided Walsh with invaluable training in handling epic material and huge productions. And Walsh had already directed a western epic, The Big Trail, in 1930. There was no way that Raoul Walsh was going to be intimidated by a project such as They Died with Their Boots On.

And since this is a movie about George Armstrong Custer, one of the most colourful and controversial men in American history, Errol Flynn was a very obvious casting choice indeed. Whatever you think of Custer he was a larger-than-life character and Flynn was most definitely was a larger-than-life figure himself.

It’s a very long movie and it takes us two hours and twenty minutes to get to the Battle of the Little Bighorn. It begins with Custer’s extraordinary career at West Point which is not exaggerated very much. Custer really did have one of the worst disciplinary records in the history of that august institution.

While at West Point he meets Elizabeth Bacon (Olivia de Havilland). They both know they’re destined to get married, which they eventually do.

Custer’s spectacular career in the Civil War (he was a general at the age of 23) gets plenty of attention. Some of this stuff is historical and some is pure fantasy.

Custer fails to adjust to civilian life and starts to fall apart until his wife pulls some strings and gets him put back on the active list. He is to take command of a ragtag bunch of hopeless new recruits. He will build them into the legendary 7th Cavalry. There are battles with the Sioux until Custer and Crazy Horse (Anthony Quinn) decide they both want peace. Custer trusts Crazy Horse and Crazy Horse trusts Custer. They are both right to do so. Custer persuades Crazy Horse that he can trust the US Government as well and should sign a treaty. Trusting the US Government turns out to be a very big mistake.

The US Government is not the only problem. There are also crooked businessmen who want the last remaining lands of the Plains Indians. Every single businessman and politician in this movie is a liar, a cheat and a crook.

This is a movie that is very sympathetic to the Sioux and the other tribes and to Crazy Horse. Custer is the hero and always behave honourably but in the events leading up to the Battle of the Little Bighorn the movie makes it quite explicit that the US Government were the bad guys.

Custer and Crazy Horse are both brave, honourable decent men but they are helpless in the face of the manipulations of those crooked businessmen and politicians. And so they end up facing each other at the Little Bighorn.

Flynn is magnificent. He plays Custer like a dashing figure from an adventure novel and that is more or less how Custer lived his life. No-one did adventure heroes better than Flynn but here he gets the chance to show that he was quite capable of displaying subtlety and emotional depth as well.

Flynn and Olivia de Havilland always made a great romantic pairing and this film is no exception.

Mention must be made of Sydney Greenstreet’s wonderful turn as the army commander-in-chief Winfield Scott. He’s a joy to watch.

As you’d expect Walsh handles the action scenes with plenty of skill. There is a very real sense of tragedy to this movie. Custer is drawn inexorably to his fate by his thirst for both glory and honour. The movie is of course utter nonsense as history but that’s Hollywood. It’s still wildly entertaining. That sense of tragedy makes this more than just a movie about heroism. Highly recommended.

The DVD release includes a brief TCM featurette on the movie made about twenty years ago so it’s mercifully free of ideological lecturing.

Pursued (1947)

Pursued is a 1947 western that sometimes gets described as a noir western. We shall see.

It was directed by Raoul Walsh and photographed by James Wong Howe so you expect it to be visually impressive, and it is. The movie was shot in black-and-white in the 1.37:1 aspect ratio.

It was written by Niven Busch, a fine screenwriter who also wrote some great western novels including Duel in the Sun and The Furies, both of which were made into excellent movies.

It opens with a man obviously on the run from someone. The man is Jeb Rand (Robert Mitchum). A girl has come to him with some food and other necessities. She tells him he has to get as far away from here as possible but that he can’t go with him. We then get the backstory an extended flashback.

It begins in Jeb’s childhood. Something very bad happened. He was taken in by Mrs Callum (Judith Anderson) and raised with her son Adam and her daughter Thor (Teresa Wright) on a ranch just outside the town of Lone Horse.

Shortly afterwards, for no reason whatsoever, someone tries to shoot the young Jeb.

Jeb grows up. Mrs Callum’s ranch thrives. Then war with Spain comes. Jeb is sent off to fight and comes back a hero.

Jeb and Thor want to marry. Thor wants a long courtship. Jeb wants to get married straight away. He then wants them to move away. He doesn’t know why but he is sure something bad is going to happen. He is still troubled by bad dreams.

Jeb isn’t paranoid. There’s someone from his past who has spent years plotting against him, and he’s right here in Lone Horse.

There is tension between Jeb and Adam, which leads to a major confrontation.

There are shootings but Jeb can’t figure out why these things are happening. He ends up going into partnership with Honest Jack Dingle (Alan Hale) in a gambling saloon.

Things get weird between Jeb and Thor. There’s another shooting. And eventually Jeb ends up back at his childhood home for a kind of climactic showdown.

Some movies makes the mistake of revealing too much too soon. This movie perhaps conceals things for too long so that the behaviour of most of the characters is so incomprehensible that it’s hard to get engaged with the story.

There are obvious affinities with film noir, especially the use of the extended flashback. What strikes me much more forcibly are the film’s affinities with Spellbound. Hitchcock had made Spellbound just two years earlier and it was a major hit. Like Hitchcock’s film Pursued deals with a man haunted by traumatic childhood events which he cannot clearly remember or understand. And like Spellbound Pursued includes dream sequences.

Pursued also resembles Spellbound in being a muddled mess. Jeb has no idea what is going on in his head and nor do we. His behaviour is bizarre. Thor’s behaviour is bizarre. There’s a sinister character with a grudge against Jeb but the reasons for the grudge are obscure. When we find out the reason we can’t help thinking he’s been holding a grudge against the wrong person.

One interesting aspect to this movie is that there are several gunfights but not one of them is a fair fight. These are not the formalised duels you get in so many westerns. These are ambushes. You don’t give the other fellow a chance to draw his gun. You just plug him, preferably in the back.

Mitchum is OK. Teresa Wright is truly awful.

There really is nothing remotely film noir about Pursued. It’s more of an attempt at a psychological thriller western. Or a psycho-sexual thriller with the sexual bits left out. It has the hallmarks of a screenplay that had been butchered by the Production Code Authority or the studio. It just gives the impression that the characters’ actions are not sufficiently motivated. I suspect that there may been some more obviously Freudian themes that got watered down to the point of virtual non-existence.

For me Pursued is an interesting movie but a bit disappointing. It just doesn’t quite work. It’s still worth a look.

The Olive Films Blu-Ray looks great.

Week-End Marriage (1932)

Week-End Marriage (also released as Working Wives) is a 1932 First National picture that combines comedy with romantic melodrama.

Ken (Norman Foster) and Lola (Loretta Young) are young and in love and they’d like to get married but Ken doesn’t earn much at his job, not enough to support a wife.

Now Ken has been offered a business opportunity but it would mean two years in South America. He tells Lola that he’ll work hard and make plenty of money so that when he returns they can marry. Lola is devastated. She doesn’t want to wait for two years.

Lola’s sister-in-law Agnes (Aline MacMahon) is convinced that Lola just hasn’t tried hard enough to persuade Ken to marry her. And that Lola hasn’t been clever enough. You don’t just wait for a man to propose. You make him propose, in such a way that he thinks it’s his idea.

This leads to a very funny scene in which Lola puts Agnes’s teachings into practice.

There’s also the question of whether Lola should give up her job. Ken wants her to. Lola doesn’t think they can survive on Ken’s salary, and eventually persuades him to let her keep her job.

Lola’s career prospers while Ken’s goes down the gurgler. Ken cannot cope with the idea of being supported by his wife. The marriage becomes rather rocky.

Lola is offered a great job in St Louis. She’d be a fool to turn it down and she takes it. Ken stays in New York and he’s well and truly on the downhill slide.

Lola meets Peter Acton (George Brent) in St Louis. Peter is charming and successful and he’s crazy about her. He is definitely interested in marrying her.

Peter is not a scoundrel. He’s a really nice guy. He couldn’t help falling in love with Lola but he doesn’t try to push her. He just hopes that eventually she’ll realise that Ken is a loser and divorce him and marry Peter.

Then something happens in New York which puts Lola in the position of having to choose between the two men.

Loretta Young looks gorgeous (and wears some stunning gowns) and she’s adorable and funny. She gave so many great performances in the pre-code era and she’s excellent here with her star quality very evident.

For some reason lot of people don’t seem to like George Brent. I have no idea why. Perhaps he didn’t have a huge acting range but in the right roles I’ve always thought he was fine, and he certainly had charisma and charm to burn.

Aline MacMahon goes close to stealing the picture. She’s very funny and it’s a nicely nuanced performance - Agnes is feisty and smart and worldly and knows how to get what she wants but her intentions are good and she’s actually a kind generous woman.

Norman Foster as Ken is the weak link but it’s only fair to say that it’s a very unrewarding part. Perhaps another actor could have given a livelier performance but Ken is supposed to be a very passive guy who just never learns to take charge of his life.

The only real sign that this is a pre-code movie is that while Lola is in St Louis Ken finds another woman and they are very obviously cohabiting, and no unfavourable judgments are made on this situation. There’s also a scene that suggests that Lola and Ken actually have a sexual relationship - once the Production Code came in in 1934 any hint that married couples have sex was forbidden.

If you have a look at some of the online reviews you’ll find that this is a movie that has many modern viewers foaming at the mouth with rage. It’s actually a movie that tries to deal seriously with an important issue - the difficulties a woman faces in trying to combine a successful career with a successful marriage. The fact that the movie doesn’t offer the ideologically correct 2020s answer to this question seems to outrage a lot of people. I find it amusing that people will actually get angry at a 90-year-old movie.

Week-End Marriage has some genuinely amusing moments and takes the problems faced by its characters quite seriously. Recommended.