[In August 1999, Titan Books, London, published my book, 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' (ISBN 1 84023 091 6), which includes supplementary essays by Dan Auiler, Steven L. DeRosa, Martin Grams Jr, Philip Kemp,  J. Lary Kuhns, and David Barraclough.  Treating all of Hitchcock's more than fifty films, the book offers an 'authoritative guide to the world's best-loved and most respected film director'.  What follows are selected details from the book, to which I have here added further comments and pieces of information.  Hopefully, these notes will both supplement the book and be of interest in themselves to keen fans of Hitchcock and his work.  Compiling these notes will be an ongoing project of this website. - K.M.]

Films written about here: The Pleasure Garden (1926), The Mountain Eagle (1926), The Lodger (1926), Downhill (1927), Easy Virtue (1927), The Ring (1927), The Farmer's Wife (1928), Champagne (1928), The Manxman (1929).

The Pleasure Garden (1926)

[Patsy Brand (Virginia Valli), a dancer in the chorus of the Pleasure Garden Theatre, befriends Jill
Cheyne (Carmelita Geraghty), just up from the country, and helps her get work at the theatre.  Jill proves
talented but ruthless.  She’s determined to be a star.  Engaged to Hugh Fielding (John Stuart), who is
about to go East for two years, she encourages the attentions of wealthy admirers who may help her,
including a supposed Russian prince (C. Falkenburg).  Meanwhile, Patsy meets Hugh’s friend Levett
(Miles Mander), who smooth-talks her into marrying him.  They spend their honeymoon at Lake Como.
Then both Levett and Hugh leave for the Tropics, where Levett begins living with a native girl.  Patsy learns
the truth about her husband when, hearing that he’s ill with fever, she rushes to join him.  (Jill is about to
marry the Russian, and refuses to help with the fare.)  Confronted, Levett becomes half-mad, and drowns
the native girl.  Later, he lunges at Patsy with a scimitar, but is shot by the local doctor.  Patsy finally finds
love and consolation with Hugh, nursing him through an attack of fever, and returning with him to
London.]

[Note: this film has been analysed at length in 'The MacGuffin' #29.]

'A good, offbeat melodrama, The Pleasure Garden pulses with life and sexuality that sometimes take odd forms.'  Thus begins the entry in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story'.  It strikes the keynote for Hitchcock films to come, since life and sexuality - the life-force that is also a death-force, the world's Will  - was always Hitchcock's main subject.  And when he once said in an interview, 'everything's perverted in a different way', he was expressing a related idea (roughly, that everything is both the same, i.e., Will, yet different, i.e., Representation).  Related to this fundamental insight is the notion of 'pure film'.  Hitchcock's even-handed approach is seen in his depiction of the film's two girls.  'In an anticipation of the two male leads in The Ring [1927], they propel each other to their respective destinies.  Patsy is "nicer", Jill has more God-given talent.  Hitchcock simply tells their two stories, which are ultimately one story.'

The film anticipates later Hitchcock in other ways.  His use of 'subjective-technique' to put the audience inside what a character is feeling or thinking was already in evidence.  At the climax, we literally see, with Levett, the ghost of the native girl who returns to taunt her killer, and who appears to be telling him to take the scimitar off the wall.  (In a 1959 television episode called "Banquo's Chair", Hitchcock would show another ghost in similar tangible manner.)  Then reality breaks in.  Levett is shot by the local doctor (or is it the plantation owner?).  At first, Levett merely smiles at his assailant.  Then he looks down and sees the mark on his shirt made by the bullet, and promptly collapses.  In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Hitchcock would stage the shooting of Louis Bernard in similar fashion.

Patsy's landlords, the Sideys, are played by a couple who anticipate other humorously-treated couples in The Lodger (1926) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943).  For instance, Mr Sidey, listening to his crystal-set through headphones, and with a copy of the 'Radio Times' in his lap, is a bit like the mild  Mr Bunting in The Lodger, whose chair collapses under him at one point, and like Mr Newton in Shadow of a Doubt, who is constantly reading detective stories.  But the gag when the Sideys' family dog chews through the cord of the crystal-set probably most anticipates the running-gag in Elstree Calling (1930) where the Gordon Harker character struggles to tune in his new-fangled television set (though his neighbour's, upstairs, is reportedly working perfectly).

The actor who plays Hugh, John Stuart, would play the detective in Number Seventeen (1932).  Miles Mander, who plays Levett, would play Druce in Murder! (1930).   And American actress Nita Naldi, who is said to be the native girl in The Pleasure Garden (though there is some contention about this), would play Beatrice in Hitchcock's next film, The Mountain Eagle.

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The Mountain Eagle (1926)

[In a mountain village in Kentucky, Beatrice Brent (Nita Naldi), a schoolteacher, incurs the enmity of
Pettigrew (Bernard Goetzke), the unpopular local storekeeper and Justice of the Peace.  Pettigrew thinks
that Beatrice has encouraged advances by his crippled son, Edward (John Hamilton), who she's been giving
evening lessons.  However, when Pettigrew questions Beatrice, he  feels her charm, and attempts liberties,
which she repels.  Furious, he publicly accuses her of wantonness.  Edward, who saw what took place,
goes into hiding.  The villagers drive Beatrice out, but fortunately she is saved from the mob’s
further anger by a handsome young man known as Fearogod (Malcolm Keen), who takes her to his remote
cabin.  Later, to end any scandal, he and Beatrice return to the village and compel Pettigrew to marry
them (planning to get a divorce later, if necessary).  Pettigrew is enraged by this new humiliation,
especially when he recalls that he and Fearogod had once loved the same woman, who had died in giving
birth to Edward.  Taking advantage of his son’s disappearance, Pettigrew goes to the cabin and arrests
Fearogod on a trumped-up charge of murder.  A year passes while Fearogod languishes in prison.  Finally,
he escapes and rejoins his wife, who by now has a baby.  But at the height of winter the baby becomes ill.
Fearogod carries it across the snow to the doctor in the village, then prepares for a showdown with
Pettigrew.  Some doubt as to which of the men is going to attack the other first is settled by an onlooker
firing a gun, which wounds Pettigrew in the shoulder.  The sudden return of Edward convinces the older
man of the futility of pressing charges against Fearogod.  Instead, the two longtime rivals shake hands.]

The Mountain Eagle was the second of two films that Hitchcock made for British producer Michael Balcon in Germany.  The above synopsis, compiled from contemporary reviews such as one in 'The Bioscope' (October 7 1926),  is about all we know of the film's plot - all prints of the film have disappeared, and only a collection of some 30 stills (unearthed by J. Lary Kuhns in the Hitchcock Collection at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) remains.

The review in 'The Bioscope' made particular mention of the film's staging and cinematography.  'Beautiful pictures of mountain scenery in summer and winter, and picturesque timber interiors, are shown with unusually artistic lighting effects and excellent photography.'

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The Lodger, A Story of the London Fog (1926)

[On the Thames Embankment a young woman lies dead.  She is the seventh victim of a serial killer known
as ‘The Avenger’ who kills only blonde girls and always on Tuesday nights.  The whole of London is soon
agog over this latest news.  Two people following the case with special interest are Mr and Mrs Bunting of
the West End.  Their daughter Daisy (played by ‘June’) is herself a blonde, a model, currently stepping out
with Joe (Malcolm Keen), a police detective.  One evening, a gentlemanly stranger (Ivor Novello) arrives
at the Buntings’ front door and indicates the ‘Room to Let’ sign.  The Buntings receive him gladly for they
need the money.  But in the ensuing days their satisfaction turns to anxiety.  The Lodger’s strange ways,
and Daisy’s increasing friendliness towards him, worry her parents.  Could he possibly be The Avenger?  The jealous Joe thinks so, and arrests him on suspicion, but The Lodger escapes.  Later that night, The Lodger is pursued by a mob, only to be saved by the arrival of Joe, who has just heard that the real Avenger has been caught ‘red-handed’.  Daisy and The Lodger marry.]

As noted in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story', The Lodger is based on the best-selling 1913 novel by Mrs Belloc Lowndes, itself loosely based on the Jack the Ripper murders that took place in Whitechapel in 1888.  It's a film with lots of psychology.  For instance, it's the first of Hitchcock's films to feature a crucial mother-figure.  After the sister of The Lodger is murdered, he promises his dying mother to track down the killer known as 'The Avenger' - who may be The Lodger himself (a variant on the theme of Sophocles's 'Oedipus').  In psychological terms, he appears to have thought that his sister was about to sully  his mother's (i.e., all women's) ideal image.  It's also the first of Hitchcock's films to feature the idea of 'the double', who may be largely inside The Lodger's head (anticipating Psycho [1960]).

In an article for the 1992  'Hitchcock Annual', called "Hitchcock's The Lodger: A Theory", I discussed the possibility that The Avenger has an accomplice.  A crucial scene, I noted, is 'the flashback to Novello's sister's coming-out ball.  On this fatal occasion, we see Novello dancing with his sister at the exact moment an unseen person's hand, across the crowded floor, throws a switch.  The lights go out, only to return almost immediately - but now the girl is dead and a card from "The Avenger" is found near her body.

'Clearly, the killer is not the person who doused the lights. ... [T]he logical suspect for the killing is the Novello character himself, the person who in two senses was closest to his sister when she died.'

Hitchcock always said he liked stories with plenty of psychology.  Well, half way through Mrs Belloc Lowndes's novel, there's a letter to the press which purports to come from a member of the public calling himself "Gaboriau" (after the French inventor of the roman policier).  The letter is headed "The Avenger: A Theory", and it surely provides the inspiration for the film's flashback scene.  'The writer argues as follows.  The Avenger, far from being "the usual type of criminal lunatic" whom the police are looking for, is more probably someone who "comprises in his own person the peculiarities of Jekyll and Hyde.  Probably he "is a quiet, pleasant-looking gentleman who lives somewhere in the West End of London", but someone with "a tragedy in his past life" - "a dipsomaniac wife", say - who now lives "maybe with his widowed mother and perhaps a maiden sister".  To these latter he is doubtless respectively "an excellent son" and "a kind brother".'

The article proceeds to show that Hitchcock's film is ambiguous about The Lodger's actual guilt or innocence.  Significantly, when Hitchcock re-staged the story for American radio audiences in 1940, he once again was keen to keep such an ambiguity to the very end.

Here's what 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' says about the film's ending:

'At the climax, word comes that the killer has been captured elsewhere.  Since the real Ripper murders were known to have provoked copycat killings, Hitchcock's original audiences may easily have felt some doubt as to The Lodger's innocence.  In fact, there's an exactly matching moment in Shadow of a Doubt which shows conclusively that its police have been hoodwinked.'  [This refers, of course, to the moment when the police in Santa Rosa call off their investigation of Uncle Charlie because they think that a man who was killed when he ran into an aeroplane propellor back East must have been the murderer.]

Hitchcock and American painter and poster-artist E. McKnight Kauffer, who designed the film's titles and caption backgrounds, experimented with symbolic designs.  For instance, the image of a triangle occurs at several points in the narrative, and is initially associated with The Avenger, whose own symbol it is (he leaves a piece of paper bearing such an image on the body of each of his victims).  But soon the film also keeps including a triangle in the intertitles referring to Daisy, implying a link with The Avenger.  And indeed a 'triangle' situation does soon develop between The Lodger, Daisy, and her policeman friend Joe.  Round about here, a tilted triangle in the corner of a  title-frame seems to indicate that Daisy is 'falling for' The Lodger.  Elsewhere, a title saying 'But Daisy didn't worry' is suitably accompanied by an untilted triangle in mid-frame.  Likewise, at the film's end, the legend  'All stories have an end' is accompanied by another upright triangle and again it's in mid-frame.

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Downhill (1927)

[Roddy Berwick (Ivor Novello) scores the winning try in an important rugby match at his public school.
Later he’s made School Captain.  But his delight is short-lived, for a local waitress accuses him of
misconduct.  Out of loyalty to his friend, Tim Wakely (Robin Irvine), Roddy doesn’t deny the charge, and is
expelled.  Worse, his father, Sir Thomas Berwick (Norman McKinnel), thinks he must be guilty - so Roddy
leaves home.  He finds work as a minor actor in a theatre.  Things look up when he inherits £30,000 and
successfully woos and marries the leading actress (Isabel Jeans).  But secretly she keeps up an affair with
her leading man (Ian Hunter), and when Roddy’s money runs out, discards him.  Next he works in a Paris
music hall as a gigolo, but quits in disgust.  Finally, he ends up delirious in a dockside room in Marseilles.  Some sailors take pity on him and ship him back to London.  He cuts a shabby figure on arriving home.  But his father has learnt the truth about the waitress’s accusation, and joyfully welcomes his son's return.  In an Old Boys’ rugby match, Roddy scores another try.]

Yes, Roddy's rugby try is symbolic, indicating the 'second chance' theme of so many Hitchcock films - including all four he had directed to this time.  But within Downhill's broad framework are subsumed other, related structures.  'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' notes the world-within-worlds idea, and how the film has three parts, named respectively 'The World of Youth', 'The World of Make-Believe', and 'The World of Lost Illusions'.

The film as a whole, and 'The World of Youth' in particular, may have influenced the depiction of English public school life in Lindsay Anderson's If ... (1968).  For example, the sequence in Ye Olde Bunne Shop with Roddy and Tim and the feisty waitress Mabel looks like the inspiration for the scene in a roadside cafe with two schoolboy pals and a buxom waitress in Anderson's film.  (In Mabel's case, she shimmies for the two boys before dancing individually with Roddy and then Tim.)  Noteworthy too about the sequence is how it makes artful use of a bead curtain, an object that the director would use again to good effect in Frenzy (1972) and Family Plot (1976).  And there's a visual gag involving a small boy - when from the camera's point of view the shop door seems to open by itself - that anticipates a gag with a circus midget in Saboteur (1942).  (The gag in Saboteur has been attributed to Dorothy Parker, but clearly Hitchcock remembered the earlier film.)

Ivor Novello had  originally played the part of Roddy on the stage.  In an early scene, his female fans had been treated to the sight of him washing his legs after the rugby match.  'The scent of good honest soap crosses the footlights,' noted an appreciative James Agate.  Hitchcock couldn't manage that, but he did include a shot of Novello naked from the waist up.  Later, in both The Ring (1927) and The Manxman (1929), he remembered to include similar shots of a robust Carl Brisson.  Later again, in Rear Window (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955), and in North by Northwest (1959), he did the same with James Stewart and Cary Grant respectively.

Now here's an item (one of several) about Downhill from a recent "Editor's Day":

April 23 [2004] Various commentators, including me, have noticed how the start of the middle section of Downhill, called 'The World of Make-Believe', first tricks us into various impressions of Roddy (including that he is a thief - making us no better than the headmaster and Roddy's father who have both wrongfully assumed him guilty of misconduct with a waitress!) and then, as the view continues to expand, finally revealing that the action is all taking place on a stage, part of a musical performance.  (Here I'm reminded both of Schopenhauer - who famously taught that all information from our senses is subjective, being mere 'phenomenon of the brain', and that the further back we stand, whether literally or figuratively, the more a 'supposed absolute reality' vanishes - and of Dickens, who in 'Great Expectations' has the worldly lawyer Jaggers tell the hero, 'Take nothing on evidence, Pip'.)  What hasn't been commented on is how an emphasis on subjectivity continues right through this middle section, and beyond, and how the film thereby continues to play tricks on us, as fate plays tricks on Roddy.  One shot, in particular, is remarkable for combining two 'realities' in one frame.  Roddy's older rival for the attention of the musical show's leading lady, Julia (Isabel Jeans), is her co-star Archie (Ian Hunter).  In the shot I mentioned, Archie, in his dressing-room, gazes into the frame while in the left-hand corner of that frame, in close-up, a hand holds a distinctive cat-shaped spray bottle.  The composition anticipates shots emphasising significant foreground objects in The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Notorious (1946).  But in this case, there's a further level of sophistication because the hand belongs to Julia who is in an adjoining dressing-room, where she is applying scent to her face after the performance, and the shot is evidently a 'thinks' shot representing Archie's thoughts of her.  In a moment, he'll get up and leave, evidently bound for Julia's dressing-room.  Hitchcock, though, has further tricks - still involving subjectivity - to play.  The view changes to reveal Julia at her dressing-table, leaning back.  A hand knocks at the door.  Cut to an upside-down shot from Julia's point of view showing the new arrival entering (another shot that anticipates one in Notorious).  We expect to see Archie.  But as the view rights itself, the new arrival is disclosed as Roddy.  Perhaps the upside-down shot has an additional degree of subjectivity beyond simple point-of-view.  Julia is a rather flighty woman, and she has apparently already being making a play for Roddy by leaving behind onstage her cigarette-case, knowing that Roddy will find it and bring it to her.  At the same time, she carries on an affair of convenience with Archie, who pays her bills!  (Archie will turn up at her dressing-room in a moment.)  Now, I haven't yet said how Hitchcock had earlier shown Roddy in his dressing-room, a scene followed by a simple fade-out.  That is, we never do see Roddy get up and leave - whereas we are shown Archie getting up from his dressing-table and going out.  Accordingly, it seems possible that the rest of this section of the film, in which Roddy inherits £30,000 and marries Julia, only to lose both the money and Julia to Archie, who has been hovering in the background all along, is itself no more than a 'thinks' episode imagined by a pessimistic Roddy in his dressing-room as he wonders whether to return the cigarette-case.  Certainly his 'married' state is never mentioned again in the remainder of the film, not even when he returns home and is re-united with his father!  And this ingenious (perhaps over-ingenious) middle section of the film is called 'The World of Make-Believe', after all!

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Easy Virtue (1927)

[Larita Filton (Isabel Jeans), wife of an habitual drunkard, gains notoriety following an encounter in the studio of a young portrait-painter, who takes pity on her and kisses her.  When the husband discovers them
together, the artist commits suicide, leaving Larita money in his will.  Consequently, the husband easily
obtains a divorce on the grounds of his wife’s ‘misconduct’.  Larita leaves for the Mediterranean, where she meets John Whittaker (Robin Irvine), the son of a wealthy English family, who is attracted to her.
Without knowing anything of her past life, he proposes and is accepted.  The newly-married couple return
to England to live with John’s parents and his two sisters in their ancestral country mansion.  But the elder
Mrs Whittaker (Violet Farebrother) is resentful - she had intended a different bride, Sarah (Enid Stamp Taylor),  for her son.  Larita begins to feel estranged.  When she appeals to John to take her back to the South of France, he is distant. And after Mrs Whittaker discovers old photos of Larita in ‘The Tatler’, thereby learning of her ‘notoriety’, it’s only a matter of time before a new divorce case is headed for court.]

Easy Virtue anticipates Rebecca (1940), Notorious (1946), and Marnie (1964), being the story of a new bride brought back to the family mansion where she encounters hostility.  The fundamemtal theme, once again, is of life versus death, and at the end it may seem that the forces of death (Mrs Whittaker and her ilk) have won the day.

In a memorable scene, the Whittakers sit down to dine beneath a mural of gaunt-looking saints, and the image is positively sepulchral.  The dead hand of the past, as in Psycho (1960), weighs oppressively here.  What the film opposes to it is simply the quality of compassion, but that is something that is constantly being slighted by a cold, sanctimonious society.  The story begins when an artist does in fact take pity on Larita; yet society proceeds to condemn both of them.  In the court scene, a large woman on the jury (anticipating the muscular Mrs Whittaker) writes on a pad, 'Pity is akin to love', and momentarily we think that she's sympathetic to Larita.  In fact, she presses her fellow jurors for a verdict of 'misconduct'.  Later, Mrs Whittaker cannot understand the humane attitude of the outsider, Sarah, who attempts to reconcile Larita with her feckless, mother-dominated husband.  (Larita, for her part, will call John her 'poor boy'.)  Sarah tells Mrs Whittaker, 'I feel terribly sorry for both of them.'

As Larita is preparing to leave the household for good, she acknowledges Sarah's friendship with a kiss. Not a lesbian moment, it is nonetheless, in its way, deliberately startling.  As I say in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story', it 'suggests Hitchcock's belief in a free-flowing Eros as the surest means of keeping us all human'.  Hitchcock is sometimes compared with the Surrealists, and this moment is excellent evidence for that affinity.

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The Ring (1927)

['One Round' Jack Sander (Carl Brisson) is a young boxer in a circus sideshow booth.  His sweetheart
Mabel (Lilian Hall-Davis) sells the tickets out front.  Hearing of Jack’s prowess, a boxing promoter visits
the booth with his champion, Bob Corby (Ian Hunter).  Not knowing who Bob is, Mabel invites him to go a
round with Jack.  For the first time ever, Jack is defeated.  Bob feels attracted to Mabel, and secretly gives
her an arm bangle.  However, when the promoter offers to make Jack the champion’s sparring-partner, the
way is open for Jack and Mabel to marry.  An uneasy three-way relationship follows.  Jack and Bob
remain sparring-partners, but it becomes an open secret that Mabel is having an affair with the champion.
Meanwhile, Jack’s own career advances.  After he and Mabel quarrel, and she walks out on him, he
confronts Bob at a night-club and demands satisfaction in the ring.  The big fight duly takes place at a
packed Albert Hall.  Mabel watches nervously.  Eventually, with the fight going against Jack, she whispers
to him her support.  He rallies and wins on a KO.  Later, a discarded bangle is found at the ringside.]

The Ring, based on a screenplay by Hitchcock himself, is something of a masterpiece, certainly one of Hitchcock's best silent films.  Clearly owing some of its inspiration to E.A. Dupont's Variety (Germany, 1925), it prefigures key ingredients of Hitchcock films to come.  It has a splendid vigour, especially in the scenes of fairground life, and a rich and complex sense of both 'life' and 'destiny'.  The Albert Hall climax anticipates the similarly  'fateful' Albert Hall sequence of The Man Who Knew Too Much (both 1934 and 1956 versions), with the latter's use of the 'Storm Cloud Cantata'.   Actually, imagery of the elements, and of the passing seasons, is central to The Ring.  To Truffaut, Hitchcock mentioned a montage of a billboard featuring the rise of ‘One Round’ Jack from minor fighter to championship contender.  As the seasons pass, the boxer’s name, in bigger and bigger letters, rises to the top of the display.  Meanwhile, trees blossom in spring, snow falls in winter.  Hitchcock said he took great care over this imagery.

Just before the film's outdoor wedding celebration, the screen is blotted for a moment with what looks like either confetti or snow.  The ambiguity is fitting and is just one of many inspired 'manipulations' of the visual image in The Ring.  Implied by several of these is the invisible working of destiny, in which it's all finally 'one'.  (Cf., say, The Trouble With Harry [1955], and the seasons imagery there.)

Again, the circular Albert Hall of the climax may be far removed from the boxing tent (and circus ring) of the opening scenes, but in another way both worlds reflect each other.  As I say in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story', to the boxers themselves, it’s indeed all one.  At a party in Jack’s London flat, where the champagne has flowed freely, two girls do a wild dance, then retire to their respective ‘corners’ and are revived by their ‘seconds’.  At a night-club, Jack and Bob come to blows and Bob appears to be ‘counted out’ by the slide of a trombone being played nearby.  Contrariwise, at the Albert Hall, champagne is poured over the boxers’ heads to spur them on.

By the time that Hitchcock made The Birds (1963), the notion that 'it's all One' was central to his work, and profound.  The birds in that film, my book suggests, symbolise immanent Will turned against itself.  In other words, the oneness of things is that film's ultimate subject.  As already noted, such an understanding is inseparable from the notion of 'pure film'

Another, related matter noted in the book is Hitchcock's even-handedness.  In The Ring, which the young director conceived and scripted himself, his affection for all the central characters, even Bob Corby, is palpable.  The film's 'sporting' note would significantly recur in The Lady Vanishes (1938) where the villainous Hartz ends up (like Corby) defeated, but is big enough to finally say of his opponents, 'Jolly good luck to them!' - a note that is also picked up at the end of North by Northwest (1959), though it's a sardonic one there.  (The arrested Vandamm complains of his opponents that it 'wasn't very sporting of' them to use 'real bullets'.)

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The Farmer's Wife (1928)

[The young wife of Farmer Sweetland (Jameson Thomas) is dying.  Her last words, whispered to the
housekeeper Araminta Dench (Lilian Hall-Davis), are, ‘Don’t forget to air your master’s pants.’  Time
passes, and Sweetland’s daughter marries.  Araminta, efficient as always, oversees the wedding breakfast
and dispenses presents to the guests.  Afterwards, Sweetland confides to her his intention of re-marrying,
and asks her to help him draw up a list of candidates.  Four names go on it.  Sweetland thinks that the first
candidate, Louisa Windeat (Louise Pounds) will ‘come like a lamb to the slaughter’, but is rebuffed when
the widow sternly tells him that she values her independence.  The same general result attends his
proposals to various spinsters: the prim Thirza Tapper (Maud Gill), the simpering postmistress Mary
Hearn (Olga Slade), and the buxom barmaid Mercy Bassett (Ruth Maitland).  At first Sweetland is
angry, then despairing.  Ultimately, he sees that his own enchanting Araminta, who has
served him so well, is the one he should have thought of first.  His glum handyman, Churdles Ash (Gordon
Harker), appears to agree, saying, 'The next best thing to no wife is a good one.']

Here are four recent entries from "Editor's Day" ...

May 24 [2004] Do yourself a favour, fellow Hitchcock enthusiast, and watch a good DVD of The Farmer's Wife (1928), such as the one from LaserLight.  The latter's DVD of Hitchcock's film has been recorded at what appears to be the correct speed, and runs 129 minutes (compared with the 91 minutes or thereabouts of a tape of the film that was once graciously given me by Australia's highbrow Mr Movies, David Stratton).  The LaserLight print is visually good, is well-engineered, and has a suitable musical accompaniment.  At times, that accompaniment reminded me of the score for The Trouble With Harry (1955), which is apt because, as I suggest in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story', the latter film has a 'sagacity' that derives from The Farmer's Wife.  Here's another point, relating The Farmer's Wife to some of the things discussed here last week.  By the end of the film, Farmer Sweetland (Jameson Thomas) has been humbled enough to see that the happiness he has been seeking was under his nose all along - on his own hearth, in fact - in the person of the faithful servant Minta who has attended him and his grown-up daughter since his young wife died.  Like so many of Hitchcock's films, The Farmer's Wife is about 'the lost paradise'; and, like The Trouble With Harry, in this case such a 'paradise' is the very setting of the film itself, to which its hero comes 'home' (symbolised by the hearth) at the film's end.  (I have an article by Hitchcock on the murderer Adelaide Bartlett in which he equates hearth and home in the same manner The Farmer's Wife does in its recurring motif of the fireside.)  The film was shot on location in rural Devon and, just as in The Trouble With Harry, the splendidly picturesque location filming is an essential part of the look and meaning of the film.  More on that shortly.  For now, notice that the spiritual lesson of the film is that home and happiness lie within oneself - the same lesson taught by, say, The Wizard of Oz (1939).  Of course, it is often said that 'we can never go home again', which is indeed what the majority of Hitchcock's 'lost paradise' films (e.g., Shadow of a Doubt [1943], and Frenzy [1972]) imply.  Such Hitchcock films invariably raise the 'taboo on incest' in order to show that healthy, invigorated living requires a breaking away from hearth and home, and an immersion in the world's striving, at least for a time.  (So young Charlie, at the end of Shadow of a Doubt, will probably soon leave home.)  If Hitchcock characters are mentally unable to break free of such a taboo - recalling the Ivor Novello character in The Lodger (1926), who in turn is the prototype of Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt, Bruno Anthony in Strangers On a Train (1951), Norman Bates in Psycho (1960), and Bob Rusk in Frenzy  - such a character is almost invariably depicted as a psychopath and a murderer.  (I have argued elsewhere that the Ivor Novello character in The Lodger is indeed such an incestuous killer, though the film appears to exonerate him.)  In a sense, then, both The Farmer's Wife and The Trouble With Harry must be seen as fantasies (as well as comedies), hypostatising what can only be aspired after.  Nonetheless, as noted here recently, poet and engraver William Blake, for one, spoke of a progression from Innocence to Experience to (a higher) Innocence.  He also once said, 'I must create a System lest I be enslaved by another man's'.  Was such a 'System' also Hitchcock's?  And, if so, how 'valid' was it?  Tomorrow: some answers, plus some more down-to-earth aspects of The Farmer's Wife.

May 25 From my observation, individual Catholics are pretty good at being both 'innocent' and worldly-wise!  Doesn't Patrick McGilligan cite the case of Grace Kelly, noting how she had been raised in a girls' school run by nuns and therefore had heard 'everything' by the time she was a teenager?!  Certainly Hitchcock and Grace hit it off from the start, by which I mean that she appreciated his fund of dirty stories and wasn't in the least put out by his telling them.  I mention all of this in answer to one of my questions yesterday, apropos The Farmer's Wife, about whether Hitchcock's films show a 'systematic' depiction of Innocence and Experience (à la William Blake's 'Songs of Innocence and Experience').  And my provisional answer is: yes, after a fashion.  I mean, it does seem to me the case that Hitchcock was imbued with a 'Dionysian' streak from his earliest days - one that is reflected in his pre-occupation with films about 'the life-force' in all of its aspects, including its darkest aspects, and that such a film (as I'll try and show) is The Farmer's Wife - but that by the same token he maintained an objectivity about such a 'force' that amounts to something between schizophrenia and, yes, 'innocence' (albeit of a rather wilful kind).  I have told the story before - I forget where I got it from - about how Hitchcock once said that, as a life-long theatre-goer, he had always kept his 'innocence' of vision by never allowing himself to think about backstage matters (including both technical ones and fan-type, gossipy ones).  The parallel with how he ran his life, and consequently put that vision into his films, is fairly exact, it seems to me.  A part of him knew damned well that Innocence is 'lost' (from the moment we are born, some poets and theologians say; from about the age of four, Freud maintained; from when we have our first sexual thoughts, popular understanding has it), but that, as a good Catholic, he would nonetheless celebrate its possibility, as in the very title of his film Young and Innocent (1937).  That is, a part of him would deny what Experience (and our reading) tells us, that we are all culpable, 'fallen' creatures - while another part of him would delight in puncturing such 'optimistic' self-deception.  Nonetheless, such a 'schizoid' position does posit the possibility of a 'higher' insight, leading to a different order of Innocence, and that is why I think that Hitchcock ultimately comes close to his fellow Cockney, William Blake, in his understanding (and also, I might add, to that of Blake's contemporary, the philosopher Schopenhauer).  Now, to illustrate what I mean, let's turn to The Farmer's Wife, where a lot of what I have been talking about is already either latent, or on show.  Today, gentle reader, I'll leave you with this observation about the film, from 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story': life and sexuality are the film's subject-matter, and its rural images carry a voluptuous charge.

May 26  The Farmer's Wife, set amidst the rolling fields and vales of Devonshire, begins with a death (of Farmer Sweetland's young wife, called Tibby), incorporates several communal gatherings - a wedding breakfast (for Sweetland's daughter), a country tea-party, a fox-hunt (predecessor of those in Suspicion and Marnie) - and climaxes with another imminent wedding (for Sweetland and his servant Minta), symbolised when Minta dons a dress left behind by Tibby.  The elements of celebration and continuity are unmissable.  On the whole, Hitchcock has done Eden Phillpotts's celebrated play proud.  In particular, his own temperament has merged successfully with what I have called the 'sagacity' of the play.  Now, an apparently quite minor character in the film is the elderly gentleman, a neighbour, who sports a small white beard on his chin and who presides over the wedding breakfast for Sweetland's daughter and her smiling, fresh-faced young husband.  (Sweetland, at the opposite end of the table, is subdued throughout the meal, thinking of his departed wife.)  His name is Dick Coaker (Haward Watts), and I call him 'Coaker the poker'.  Standing and addressing the nubile bride at the wedding breakfast, he pokes her in the chest with his walking-stick.  Her husband beams his approval.  It's a seemingly harmless and innocent gesture by old Coaker, but that satyr's beard he wears, and phallic symbol he wields (which Hitchcock also gives to Scottie in Vertigo!), are not accidents!  Later in the film, Coaker and Sweetland fall to talking.  Sweetland is again subdued, having been rejected in his advances by three (soon four) of the most-likely candidates for the new wife he has been seeking.  (When he first drew up a list of such candidates, with Minta's help, he had brimmed with over-confidence.  'It seems almost indecent to see them all listed on the one bit of paper', he had remarked.)  Now Coaker invokes the countryside while simultaneously sounding the voluptuous note that characterises the film (as it also characterises The Trouble With Harry, both novel and film versions).  He speaks of pulling turnips, 'as round and white as a woman's bosom'.  Coaker, we may guess, is obsessed with such objects!  At this point, Hitchcock cuts to the hunters and hounds, in full cry on the nearby heath.  The symbolism, and communal preoccupation (what Schopenhauer would label 'Will'), are evident enough.  But here's the point I make about all of this in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story': 'The intention of the filmmakers is less prurient than it is to share a matter of profound importance, to let the viewer "enter in" (as the housekeeper Minta's phrase has it).'  In other words, the wisdom and 'vision' I am attributing to Hitchcock emerge at this point, allowing the possibility of the 'higher' Innocence I spoke of, and they are all connected with things like our common 'Will' (life-force) and the 'continuity' that marriage signifies.  The parallel film is again The Trouble With Harry.  More tomorrow.

May 27   The Farmer's Wife is one of those Hitchcock films (there are many, Rear Window being another) where the social niceties are sooner or later stripped away to reveal the struggling humanity underneath (Schopenhauer's 'Will' exposed!).  It doesn't always make for a pretty picture!  Only Hitchcock's subtle commentary, or wit, may stop such moments from being too distasteful, or painful, to watch.  The scene at Thirza Tapper's tea-party where Farmer Sweetland, stung by his second rejection in an afternoon (and his third in about as many days!), switches tack and tells Mary, the over-ripe postmistress, some home-truths, is a case in point.  The poor woman, who has evidently fancied herself still youthful and as eligible to receive a man's advances as any member of her sex, is suddenly reduced to hysterics and a baby's flailing gestures, which Hitchcock films in close-up.  (Not incidentally, The Farmer's Wife, a film about ego, though also its overcoming, may contain more subjective-shots than any other Hitchcock picture.  Anticipating The Birds in this respect, Hitchcock wants to leave us in no doubt that we, the viewers, are involved in the goings-on in this particular rural community.)  Hitchcock manages to take the hard edge off this scene by highlighting the comical reactions of the other people at the tea-party - who, amazed, all come flocking into the room from the terrace outside.  Old Coaker (the poker) says something like: 'Guy Fawkes and Angels, what's Sammy doing to postmistress?'  Seeing this film again recently, though only for the first time in a quality print (the LaserLight DVD), has given me several 'favourite scenes' to savour.  I've only space to mention a few.  I love the long shot of Sweetland riding up a perilous hillside track, set deep amidst rolling Devon hills, to visit the Widow Windeatt, whom he confidently expects will come 'like a lamb to the slaughter' when he proposes to her.  (He is mistaken.)  He is like some intrepid knight going to rescue, or anyway serenade, a damsel in a remote fortress.  On his way into this particular lady's house, he treats her two startled grooms with lordly patronage, as if he were already their new employer.  Leaving, he rounds on them, angrily.  (In Jameson Thomas's performance, though, Sweetland never wholly loses his gentlemanly dignity.)  It's the equivalent of the scene in The Birds where Mrs Brenner drives over to neighbour Dan Fawcett's farm, only to find him dead.  Aghast, she stumbles outside again and drives away in a cloud of dust.  The tea-party scene in The Farmer's Wife is an extended comic triumph, full of clever sight-gags, several of them involving Sweetland's grumpy manservant, Churdles Ash, who has been 'loaned out' for the occasion and finds himself in ill-fitting livery whose pants he must hold up with one hand.  At one point he must single-handedly (yes, literally!) manoeuvre an elderly lady's enormous bath chair through a doorway.  Now, finally, I'll mention one of the film's notable subtleties.  We don't directly see the fourth, and final, of Sweetland's rejections, this time by a buxom barmaid named Mercy who is certainly the prototype for Maisy the barmaid in Frenzy.  A fade-out spares us that.  However, we do later briefly see what had happened when, in a series of 'thinks' shots, Sweetland imagines each of his four initial 'candidates' occupying the chair on the hearth that had been his late wife's.  (In Maisy's case, we see her that day at the bar thrust Sweetland away.)  In a beautiful moment, the patient Minta then walks into the shot and really does sit in that chair.  In a flash, a humbled Sweetland at last knows to whom he should have addressed himself all along ...

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Champagne (1928)

[New York.  When her millionaire Father (Gordon Harker) frowns on her affair with The Boy (Jean
Bradin), The Girl (Betty Balfour) simply borrows one of her Father’s aeroplanes and re-joins her lover at sea (he is on a liner, sailing for Europe), crash-landing the plane in the process.  Soon The Boy proposes, but bad weather on the rest of the trip forces him to stay in his cabin.  The Girl reports that she’s arranged with the captain to marry them, but The Boy expostulates, ‘You’ve arranged - don’t I arrange anything?’  This and later events are observed by The Man (Theo von Alten), a mysterious stranger whom The Girl first meets in the ship’s lounge.  On arriving in Paris, the lovers, still at odds, separate for a time.  More bad news is brought by The Father in person - he is bankrupt. The Girl, who is good-natured, if rather spoilt, goes to work as a flower girl in a cabaret.  But when her Father eventually admits that he isn’t bankrupt at all, and has only been testing her, the chastened Girl is re-united with The Boy, who has come seeking her.]

Champagne is about the 'taming', or 'civilising', not of a shrew but of a head-strong young blonde (who represents the life-force, symbolised by the champagne of the title) by a number of men, including her father and her lover.  The film includes her erotic fantasies and impulses, and the overall effect is worthy of Bunuel (e.g., El Gran Calevera [1949], Belle de Jour [1967]).

Comic actor Gordon Harker (The Ring, The Farmer's Wife) again gives a sturdy performance.  There's an amusing episode, for instance, when the millionaire father and his daughter are sharing a Paris garret (they are supposedly now destitute).  In one scene the father, in pyjamas, does his morning exercises - up and down - with a cigarette holder in his mouth, talking all the while.

But as noted in 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story', the film's most interesting, and complex, character may be The Man, who is something of a surrogate for the audience and our fantasies.  Hitchcock later dismissed the film as 'dreadful', yet it contains the germs of several of his later masterworks, including Rear Window (1954).

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The Manxman (1929)

[The Isle of Man.  Fisherman Pete Quilliam (Carl Brisson) arrives back in port to be greeted by his pal
since boyhood, lawyer Philip Christian (Malcolm Keen).  Both men admire Kate Cregeen (Anny Ondra),
daughter of old Caesar (Randle Ayrton), the village publican.  But Caesar glowers at Pete because of his
poverty, making him realise that his present chances of marrying Kate are slim.  He vows to go abroad and
seek his fortune.  Extracting from Kate a promise to wait for him, he asks Philip to watch over her.  Time
passes, then news comes that Pete has been killed in South Africa.  Kate and Philip begin an affair.  When
Pete turns up, very much alive,  he suspects nothing.  Pete and Kate marry, but the child she soon bears is
Philip’s - though Pete thinks it his.  Unable to keep up the deception, Kate tries to drown herself.  For this
offence, she is brought before Philip, newly appointed Deemster (judge).  But Caesar, who knows the truth,
publicly denounces Philip.  The latter resigns office to depart with the woman he loves and their baby.
Pete returns to the fishing fleet.]

The Manxman was first screened in January 1929, though it didn't receive a full public screening until a year later, after Blackmail.  It was not a success with the public.  Hitchcock himself was reportedly bored during its making, probably because of the old-fashioned story, taken from the best-selling novel (1894) by Sir Hall Caine.  In turn, the general storyline borrowed from Tennyson's narrative poem, 'Enoch Arden' (1864).

Also, here's a paragraph that was cut from the US edition of 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story':

'Was there ... anything more to Hitch’s reported boredom?  Perhaps it owed something to how remote the story’s Manx setting seemed to him.  Michael Powell, just then starting out in the film industry as The Manxman's stills photographer, has written that "Hitch was not enthralled by local colour, except in city streets".  (Actually, only two scenes were shot on the Isle of Man, the remaining location filming being done around Minehead in Somerset, and in North and South Cornwall.)  This didn’t stop the film from containing one of those idyllic interludes that had sometimes figured in earlier Hitchcock films, such as The Pleasure Garden, suggesting nostalgia for a lost paradise.  The corresponding passage in the novel says that Philip and Kate "were like other children of the garden of Eden, driven out and stripped naked".'

The hapless and self-centred Kate (played by Anny Ondra, a blonde), is given business that Hitchcock would use again.  When she runs to Philip after Pete's reported death, saying 'We're free!', it's a pre-echo of the moment in I Confess (1953) when Madame Grandfort runs to Father Logan and uses the same words.  (The pair's would-be blackmailer has been reported murdered; another similar moment is in Topaz [1969].)  And when, just before Kate's attempt to drown herself, she looks up at a ship's mast towering over her, the gesture is identical to Madeleine's in Vertigo (1958) just before she goes to throw herself off the mission tower.  In each of these cases, you could say that Hitchcock is using precise visual stylisation to imply forces beyond the woman's knowledge or control.