Hitchcock: Two Lost Works

Though he directed nine feature-length films during the silent era, Alfred Hitchcock's early works are rarely revived. With the exception of The Lodger (England 1926), Hitchcock's silent productions were non-thrillers and for most of the 1920s he was best known for directing domestic melodramas and, occasionally, comedies. Yet it was during this period that Hitchcock learned his skills as a filmmaker and his silent productions often display a surprisingly strong sense of visual daring and technical virtuosity. Further, his silent melodramas tend to reveal aspects of Hitchcock's thematic concerns that are often hidden beneath the more overt chills of his suspense films.

A film that was of major importance in the critical advancement of Hitchcock's reputation was The Ring (England 1927). Written by Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville, the film was his first production for British International and the producer John Maxwell. Though the work relationship between Hitchcock and Maxwell would last until 1932, it was often strained by Maxwell's insistence on producing films adapted from the theater. Hitchcock was more interested in exploring his own emerging sense of cinematic art and The Ring was a determined effort to combine photographic naturalism with the experimental techniques of the Russian Avant-Garde and German Expressionist cinemas.

The Ring was also the first of ten films in which Hitchcock collaborated with the cinematographer Jack Cox. Together they successfully created images of stark light and dark, smoke-filled shadows that would have a profound effect upon a generation of English photographers, including Bill Brandt who was especially attracted to the visual structure of The Ring. Within the traditionally stage-bound English cinema of the 1920s, The Ring was like a gauntlet being thrown by a young director who was already in command of his art and was anxiously attempting to test the limits of film further than the constraints of the British film industry would allow.

His second film for Maxwell, The Farmer's Wife (England 1928), was based on a popular play of the period. This gesture of appeasement to Maxwell's sense of standards persuaded Hitchcock to approach the film as an act of mere craftsmanship. It did, however, allow him a chance to display his gift for comedy, a skill that Hitchcock would slyly use in many of his later suspense films.

In a way, The Farmer's Wife represents a light-hearted variation on one of the major themes in The Ring. The conditions of marriage, the illusions of love, and necessary betrayals forced by conflicting social and psychological, was a recurring concern that dominated much of Hitchcock's work. In The Ring, these contradictions can only be resolved through a perverse combination of pain and sentimentality. In The Farmer's Wife, a surprising act of good common sense is all that i takes to end the ever escalating humiliations suffered by the film's romantically inclined character. In both cases, masculine pride proves worthless against the forces of love and matrimony.