I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano;
A stage, where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
"THE ASPECT THAT INTRIGUED me is that it was a story about the theater," Hitchcock
once said. Produced in England just after Under Capricorn from a novel by Selwyn Jepson called
Man Running,
the screenplay by Whitfield Cook concerns Eve Gill (Jane Wyman), an
aspiring actress at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, whose boyfriend
Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd) seeks her aid in establishing his
innocence. He insists that he is being framed for murdering the
husband of actress Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich), who took
advantage of his infatuation for her. Eve disguises herself as a maid,
gains Charlotte's confidence, and with the help of Inspector Wilfred
Smith (Michael Wilding), nearly proves Charlotte was the murderer. But
she finally plays her role so well that Jonathan is in fact revealed to
be the killer. By this time Eve has transferred her affections to
Wilfred Smith, and when Jonathan is killed trying to escape, the final
frames suggest she may at last find a true relationship with the
inspector.
One of Hitchcock's least appreciated works, Stage Fright annoys
some viewers because of its complex plot, its surprises, twists, double
twists - and, most of all, by its bold use of an opening false
flashback, an account told by a murderer (and seen by us as he tells it
to another) and therefore finally revealed as a lie. There's no doubt
that this is a film demanding the most careful attention - but
Hitchcock always deserves this attention, and our enrichment derives
proportionately. Stage Fright is in fact a major comic work, entirely worthy of the various significant talents who contributed to it.
The safety curtain of an English
theater slowly rises under the credits, revealing not a stage set, but
real-life London in full motion; when the curtain is fully raised,
we're pitched at once into the action of the story. Immediately, the
distinctions between appearance and reality, between theatre life and
street life, begin to blur. Everything that follows is an
interconnected series of ruses, costumes, lies and artifices, and
everyone in the story plays a variety of real-life roles - a favourite
Hitchcock motif, exploited as early as The 39 Steps. As in Hitchcock's darker romances, appearances
and identities slip and slide. Nothing is certain in the world of
disguises, performances, matinées and theatrical garden parties.
The opening scene of flight from the
police - in Eve Gill's open roadster - establishes the film's
tripartite structure, a series of ever-slower journeys until the final
stasis. The film is built, in fact, like a rallentando - a gradual
slowing down - from that first chase to the midpoint of the more
leisurely ride in a taxi (the love scene between Eve and Wilfred), to
the final motionless "ride" of Eve and Jonathan in the unused
eighteenth-century stage-prop carriage. Within this framework, Eve, a
young novice actress, is disabused of her belief in the glamour of
theater life and - precisely by successful multiple role-playing -
first endangers herself and at last confronts the shifting and specious
nature of her own romantic illusions.
In this regard, it's crucial that at the end Eve must go under the
stage, to confront a more paralyzing fear and to invent an ingenious
acting ploy whereby she disarms a pathological killer and saves
herself. Real stage fright, in other words, is something beneath the
stage, deeper than mere onstage panic. Thus the melodramatic play in
which Eve is first seen rehearsing at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
(and in which she seems to be egregiously incompetent indeed) at last
becomes a "thriller" from which she must extricate herself by a
superlative performance.
Besides Eve, Charlotte too is a
performer, her demented lover Cooper is a performer, and everyone in
the story plays roles. "You're an actress. You're playing a part. No
nerves when you're on," Jonathan tells Charlotte (although in the lying
flashback), just after she begs him to "draw the curtains, Johnny!"
The scene points forward to the final horrific moment, when a stagehand
is asked to "lower the iron curtain," effectively cutting off
Jonathan's escape (and by implication, his head).
Eve's father is also a role-player,
in a portrait charmingly created by scenarist Whitfield Cook and
engagingly rendered by the incomparable Scottish actor Alastair Sim
(whose first name is misspelled on both opening and closing credits).
"You're just dying to get into a part in this, and you know you are," Eve tells him.
"A part in this melodramatic play, you
mean," he replies, in a triumphant comic scene at his seaside cottage.
"That's the way you're treating it, Eve - as if it were a play you were
acting in at the Academy. Everything seems a fine acting role when
you're stage-struck, doesn't it, my dear? Here you have a plot, an
interesting cast, even a costume [the blood-soaked dress].
Unfortunately, Eve, in this real and earnest life we must face the
situation in all its bearings … [or else] you'll spend a few years in
Holloway prison, meditating on the folly of transmuting melodrama into
real life."
Eve, we should note, is different
things to different people. To Jonathan she's a patient and helpful
friend whose love for him he conveniently exploits. To her father
she's an apprentice actress ("You're my audience, Father! I wish you'd
give me a little applause now and then" - which he later does, after
Charlotte is unmasked by Eve). To Wilfred, she's an innocent actress.
To Nellie Good (Kay Walsh), she's a newspaper reporter wishing to
disguise herself as the dresser's cousin, to gain access to Charlotte.
And to Charlotte she's Nellie's cousin Doris - whose name Charlotte
can't quite seem to get right (she calls her Phyllis, Mavis and Elsie).
Charlotte is a performer on a deeper
level, too - her widowhood, especially, becomes her most pointed
attempt at self-glamorizing ("Couldn't we work in a little color?" she
asks about the funereal black outfit. "Or let it plunge just a little
in front?"). And she directs others - Eve especially - in their forms
of address, their tones of voice, and their wardrobes.
Quite early, we learn the truth about
Jonathan, which Charlotte tells the police and which Eve overhears.
Charlotte is trying to exonerate herself from involvement in the crime,
but what she says of Jonathan is true:
"I suppose I shouldn't have seen him
as often as I did, but I didn't realize how madly infatuated he was
with me. I just didn't realize. You'll never know how much I blame
myself for all this. When my husband came back from New York last week
and I told Johnny I couldn't see him, he kept on phoning me. He
wouldn't let me alone. Oh, maybe if I'd agreed to see him he wouldn't
have done this dreadful thing."
Dietrich's focused rendition of the
Cole Porter song "The Laziest Gal in Town" is the film's clearest
tip-off to the resolution of the plot; Hitchcock never, after all,
merely inserts a song into a film without a powerful structural reason:
"It's not that I shouldn't, it's not that I wouldn't, and you know that
it's not that I couldn't - it's simply because I'm the laziest gal in
town," she sings in a triumphant proclamation with multiple meanings.
Our first thought about the lyrics is obvious, but later we realize
they're also a pointed reference to what she did with Jonathan,
exploiting his fanatical devotion to the extreme that he killed her
husband.
But on its most serious level, this
leisurely comic tale is but another Hitchcockian reflection on romantic
illusion. In this case, Eve's refusal to believe the guilt of the man
she's in love with (in spite of overwhelming evidence) makes this film
a kind of comic female version of The Paradine Case. The crucial moment in this regard occurs
when Eve's affections begin to shift from Jonathan to Wilfred, and this
happens when Jonathan, seeking lodging with the Gills, embraces Eve.
Convinced of (what she thinks is) the ineradicable bond between
Jonathan and Charlotte, she gazes at the piano and we (with her, from
her viewpoint) remember the romantic piano melody played by Wilfred
(shades of The Paradine Case again). It's additionally important,
therefore, that this sequence is at once followed by Eve's ride in the
taxi with Wilfred, accompanied by the same music; it's one of the
gentlest and sweetest love scenes in the Hitchcock canon.
