The Alfred Hitchcock
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EXCERPTS - 3
From: Thomas Leitch, The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock: From Alfred Hitchcock Presents to Vertigo (Facts on File Inc., 2002)
Irony; Jamaica Inn
[Editor's note. Two excerpts this time, to give the flavour of the author's excellent and comprehensive
encyclopedia. Professor Leitch teaches in the Department of English at
the University of Delaware. His further publications include Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games (1991). See also "Note on Hitchcock's villains" elsewhere on this website.]
(1) Irony. Since Hitchcock’s public persona, especially in his
playful introductions to each segment of ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS and
THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR, is clearly ironic not only in its
disingenuousness but in its contrast with the melodramatic intrigue of
his fictions, it may seem unnecessary to suggest that the director has
never had his due as an ironist. But although, as Sidney GOTTLIEB
notes, he has been analyzed as a humanist, a romantic, and a sadist, no
one has yet produced a comprehensive study of Hitchcockian irony.
Irony is central to Hitchcock’s films in ways that have never
properly been realized. In a 1934 essay written in connection with THE
MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, the director condemned most British films as
“stodgy” because of their imprudent determination to
maintain a single unmodulated tone throughout. American films, he noted
by contrast, achieved much broader emotional effects and incorporated
many more possibilities for surprise, by mixing drama with comedy, even
farce. His new film, he promised, would follow the Americans’
lead on this point. Indeed it has become a platitude of Hitchcock
criticism that virtually all the director’s most successful films
except VERTIGO depend on incorporating a broad range of tones. There is
much merit in this observation, but it makes Hitchcock’s films,
despite their unmatched narrative pull, sound a bit miscellaneous in
their variety. A more positive, and more incisive, way of describing
their special achievement is to recognize their dependence on irony as
an organizing trope. Hitchcock’s irony begins in motivic
contrasts—between comedy and farce, between what characters know
and what audiences know, between the routines of the normal world and
the melodramatic irruption of intrigue, between Hitchcock’s
avuncular physical presence and his adolescent sense of fun—but
becomes the armature for most of his successful films. A film like
CHAMPAGNE is full of small ironies, from the lovers’ quarrels
aboard the ship she has commandeered her father’s airplane to
meet to the fantasies it hints about the sinister, but ultimately
benign, older man who is watching the heroine, and is shaped by a
single structuring irony: the heroine’s false belief that she
must support herself and the millionaire father she thinks has gone
broke; it fails not because it is insufficiently ironic, but because
its ironies are insufficiently integrated and thus finally meaningless.
The pattern is repeated in FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, which is structured
as a series of effectively ironic sequences (the picturesque windmill
that hides a nest of spies, the assassinated diplomat who is really
alive, the peace organization which is a front for espionage, the hired
killer who ends up killing himself) in search of any larger ironic
vision consistent with the film’s intermittently rousing
patriotism. LIFEBOAT is more successful in focusing its story on a
single powerful irony: the susceptibility of liberal democracies to
authoritarian rule by virtue of their very liberalism.
But the ironies which shape Hitchcock’s most penetrating films
are less often political than moral, psychological, social,
representational, or more broadly relational, as in the intimacy first
sought, than rejected in horror, between Charlie Newton and her
beloved, murderous uncle in SHADOW OF A DOUBT, or between the earnest
adulterer who wishes his wife were dead in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and the
charming villain who is only too happy to oblige. MURDER! and STAGE
FRIGHT both take theatricality as a radical metaphor for the
characters’ duplicitous or disingenuous behavior; REAR WINDOW
invites audiences to savor the irony of a man so averse to romantic
commitment that he becomes deeply invested in proving that his neighbor
has murdered his nagging wife. When later Hitchcock films like
SPELLBOUND or UNDER CAPRICORN or I CONFESS or TOPAZ falter, it is not
because they are not ironic enough—though all four of these films
restrict themselves to a narrower range of tones than most of
Hitchcock’s work—but because their leading ironies—a
man must turn detective to unearth the secrets of his own unconscious;
the dissolute aristocrat who ran off to Australia with her own groom is
the murderer whose guilt he has taken on himself; a priest cannot save
his life by revealing the confession of murder made to him;
international politics poison every intimate relationship they touch
regardless of particular partisan sympathies—cannot be
compellingly visualized or dramatized. And when Hitchcock’s films
succeed most completely, it is because their structuring ironies are
powerful enough to pull together as many episodes as in NORTH BY
NORTHWEST, or because they can motivate two tones as dissonant as the
horror and black comedy of PSYCHO, or because they can sustain a
single, fatally dreamlike mood for over two hours, as when Scottie
Ferguson falls in love with the woman he is supposed to be protecting,
not realizing that she has been manufactured expressly in order to make
him try and fail to save her—or that he is about to repeat the
process himself. Hence Vertigo is not an exception to the rule of
Hitchcockian irony because the contrast of tones the director commended
in 1934 is only one possible way of revealing the irreducible
inconsistencies that underlie all representation, all desire, and all
action.
(2) Jamaica Inn. Alternative titles: Riff-Piraten, La taverne de la
Jamaîque, La taverna della Giamaica. Mayflower. Producers: Erich
Pommer [and Charles Laughton]. Screenplay: Sidney Gilliat and Joan
Harrison, based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier. Continuity: Alma
Reville. Additional dialogue: J.B. Priestley. Cinematographer: Harry
Stradling, in collaboration with Bernard Knowles. Set decoration: Tom
Morahan. Costumes: Molly McArthur. Makeup: Ern Westmore. Production
manager: Hugh Perceval. Special effects: Harry Watt. Sound: Jack
Rogerson. Editor: Robert Hamer. Music: Eric Fenby. Musical direction:
Frederick Lewis. With Charles Laughton (Sir Humphrey Pengallan), Horace
Hodges (his butler [Chadwyck]), Hay Petrie (his groom [Sam]), Frederick
Piper (his agent [Davis]), Herbert Lomas, Clare Greet [Granny Tremany],
William Devlin (his tenants); as Pengallan’s friends: Jeanne de
Casalis, Mabel Terry Lewis [Lady Beston], Bromley Davenport [Ringwood],
George Curzon [Pengallan’s friend], Basil Radford [Lord George];
Joss Merlyn’s household: Leslie Banks (Merlyn), Marie Ney
(Patience, his wife), Maureen O’Hara (Mary Yellan, his niece); as
Merlyn’s gang: Emlyn Williams (Harry the Pedlar), Wylie Watson
(Salvation Watkins), Morland Graham (Sea Lawyer Sydney), Edwin
Greenwood (Dandy), Mervyn Johns (Thomas), Stephen Haggard (the Boy,
Willie Penhill), Robert Newton (Jem Trehearne) [and Robert Adair
(Captain Murray), Aubrey Mather (coach driver), O.B. Clarence, Marie
Ault (coach passengers), Mary Jerrold (Miss Black, housekeeper), John
Longden (Captain Johnson), Roy Frumkes, Archie Harradine, Harry Lane,
Sam Lee, Alan Lewis, Philip Ray, Peter Scott, A. George Smith].
Distributed by Associated British. Running time: 100 minutes. Released
May, 1939.
On the eve of departing for America on the 1938 trip that would climax
with his signing a contract with David O. SELZNICK to direct a single
film that turned out to be REBECCA, Hitchcock, despite his aversion to
costume pictures, agreed with MAYFLOWER PRODUCTIONS, a partnership
between Erich POMMER and Charles LAUGHTON which had already produced
two vehicles for Laughton, to direct a film based on Daphne DU
MAURIER’s previous novel, Jamaica Inn. On returning to England,
Hitchcock read a screenplay Mayflower had commissioned from Clemence
DANE and immediately tried to withdraw from the project, but Laughton,
an old acquaintance, insisted that he honor the contract. Other
difficulties soon arose. Laughton decided that instead of playing Joss
Merlyn, he would give that role to Leslie BANKS and play the
story’s villain, a Cornish parson who turns out to be the head of
a smuggling ring responsible for wrecking and plundering passing ships.
Since the Hays Office forbade negative portrayals of clergymen, the
role was changed from a parson to the local squire, and since Laughton
was clearly the film’s star attraction, his part was expanded and
his involvement in the smuggling (which could hardly have been kept
secret for long) revealed earlier in the story. Although the rewriting
offered Hitchcock the opportunity to work with Laughton’s old
friend J.B. PRIESTLEY, whom he had long admired, the novelist announced
publicly that she was dissatisfied with such a free adaptation,
insisting that Selznick treat Rebecca with greater circumspection. When
shooting began in September 1938, Laughton proved an equally
intransigent performer, demanding that Hitchcock shoot only closeups,
backgrounds, and scenes without him until he had found the right walk
for Squire Pengallan. Although Hitchcock told the press that he
expected the film to provide opportunities for the sorts of action
sequences he relished, he completed the filming in October with more
relief than enthusiasm, and like all his costume dramas, it was an
inert piece of filmmaking, as the same reviewers who had rhapsodized
over his preceding film, THE LADY VANISHES, were quick to point out.
The film turned a small profit, but it cannot have made Hitchcock more
reluctant to leave his homeland behind.
Like du Maurier’s novel, Hitchcock’s 23rd film is first and
foremost a drama of homelessness for its orphaned heroine, sent from
Ireland to Cornwall to live with relatives she has never met and
finding instead of a proper home a neo-Gothic nightmare of intrigue.
What the screenplay adds to the novel is a structuring opposition of
false homes, as Mary Yellan, en route to the inn kept by her Aunt
Patience’s husband Joss, stops for help at Squire
Pengallan’s, where she finds bright company, rich furnishings,
and a host suspiciously epicurean in his tastes. From then on she
oscillates between the world of Jamaica Inn, which is overrun by
lowlife ruffians, to the leering care of the Squire, who treats her,
not as the lady she thinks she is, but as one more object, like the
figurine or the horse he had so highly prized just before her arrival,
to add to his collection. In offering her a choice between too little
culture and too much, the film seems determined to sever all ties
between acculturation and genuinely social behavior, and to offer its
heroine no alternative to commodity status. The exception to these grim
alternatives is Jem Trehearne, the member of Merlyn’s gang of
smugglers and jackals who is actually an undercover peace officer.
After Mary saves Jem from hanging by the gang and they escape the gang
together, their romance seems assured. And so it is after further
adventures, deaths, and revelations, though the performances of Robert
NEWTON, who had not yet found the hammy range that would serve him so
well in roles like Long John Silver, and Maureen O’HARA, whose
fighting spirit seems to conceal not demure sexuality but an
amateurishly narrow acting range, are completely overshadowed not only
by the antics of Laughton but by Horace HODGES as Pengallan’s
long-suffering butler and the programmatically colorful gang members
who infest Jamaica Inn. Despite occasional touches of Gothic
atmosphere, the film demonstrates the truth of Hitchcock’s dictum
that his costume pictures failed because he never knew what the
characters inside the costumes were thinking or feeling; since it never
creates any sense of normalcy which its quaint horrors might be thought
to disrupt, there never seems to be anything substantial at stake for
the orphaned Mary or her blandly roguish lover.
EXCERPTS 1 - Michael Walker on "Confined Spaces" in Hitchcock
EXCERPTS 2 - Tony Lee Moral on Marnie
EXCERPTS 4 - Lesley Brill on Mr and Mrs Smith
EXCERPTS 5 - Jane Sloan surveys critical writing on Hitchcock
EXCERPTS 6 - Donald Spoto on Stage Fright
EXCERPTS 7 - Jack Sullivan on Franz Waxman and Suspicion
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