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.

The 1920s: Films of the Deco Decade

Art deco, art nouveau, and the Viennese secession styles are all prevalent in the vibrant photography and set designs of many of the grandiose and decadent films of the 1920s. This unique combination of grand, sweeping visual gestures and, at times, delirious excesses embodies a dominate strain of the culture and, in some cases also reflects, the contradictions that were evident in both the cinema and the history of the period. This program presents four of the major films of the deco decade -- works that represent a distinctive sampling of the period's popular aesthetics and its own unique image.

Alfred Hitchcock's The Pleasure Garden (England/Germany 1925) was a co-production between the British producer Michael Balcon and the German Erich Pommer who was one of the key figures in the development of the German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s. Hitchcock was an unknown quantity in 1925 since, prior to his direct­orial debut on The Pleasure Garden, he had worked primarily as an art director on Balcon's films. The film was made as an English production set in London and Africa and totally filmed in Pommer's studios in Munich. It was to be a challenging introduction to film making for the future "master of suspense."

The heavy German Expressionistic influence found in The Pleasure Garden is due not only to the location of the film's actual production, but also to Hitchcock's great fascination with the works of such directors as Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. Added to this was an unusual mix of set designs, ranging from the gaudy glitz of the theatre scenes to the pseudo-exotical of the English's notion of colonial Africa. The film's narrative of betrayal, madness, and miscegenation is, in part, indicative of the racial ideology that underlined British Imperial thinking. It also represents, however, a first-step in Hitchcock's recurring theme of marriage as a state of danger rather than bliss.

Hitchcock once stated that he learned how to make movies by watching repeated viewings of Lang's Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (Germany 1922). This film, which was the first part of the epic-length production Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler: Ein Bild der Zeit, presented Lang's vision of a modern Germany collapsing under the weight of economic chaos, social instability, and extreme decadence. Against this backdrop, the half-mad master criminal Mabuse thrives through combined cunning and pure will as he murders and extorts his way to power. The obvious political implications of the story were developed further by Lang in his two sequels -- The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Germany 1932) in which Mabuse directly prefigures the Third Reich, and The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (Germany 1961) in which the doctor's will power proves strong enough to transcend both death and the passage of time in order to attempt the creation of a new Germany in his own image.

Lang utilized a variety of stylistic designs in the film's photography in order to invoke the period. Sharp angles and distorted perspectives create a subtle sense of disorientation through out the film as Lang depicts a society increasingly dominated by Mabuse's paranoid megalomania.

Though he was critically considered to be one of the major filmmakers of the 1920s, Rex Ingram remains largely unknown by modern audiences. His most successful film of the period, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (USA 1921), has become mainly a footnote in movie history books, despite the fact that this production not only made Rudolph Valentino a star but also made it financially possible for M-G-M Studios to be formed. Yet the film still has a striking pictorial power that may come as a surprise for viewers unfamiliar with the expressive qualities of the silent cinema. In fact, many of the scenes in the film were based on oil paintings, especially the works of Maxfield Parrish. This, combined with Ingram1s almost obsessive quest for exotic details, gave his films a stylistic polish that helped to balance his unpredictable wavering between excessive profundity and sentimental superficiality.

Based on the popular novel of the period by Vicente Blasco-Ibanez, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was originally intended as an anti-war epic in which World War One is literally shown as fratricide. The film's noble aspirations, however, were presented within the context of a very American view of Europe, and upon its release, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was protested against by the English, French, and German governments. Even though it is now clearly dated, the film remains a fascinating and vivid document of its era.

If sentimentality was one of Ingram's flaws, the lack of it was worn as a virtual badge of honor by Erich von Stroheim. In his production of Foolish Wives (USA 1921), von Stroheim proceeded to scandalize the American film audience by presenting a caustic portrait of European cynicism and debauchery that would reconfirm his title as "the man you love to hate." While he was overtly flaunt­ing his self-created image of European corruption, von Stroheim was also attacking American naivete, xenophobia, and middle-class hypocrisy while simultaneously insulting the honor and privileges belonging to the alleged nobility. That an artist like von Stroheim was able to make Foolish Wives is a testament to both his skills and his special self-destructive nature.

Though at the time it was claimed to have been the first film ever to cost a million dollars, the actual production of Foolish Wives was not that expensive. Von Stroheim did, however, pursue his notion of realism to new extremes as he completely reproduced Monte Carlo as a full scale working model on Universal's back lots, including a completely operational casino. For von Stroheim, his sets had to be as authentic as possible since his artistry was based upon the massive accumulation of physical details. As with the naturalist writers of the late 19th century, von Stroheim was interested in presenting the realities of the world with all of its warts and blemishes carefully cataloged. It was in this manner, he felt, that something resembling truth could be reclaimed from the lies and illusions of society.

Hitchcock: Variations on a Theme

In his nightclub routine, Woody Allen once joked that he had written a short story about his first year of marriage. No one would publish it, but Alfred Hitchcock had expressed interest in the film rights. The joke is surprisingly accurate in what it says about Hitchcock. Marriage, and the tangled relationships between men and women, is a major theme which Hitchcock would hammer away at in all of his films. While the conventional dogma of the happy ending in the traditional Hollywood film stated that marriage brought continued bliss, Hitchcock saw it as merely a transition in the tense, and usually tainted, nature of sexual relationships. In the 1964 film Marnie, the couple's ultimately therapeutic relationship is rooted in their mutually sick, pathological behavior patterns. Sabotage (England 1936) concludes with the wife stabbing the husband to death over the dinner table. The newlyweds in Rear Window (USA 1954) are, by the end of the film, on the same path to mutual hatred that had led to the murder at the beginning of the film. Instead of happiness, marriage caused paranoia, distrust, and many violent deaths.

That marriage may be built upon mutual weakness rather than strength was examined by Hitchcock in two films: Marnie and Suspicion (USA 1941). The two films bear some striking similarities. Sean Connery's obsessive love for Tippi Hedren is caused by the fact that she is both frigid and a pathological liar. Not only is his love for her sick, but his method of curing her involves a subtle use of psychological torture. In Suspicion, Cary Grant plays an amoral, pathological liar whose obvious illness makes him romantically attractive to Joan Fontaine. She, in turn, is not only exceedingly naive, but is also willing to nurse and even protect his sickness up to a certain point. Her own behavior is remarkably child like and her constant fumbling with her eyeglasses is a visual indication of her own blindness. Her love for Grant's character is largely based on her need to escape from her parents, just as his love for her is based on an innate need for nurturing, yet the only thing she nurtures within him is a continuation of his pathological behavior. The film's climax (which was not the original ending of the film) literally pushes them to the edge of their relationship, a point at which they must make the decision to mature.

Their mutual illness even takes certain mutual forms. One of the few times that Fontaine's character shows signs of great vitality is when she is horseback riding. Likewise, Grant's great passion is betting on the horses. Grant plays an immature man, and when they first meet she is reading a book on child psychology. The weakness that threatens to separate them is also the very bond that holds their marriage together.

For Hitchcock, things other than mental illness can hold a marriage together. In Rich and Strange (England 1932), the banality of middle-class life is the thread that ultimately binds. The couple in the film are bored with life and each other and their unexpected inheritance enables them to take an exotic world cruise, a trip that quickly turns into a surrealistic journey of the soul. Taking the title from a line in Shakespeare's The Tempest ("Nothing of him that doth fade/but doth suffer a sea-change/ into something rich and strange"), the film's visual strangeness clearly demonstrates the influence of Luis Bunuel on Hitchcock, but the central theme is strictly his own. The couple's escape from banality leads only to a false glamour and a realization of the precarious nature of life. The security of boredom is seen by Hitchcock as being preferable to the horrors of reality.

Spellbound (USA 1945), like Marnie and Suspicion, returns to the notion of romantic love and mutual mental illness. While Fontaine's character in Suspicion is symbolically blind, Peck's character in Spellbound is an amnesic whose loss of memory is needed to blind him to his inner sense of guilt. Ingrid Bergman's own aloof and cold personality in the film is a facade covering her own vulnerability and her protectiveness of Peck becomes obsessive.

The film may now be best known for its dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali, although only a fragment of the complete sequence was actually used in the film. An element of surrealism is always evident in Hitchcock's films, but in very subtle ways, and he felt uncomfortable with the extreme artificiality of the sequence. During the forties, when he made Spellbound, Hitchcock had adopted a classical, invisible film technique more in line with Hollywood film making of the period. An important aspect of this kind of film making is maintaining the illusion of reality, and while Hitchcock was not a realist, he was fond of the illusion. His films of the forties were more subdued than either his more experimental films of the thirties or his great masterpieces of the fifties.

Perhaps one of the most under-rated films ever made by Hitchcock is Mr. and Mrs. Smith (USA 1941). Directed as a favor to Carole Lombard, the film was a late entry by Hitchcock in the screwball comedy genre. Lacking the larger subject matter of his other films, Mr. and Mrs. Smith concentrates completely on the theme of marriage. The couple in the film are a pair of egotistical, over-grown children whose behavior pattern holds them together as much as it drives them apart. They are clearly made for each other as their petty destructiveness makes them unsuitable for anyone else.

The weak critical reputation of Mr. and Mrs. Smith may leave the viewer unprepared for what is actually a genuinely funny film. Hitchcock's flair for comedy is evident in many of his thrillers. Certainly Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a minor film in that it limits itself only to this one idea, making it a sonata when compared to the grand symphony of a film like Vertigo (USA 1958). As a sonata, however, it is delightful and is especially light-hearted as opposed to Hitchcock's own darker viewpoint.

Hitchcock: The Deceptive Screen

In the world of Alfred Hitchcock, everything is in doubt. Throughout his films, he repeatedly demonstrates that all forms of knowledge, including visual information, are unreliable. For Hitchcock, the notion that nothing is as it seems is a vehicle for suspense, but it also takes on a far greater importance. The visual deceptions in Hitchcock's films are actually indicative of his deep concern with the extremely deceptive nature of the real world. For Hitchcock, perception only provides clues to the truth and these clues must be scrutinized carefully before the viewer can understand their importance.

The deceptive nature of the world, and of visual perception, appear in many forms in Hitchcock's films. The film Strangers on a Train (1951) is structured upon a system of duality which creates its own pattern of connections within the narrative. The film's photographic compositions contain many carefully balanced "pairs" and the characters and scenes are presented in terms of "two's." There are two fathers, two merry-go-round scenes, and two women in glasses who are either strangled or nearly strangled. The first key to understanding Strangers on a Train lies within the film's repetition of images.

At the core of Strangers on a Train are the characters of Bruno (Robert Walker) and Guy (Farley Granger). On the surface, Bruno's decadent and psychotic personality is in sharp contrast to that of Guy, a professional tennis player. It is Guy, however, who accidently sets the stage for Bruno's act of murder. In turn, it is Bruno who represents a sense of strength rather than Guy, although Bruno's strength is manifestly bizarre. The apparent differences between Guy and Bruno are superficial, for they are actually perverse reflections of each other.

he 1953 production of I Confess is an intense elaboration on Hitchcock's theme of guilt. The film tells us at its very beginning who committed the murder when the man confesses the crime to the priest played by Montgomery Clift. The murderer does not even intend, at first, to frame the priest for the crime. The killer had worn at the time, however, the priest's coat and hat and despite the difference in their physical appearance, the priest-like wardrobe is the only detail noticed by witnesses to the crime.

More importantly in I Confess is the degree to which the priest inadvertently implicates himself in the murder. The murderer's sense of guilt compelled him to confess to the priest, but the priest's feeling of guilt for his own act of adultery is something which he is afriad to confess. Thematically, as well as narratively, the sins of murder and adultery become interlinked in the film, and the admission of the crime eventually becomes dependent upon the priest's admission of his sin.

The conflict between guilt and innocence is the central concern of Shadow of a Doubt (1943). In the film, the niece named Charlie yearns for a sense of worldly sophistication and views her Uncle Charlie, her name sake, as an enviable figure of urbane knowledge. Uncle Charlie is, however, an obsessive killer who has returned to the niece's small town because the police are searching for him across the country. In a way, the uncle does have worldly knowledge, but it is a disturbed and genuine knowledge of evil.

The visual effect of Shadow of a Doubt is one of Hitchcock's most deceptive. The myths and illusions of small town America evoke a placid and banal existence. But beneath the film's surface present­ation of the small town is a complex reality of fears, repressions, and unfulfilled lives. While Uncle Charlie represents the darkest manifestation of these fears and repressions, he is nonetheless a plausible product of this small town society.

The ease with which film viewers can be mislead by the visual information presented to them in a film is one of the prime concerns of Stage Fright (1950). One assumes that the visual information is true, yet it is this very assumption which Hitchcock attacks in Stage Fright. While the narrative of the film suggestively plays with the illusionary nature of acting and the theater, the film's visual imagery clearly demonstrates that seeing is not the same as under­standing.

While Stage Fright challenges the verisimilitude of film, The Wrong Man (1957) creates a complex series of contradictions between observation and truth. There is no question as to the innocence of the film's main character, yet all of the evidence points increasingly to his guilt. The investigative police work presented in The Wrong Man, which was based upon a real case, is routine and thorough and yet the conclusions are persistently wrong. Empirical evidence, Hitchcock suggests, is not enough to pierce through the misleading nature of reality.