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.

Hitchcock Fridays - my Hitchcock movie viewing project

I have a movie-watching project for the next few months - renewing my acquaintance with Alfred Hitchcock. I’ve been involved in a number of interesting recent online discussions of Hitchcock’s films, which caused me to check back on my movie viewing log. I was somewhat shocked to realise that I hadn’t seen any of Hitchcock’s movies for about twenty years.

My tastes in movies, and my views on movies, have changed a lot over those twenty years. I suspect that my responses to some of Hitch’s movies will be very different today. Twenty years ago I was well and truly under the Hitchcock spell. He was a genius and I was prepared to make excuses even for some of the lesser movies. I suspect that today I’ll approach his work with a much higher degree of scepticism.

I also realised that I have very strong views on some of his movies (particularly Suspicion, Notorious and Marnie) but it’s possible that those views are based on hazy or even inaccurate memories of the actual films. I’d also be interested to find out if I have more favourable (or possibly even less favourable) responses to some of the movies in the Hitchcock canon that even I at the height of my Hitchcock worship regarded as turkeys (movies like Topaz, Torn Curtain and Lifeboat).

I’m also hoping to see some of Hitchcock’s British movies in decent prints. I’ve seen almost all his early British movies but at the time I saw them they were only available in truly ghastly DVD releases. I’m especially keen to see Young and Innocent and the 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much again.

There have been some great recent Hitchcock discussions at ahsweetmysteryblog and they have really re-awakened by Hitchcock obsession. And a review of Marnie has just appeared at the RealWeegieMidgetReviews blog.

I don’t know how long I’ll stick at this project but at the moment I’m enthusiastic. I might even have a Hitchcock Friday feature here in addition to my regular posts.

First cab off the rank is going to be Suspicion. I’ve always found that if you want to get into a knock-down, drag-out argument about a Hitchcock movie then Suspicion is the movie to pick.

Saigon (1947)

In the late 40s there was a craze for American movies with the names of exotic cities as the title - Calcutta, Macao, Singapore, Lisbon, etc. Most of these movies are great entertainment and most of them fit at least peripherally into one of my all-time favourite sub-genres - tropical noir. Tropical noir was a very big thing at the time, with movies like The Bribe and Hell’s Half Acre.

If you want to be picky some of thee movies might be better described as tropical melodramas or tropical adventure melodramas. I don’t mind how you classify them, if a movie was made at that time and it has a tropical setting (or any kind of similar exotic setting) then it’s a movie I want to see.

Which brings us to Saigon, released by Paramount in 1947 and starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake (who were at that time just about the hottest leading man-leading lady combo in Hollywood).

Major Larry Briggs is in Shanghai where he’s just been released for his wartime air force service. He’s just had a shock. His co-pilot and best buddy Captain Mike Perry (Douglas Dick) has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. He has two, maybe three, months to live. Briggs tells the doctor that he’ll give Perry the bad news. But he has no intention of doing so. He and their other surviving wartime crew member Sergeant Pete Rocco (Wally Cassell) decide they’re going to make Perry’s last months the most exciting and fun months of his life.

To finance all this fun Briggs accepts a flying job from a shady character named Maris. Since the pay is $10,000 for one flight the job can’t be honest but Briggs wants that money to give his friend a couple of months of high living. Maris is supposed to be the passenger but when the plane takes off there’s a different passenger aboard - Maris’s glamorous secretary (played by Veronica Lake of course). Maris himself didn’t make the flight and Briggs figures that the flurry of gunshots they heard just before takeoff may be the reason for that.

Briggs and his buddies now have Maris’s ten grand. In fact they have fifteen grand - Maris’s secretary (we learn that her name is Susan) offered them a bonus just before takeoff. They have all that dough, which is not a major problem, but they also have a very angry very pretty blonde who seems like she might be a very big problem. Pete Rocco has already had to give her a sock in the jaw. Pete thinks that’s the approved way of dealing with over-excited females.

They decide to head for Saigon but the plane doesn’t make it. They end up in a paddy field in Indo-China. It’s not too bad, nobody was hurt, they make it to a nearby town and put up in a hotel. The fly in the ointment is a policeman, Lieutenant Keon (Luther Adler). Keon is one of those very civilised very polite very friendly cops who gives the impression he might be rather good at his job. He’s very interested in these new arrivals in his territory and he seems particularly interested in Susan.

Larry Briggs is rather curious about Susan as well. Was she just Maris’s secretary? What was the reason for the flight that Maris wanted to take out of Shanghai? What’s in the briefcase which she clutches so tightly? Susan doesn’t reveal much about herself but she’s obviously a woman with a few secrets. Briggs is a smart guy, He knows if Lieutenant Keon is interested in the young lady then he has a good reason for being interested. Briggs figures it might be worthwhile finding out a bit more about Susan, especially since poor doomed Mike has fallen for her and fallen hard.

Alan Ladd is perfectly cast as Briggs, a tough guy with a sensitive side but a tough guy all the same. Susan is obviously set up to be the femme fatale and that’s the sort of thing Veronica Lake could do quite competently. Of course Susan might not be a femme fatale. She could be an innocent dupe. Or she could have become involved in something a bit dubious and then gotten in deeper than she’d intended. Lake plays the part with enough ambiguity to keep us interested. And of course, as always, there’s some heat between Ladd and Lake. It could be love, it could be lust, it could be hate, it could be all three. Luther Adler has fun as the ever-smiling Lieutenant Keon.

Leslie Fenton directed. He was not exactly one of the big name directors in Hollywood at that time. After a not terribly distinguished career he quit the film business in the early 1950s.

This is not an easy movie to track down. I found an Italian DVD which includes the English soundtrack (with removable Italian subtitles). The transfer isn’t fantastic but it’s acceptable. This Italian disc appears to be the only DVD release the film has had. I was involved in an interesting discussion recently on Riding the High Country about tropical noir and the difficulty of getting to see some of the key movies in that genre, including this one.

Saigon has plenty of hothouse tropical atmosphere and it has a few definite noir touches. It’s not a great film, Fenton’s direction is lacklustre and it suffers a little from being in effect two films at once - a sentimental romantic melodrama and a noirish thriller. It’s just a tad disjointed. But it looks great and Ladd and Lake, in their final pairing, are good enough to carry the film through a few weak spots. Recommended.