George Herman Hitchcock project, Chapter 5A: Sabotage

Introduction
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2A  and  2B
Chapter 3A  and  3B
Chapter 4A  and  4B


HITCHCOCK
(1936-1938)

With the great financial and creative successes of The Man Who Knew Too Much and The 39 Steps, Hitchcock remained free to choose his projects.  With this freedom came a clear level of confidence.  Even though only one film stood between Number 17 and The Man Who Knew Too Much, there's a complete reversal in the sense of comfort in the storytelling.  The dialogue and characterization are lean and always feed into the story.  The visual pyrotechnics now only appear in order to further the scene or film.  And there are full consistent themes that are addressed throughout each movie, in almost every sequence.  With The 39 Steps and the films that followed, this maturity continued to grow.

It's a pleasure to watch this growth happen.  Many of his earlier films (especially the theatrical adaptations) are a chore to watch, especially when there's no hint of Hitchcock (or any competent director) involved in the production.  Now it's getting interesting watching him grow up.

He was my age during the Number 17-and-Waltzes of Vienna period, the deepest of his creative struggles.  So it's reassuring to watch the success that followed immediately after.

With that success came films that are so competently made that craft and style discussions seem to burst from them.  Let's try a couple.

---

Secret Agent (1936)

Adapted from two of M. Somerset Maugham's short stories, Secret Agent has a great cast of John Gielgud, Peter Lorre, Madeleine Carroll, and Robert Young.  As the script was being developed, tensions were rising throughout Europe over Germany's agression.  The filmmakers seize this atmosphere and set the action during World War I in the midst of actual battle.

Keeeesss me. Yes?  (Source)

The story is about three British secret agents who are sent to Switzerland to find and kill a German secret agent before he crosses over to enemy territory.  They kill a man who turns out to be innocent, then have to chase the real agent into Bulgaria to assassinate him.

Technically, the film is solidly made on all levels.  There's a great theme running throughout about how the noise of conflict prevents successful communication.  Besides this metaphorically happening between characters throughout the script, Hitchcock activates it cinematically via multiple sequences where loud harsh mechanical noises keep people from hearing pivotal information.  The camera work and editing combine to create many scenes of great suspense, including a massive police-and-spy chase through a Swiss Chocolate factory!

This issue I have with the film has to do with plausibility and how it affects the tone, characters, and overall story.

First, here's Hitchcock's (AH) spectacular defense in his conversation with Francois Truffaut (FT):

AH:  I'm not concerned with plausibility; that's the easiest part of it, so why bother? (...)
FT:  Not to mention the waste of time for the public!
AH:  Aside from the waste of time, they make for gaps or flaws in the picture.  Let's be logical.  If you're going to analyze everything in terms of plausibility or credibility, then no fiction script can stand up to that approach, and you wind up doing a documentary. (...)  To insist that a storyteller stick to the facts is just as ridiculous as to demand of a representative painter that he show objects accurately.  (...)  There's quite a difference, you see, between the creation of a film and the making of a documentary.  In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film, the director is the god; he must create life. And in the process of that creation, there are lots of feelings, forms of expression, and viewpoints that have to be juxtaposed. We should have total freedom to do as we like, just so long as it's not dull. (...)
FT:  (...) Incidentally, one play on words I rather like is your own saying: "Some films are slices of life. Mine are slices of cake."
AH:  I don't want to film a "slice of life" because people can get that at home, in the street, or even in front of the movie theater.  They don't have to pay money to see a slice of life.  (...)  Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story.  That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal.  It must be dramatic and human.  What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out.(Truffaut 99-103)

These are great guidelines for all storytellers.  I agree with everything said.

But.

There's a limit to allowed implausibility when it effects the entire story.  For instance, Secret Agent.  Here are the three "secret agents" that the British military send to assassinate a German spy:

1.  A writer who, though he had previously served in the military, appears to have never killed anyone before this assignment.
2.  A woman who seems to be doing this on a lark and clearly is unable to handle any level of espionage.  She freaks out at the first moment of danger and panics to the point that she'd rather kill her allies than the bad guy.
3.  An imbalanced, infantile sociopath who is comically terrible at keeping his cover.

With these three knuckleheads assigned to kill an important German agent, it's no wonder that they keep bumbling the mission.  Thus the first half of the film has a goofy bubbly tone.  This sort of setup is for screwball comedies.  But once the events start to go wrong the film pivots abruptly to a tragic, melodramatic tone.

And this doesn't work.  Why?  Plausibility.  By assigning these incredibly unfit three people to do this job, the British military itself can be called into question.  It's blunderingly stupid.  It's parody.

Thus the story's inciting incident (sending these three dolts on the mission) makes no sense.  Without that inciting incident there's no story to tell.  So if that piece is flawed to its core, so will be the story that follows.

And now for something completely different.

---

Sabotage (1936)

It comes close to an abuse of cinematic power. -- Truffaut

And it's GREAT! -- Me

Psycho's shower sequence is often mentioned as the pivotal moment in cinema that altered audience expectation about who will live and die in a film.  I would like to take everyone back another 24 years to Sabotage.

The hub, the midpoint, the central scene to Sabotage is an extended, overwrought build up to one tasteless moment of exploitation.  And it is so good, that Hitchcock apologized for it for the rest of his career.

The first thing you need to know is that the film is a story focused on domestic terrorism.  A German(!) immigrant(!) is used as a pawn by a terrorist group to incite fear in Londoners.  He sabotages the power grid at the film's opening, but London winds up having a good old time in the dark.  So his shadowy bosses decide to have him deliver a bomb in the middle of a royal parade.

Yes, a ticking bomb.  Set to go off at 1:45.  But Scotland Yard is on his case, so he hands the packaged bomb to his 12-year-old brother-in-law -- a happy-go-lucky kid -- telling the innocent boy to drop off the package at a specific location before 1:30.

(Source)

But the boy keeps getting delayed on his way to the delivery point, all the while holding a bomb under his arm.  His delays become increasingly out of his control.  The nearby clocks pass 1:30...

He casually hops onto a city bus.  But it's not just any city bus.  There's a film-loving warm-hearted ticket taker.  A sweet old lady.  And a puppy!  A cute puppy who plays with the little boy as the clock passes 1:45.

And the bomb explodes, killing everyone on board.

The suspense is insane.  The overdone build up is so enjoyable that I started laughing.  I knew something ironic would happen to stop the bomb from blowing up.  Right?

No.  Hitch kills the innocent.  The boy, the nice old lady, the generous film buff.  The baby puppy!  All burned to death in the explosion.

Then Hitchcock cuts to the main characters laughing.  Wow.  The film is never the same after that.  It turns into a nervous kinetic meltdown:  A spectacular death scene done in silence.  Hitchcock's birds make their first appearance and they're everywhere.  A poignant Disney cartoon!  Guilt.  Grief.  Suicide.  I'm not even sure how this screened in the US.

(Source)

Sure, there are weaknesses in the film.  The acting is questionable (aside from the great Sylvia Sidney) which in turn weakens the love story.  The early pacing is sluggish.  And the ending is a direct ripoff from Blackmail (though that's not entirely a bad thing).

Yet the power in the second half of the film and the many layers woven within make up for all of that.  And ultimately, the bomb sequence is a use of cinematic power.  Not an abuse.  It's showing an act terrorism.  And by fully engaging the audience through the power of film, it does so effectively.

Up to this point in Hitch's career, this is his best film.  I mean, he's wielding the power of the cinematic gods now.  What will follow?

TO BE CONTINUED...


Sources:
Sinyard, Neil. The Films of Alfred Hitchcock. Multimedia Books Ltd., London. 1994.
Spoto, Donald. The Art Of Alfred Hitchcock. Anchor Books, New York. 1992.
Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. Simon & Schuster, Paris. 1984.

George Herman Hitchcock project, Chapter 4B: The 39 Steps

Introduction

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2A  and  2B

Chapter 3A  and  3B

Chapter 4A

HITCHCOCK
(1931-1935)
continuing from Chapter 4A

Hitchcock had just released the abysmal mess of Number 17.  He followed that up with Waltzes from Vienna in 1934, which he too embarrassed about to even discuss.  Waltzes is unavailable on home video in the US, which is just as well for me.  It becomes difficult to watch him flounder repeatedly after all the promise of Blackmail.  His stylings were bursting at the seams in Rich and Strange, but at least were crazy enough to be interesting.  In Number 17 there were random bursts of strange angles and camera tricks that awkwardly distracted from the story, as if he was fighting with the film or with boredom.

As I'd quoted at the end of Part A, after the release of 17 and Waltzes Hitch underwent a bit of introspection.  He was only going to commit to projects that interested him personally, films that would fully involve his craft.

What remains largely unspoken is that after this period Hitchcock never again had a screenplay credit.  Instead he entrusted the writing to others while he focused on direction.


The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

Not to be confused with his 1956 Stewart-Day remake, the 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much is an abrupt track change to Hitchcock's career.  Working with (at least) five writers, Hitch crafts a classic thriller as if he'd been doing so for his entire career.

As a thriller genre writer, I found this exhilarating.  When I use the term "classic thriller" I mean that it fully fits the structural mold of a thriller that we all use today.  It's easily pitchable:  After a family accidentally discovers a terrorist group's plans, their daughter is kidnapped.  If the parents involve the authorities, the bad guys will kill the girl.  So they are left to search for her on their own.  The first, second, and third acts just pop right out of it.

Thanks to the work of that team of writers (Charles Bennett, D.B. Wyndham-Lewis, Edwin Greenwood, A.R. Rawlinson, and Emlyn Williams) the film is funnier, faster, and leaner than any previous Hitchcock work.  There are set-ups and payoffs in theme, character, and story.

The two parents, played by Edna Best and Leslie Banks, transition from a bantering but sexually bored marriage to a smart hard-working team throughout the conflict.  The daughter, played by Nova Pilbeam (fantastic name!), arcs from happy-go-lucky to exhausted shock.

Peter Lorre is tremendous as always as the bad guy.  He's really one of the great cinematic presences, absolutely nailing character and feeling the moment he steps on screen.  Here in The Man Who, he's like an evil Ralph Wiggum, a pudgy little demon.  Lorre was also reciting most of his lines phonetically since he'd just left Germany as the Nazis came to power.  But one can't see any issues with the language or the dialogue since he looks so comfortable in character.

(Source)

On top of this great actor direction, Hitchcock's visual style is present only to serve the story.  Little is wasted, in direct contrast to Number 17.  The lighting progresses from light to dark, white to black, day to night.  The suspense in the concerto assassination scene is textbook perfect, shot to shot, devoid of dialogue.  And the penultimate police shootout is brutal, dead bodies everywhere.

It all feels like it was directed by an old veteran of the form.  Perhaps this is because this director was inventing the form right here.  We are told that the assassination will happen during the cantata performance; the gun will go off when the cymbals crash.  We hear the piece beforehand on a record, then we're in music hall, we hear the music, we see the cymbals, we see the gun, the cymbals, the cymbals, the cymbals, the gun, the cymbals are lifted, the music rises, and...


The 39 Steps (1935)

Sir Alfred goes on to prove that this wasn't a fluke with The 39 Steps.  He brought in Charles Bennett (again) and Ian Hay to adapt the novel by John Buchan.  Together they assembled the first solid Wrong Man-themed Hitchcock film and introduced his first Macguffin.

(Source)

A Canadian tourist (Robert Donat) is visited by a spy who is then killed his apartment.  The bad guys frame him for the murder, so he sets off across Scotland to find the lead criminal and prove his own innocence while being chased by the cops and the baddies.

Remove the specifics and that's actually the mold for an entire cinematic genre.  The setup could make for a terrifying film, but Hitchcock always keeps the pace moving quickly because he's not aiming for psychological horrors.  He's out for thrills.

The film plays pretty steadily and reliably until the third act, when it propels into the stratosphere.  Donat gets handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll, a woman who's determined to turn him in.  The two are genuinely disgusted with each other and squabble their way up to the ending, when they finally work together to solve the mystery of The 39 Steps.  Carroll is (gorgeous and also) phenomenal in a physically demanding role.

And what is this Macguffin thing, mentioned above?  It's The 39 Steps.  It's the suitcase in Kiss Me Deadly.  It's the suitcase in Pulp Fiction.  It's the microfilm in North by Northwest.  It's the uranium in Notorious.  It's the catalyst that gets the story going, the thing that everyone is after, but "it's the device, the gimmick" (Truffaut 138) as Hitchcock says, because ultimately that one item doesn't matter.  The story it propels is what's important.

So we get the innocent man on the run, the cool blonde, and the Macguffin all here (and executed well) in a 1935 film.  It's all kept to 86 minutes, and nothing is wasted.

Hitch's style has now fully merged with the narrative.  As a result there are no flourishes to point out because everything he does here serves the story.  That's true mastery of the craft of visual storytelling.  He'll make greater cinema, but he couldn't get there without arriving here first.

---

At this point in their careers, Ruth and Hitchcock seized the rare opportunity they had and showed the beginnings of making good on the promise they'd had earlier.  Ruth though very successful on the mound forced his way to the plate by showing his doubters that he could fulfill a previously unknown potential.  Hitchcock's early films had become financially profitable enough so that he was getting hired out three times a year to crank out picture after picture.  But this sort of achievement was limited, and as his craft began to fray he quickly changed direction and began producing the sort of cinema no one had yet seen.  But here, the two big men were merely carpeting the floor.  The ceiling lay ahead.


Sources:
Spoto, Donald. The Art Of Alfred Hitchcock. Anchor Books, New York. 1992.
Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. Simon & Schuster, Paris. 1984.

George Herman Hitchcock project, Chapter 4A: Rich and Strange

Introduction

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2A  and  2B

Chapter 3A  and  3B


RUTH
(1918)

(Source)

1917 had ended on a sour note for Ruth and the Red Sox.  They'd finished far behind the White Sox in the final standings.  Their team hitting and baserunning were below league average.  Their pitching remained their strength, but was also bested by Chicago.

Then, just as the season was closing up, the draft for The Great War took away more than half of their roster (as a married man, Ruth was not called up).  Owner Harry Frazee saw this as an opportunity to rebuild, cheaply, and bought up players from teams that were struggling with their financials.  Because the Sox lost their manager, Jack Barry, to the service, Frazee hired big Ed Barrow to manage the team on the field and the Sox's accounting!  Barrow's knowledge of the game was limited but he was a serious disciplinarian.  Barrow and The Babe butted heads immediately.

Ruth spent the entire offseason begging Barrow to let him play the field.  First base, outfield, anything.  The spots were open due to the departed players and Bambino just wanted to bat more often.  During exhibition games, Ruth was once again making baseballs vanish far beyond the field of play.  But Barrow wouldn't budge; Ruth was to pitch.

But since Barrow's strategic acumen was at a minimum, he put Harry Hooper (outfielder and, at the time, the team's best player) in charge of the on-field game.  Hooper knew Ruth's power and he knew it's draw to the fans.  So Hooper appealed to Barrow's financial side (since Barrow owned a share of the team) -- the more at bats for Babe, the more ticket-buying fans fill the seats.  In May, Barrow gave in.

On May 4th, Ruth homered (after calling his shot to the umpire).  The next game, May 6th, he played the outfield and hit a home run.  May 7th, he took a Walter Johnson pitch out of National Park and into a neighbor's yard.  On May 8th, he went 5 for 5.

Two weeks later Ruth had caught the strain of influenza that would kill 600,000 Americans.  But not Ruth.  He would return to baseball two weeks later and homer in four straight games.  He'd hit seven home runs in the span of one month.  Had he hit seven for the entire season, that would have been second best in the league.

In July, more players were called up to fight.  Barrow put Ruth back in to pitch again.  But Ruth had fallen too deeply in love with hitting.  He was already at 11 home runs with only half of the season done, the American League record was 16.  He continued to battle in out with Barrow for the rest of the season.  In July he hit five triples and four doubles, but no home runs.  In August he agreed to return to his pitching-only duties and didn't hit a single home run after than.

The Sox won the pennant, then beat the Cubs 4-2 in the World Series.  Ruth had two spectacular starts, including a six-hit shutout in the opener.

For the regular season, Ruth had tied for the major league lead in home runs, despite not playing a quarter of the games.  He was also first in the AL in Slugging Percentage (SLG), Production (OPS), and extra base hits.  He was also second in OBP, eighth in batting average, second in doubles, fifth in triples, and first in strikeouts (the batting kind, not the pitching kind).

As a pitcher, he completed 18 of his 19 starts.  He was 9th in ERA.  He had brought his walks down, so he finished second to Johnson in baserunners per 9 innings.  Had he been a full time pitcher he would have likely continued his southpaw statistical dominance, but no had ever multitasked to this level in major league baseball.  And no one would ever do it again.

The Red Sox were not fools, Ruth was going to get his appropriate time at the plate next season, but only if the World War did not stop the sport entirely.


Sources:
Creamer, Robert. Babe: The Legend Comes to Life. Simon & Schuster, New York. 1974.
Jenkinson, Bill. Baseball's Ultimate Power: Ranking the All-Time Greatest Distance Home Run Hitters. Lyons Press. 2010.
Jenkinson, Bill. The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs: Recrowning Baseball's Greatest Slugger. Carrol & Graf. 2007.
Montville, Leigh. The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth. Broadway Books, New York. 2006.

---

HITCHCOCK
(1931-1935)

Thanks to continuing box office success and a good relationship with British International Pictures, Alfred Hitchcock remained an in demand director.  In 1931, he directed The Skin Game, Rich and Strange, and Mary (the German version of Murder!).  This would be the last time three of his films were released in one year.  From 1932 to 1935 he directed Number Seventeen, Waltzes from Vienna (unavailable on home video), The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The 39 Steps.  The style and quality of these films varied greatly as he was still being hired to adapt purchased properties, and rarely had an opportunity to pursue ideas of his own.

The Skin Game (1931)

Like previous pictures of lower quality (see: Juno and the Paycock, or actually don't see it), Hitchcock was hired to adapt a popular play into a film.  This time it was John Galsworthy's The Skin Game.  Hitchcock didn't even want to talk about this film during his interviews with Francois Truffaut.  Donald Spoto, the great Hitchcock expert who always seems to find something positive in every Hitch film, avoids this one almost entirely.  For good reason.

It's boring.  Stuck-at-the-DMV boring.  It's a pity since Hitchcock viewed being boring as THE directorial deadly sin.  And it's also a shame because it has such a great title:  The Skin Game.  Sounds like a Grand Guignol horror story.  Or a lurid vintage porn film with white slavers and opium dens.  But it's not.

Oh dear. How do I get out of this film? (Source)

It's a land battle between the Old Rich and the New Rich.  This feud between the parents causes larger problems for their children until ultimately one of their daughters commits suicide.

There are themes of modern versus baroque, money versus sentiment, city versus country, industry versus agriculture.  But these are really more like settings than themes.  It's mostly about how the sins of the parents destroy their children.  But with cardboard spoiled characters and a complete absence of visual sense.

It's not schadenfreude that makes me enjoy watching Hitchcock struggle.  Instead, I feel more secure as an artist to witness struggles by the greats, seeing them stumble and labor on their way to an eventual ascent.

Aside from some interesting but ultimately unmotivated POV shots in an auction scene and some ample décolletage bearing in another sequence, The Skin Game flounders as cinema.  Adapting one medium for another is difficult, as even Hitchcock would attest.

---

Rich and Strange (1931)

(copyright Studio Canal)

Rich and Strange is indeed rich and strange.  It bubbles over with oddity, momentum, and (dare I say) zaniness.  It's an epic romantic comedy, that is anything but romantic.  There really isn't anything else like it in Sir Alfred's oeuvre.

Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
     (The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2)

Fred and Emily are a middle class married couple who are dissatisfied with their lives.  Then they receive a big inheritance with the money being earmarked only for their travels.  So they happily set off on a voyage around the world.  On the voyage they fall out of love with each other, and into love with others; she with a military man and he with a fake princess.  Their cruise ship sinks while they sleep and in their escape they are left alone, until Chinese pirates salvage the ship and take them to safety.  They return to their old life and have to figure out how to deal with each other on normal terms.

What makes this unlike any other "romantic" comedy are the details.  Two onscreen deaths, including one graphic drowning.  A spectacularly gruesome dead cat joke.  And the fact that Fred and Emily don't just cutely fall for others outside their marriage.  They actively have sex with them on the same cruise ship.  It suddenly puts the film in grown-up territory that contemporary comedies dare not tread.  And the alacrity with which this happens (especially with Fred and the princess) makes one question if the marriage should continue.  What would normally be light marital quibbling in the final scene is underscored by their sexual choices and the deaths they have seen.  That which is daffy on the surface is actually quite complicated underneath.

(copyright Studio Canal)

And Hitchcock's style, so repressed in the previous film, EXPLODES out of the gate in this one.  A four-minute silent opening, with shadows painted Expressionistically on the walls.  Dozens of silent-film-style title cards pop up throughout, even once the dialogue starts.  There's a dizzying Parisian montage with rapid split-second cuts reminiscent of Vertov and Eisenstein.  And jump cuts!  Then there are fractured unfinished scenes that are tied together with further montage.

Hitch suddenly has film-school brazenness tied to actual skill, with visuals wrapping sophisticated themes.  At moments he seems to be trying to break through to a new style of filmmaking.  It's funny and weird and exciting and...

The film was a flop at the box office.

Unlike The Skin Game, Rich and Strange wasn't an adaptation (despite what Wikipedia says).  The idea was pitched to Hitch and his wife, Alma.  They then did the research and developed it on their own.  Thus it feels so much more personal than the previous film, or most of his other cinema up to that point.

Though it failed publicly, it's an artistic victory for Hitchcock.  He gets to use one of his favorite themes -- people yearning for a more exciting life and then regret when they get it -- and packages it with cinematic excitement.  Could he keep this up in his next film?

---

Number Seventeen (1932)

No.  A pattern of "one for me, one for them" begins to emerge, as Hitch was hired to adapt ...wait for it... a popular stage play, Number Seventeen.

Ugh.  Even Hitch called it, "A disaster!" (Truffaut 81)  I have to say that it's the worst Hitchcock film I've seen so far.  It's right up there with The Farmer's Wife.  I have so many notes on this.  I'll list only some since they start getting repetitive:

• Acting is somehow both broad and stiff.  (Insert joke here.)
• Amateur porn level of line delivery.
• Written by Ed Wood's twelve year old handicapped son
• Terrible pacing fueled by strange editing.  Did someone just keep falling on the editing flatbed?
• Characters keep showing up, each less interesting than the last
• Characters abandoned when they're no longer of use to the writer?
• Nominee for worst fight scene in cinema?
• Every time there's a twist, it gets announced again in the dialogue
• Every twist stupider than the last
• The eyelines don't match
• Quick cutting and weird camera tricks, none of which are motivated
• The town bus travels as fast as an out of control train?
• Miniature work is more primitive than Melies' Trip to the Moon
• Stunts are urine-inducingly funny. Maybe I should watch this in the bathroom.

You get the point.  I was going to write about how this would fit right into the works of Ed Wood and piss on it further.

But then I read a quote by Hitchcock about this time in his life.  I'd never seen him get this personal.  I'm still thinking about it:

In fact, at this time my reputation wasn't very good, but luckily I was unaware of this......I don't ever remember saying to myself, "You're finished; your career is at its lowest ebb." And yet outwardly, to other people, I believe it was......There was no careful analysis of what I was doing. Since those days I've learned to be very self-critical, to step back and take a second look. And never to embark on a project unless there's an inner feeling of comfort about it, a conviction that something good will come of it.
(Truffaut 85)

So, what would come of it?  We'll see in Part B.

TO BE CONTINUED...


Sources:
Spoto, Donald. The Art Of Alfred Hitchcock. Anchor Books, New York. 1992.
Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. Simon & Schuster, Paris. 1984.

The George Herman Hitchcock project, Chapter 3B: Champagne

Introduction

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2A  and  2B

Chapter 3A


HITCHCOCK
(1928-1930)
continuing from Chapter 3A...

Juno and the Paycock (1930)

The less said about this film the better, but I'm going to say it anyway.

"For the love of Christ, don't watch our film."

Anyone Anything could have directed this movie.  The mildew growing in your shower grout.  Governor Rick Perry's cowboy boots.  A jar of pickled radishes.  An empty shoe box.  A broken headlight.  The only reason I know that Hitchcock directed it is because he said he did.  More on that in a moment.

It's a statically filmed Sean O'Casey play, full of barely directed actors chewing through repetitive dialogue while employing broad Irish accents to portray broader Irish stereotypes.  I think it was supposed to be a combination of comedy and tragedy, but I cringed at the "comedy", laughed at the "tragedy", and fell asleep twice in the middle.

I kept wishing that I had a liter of the rotten potcheen the characters drank, but I would have been better off reading a whiskey label for eighty-five minutes than watching this.  The DVD transfer continually chopped off the actors' heads, which became kind of interesting.  So I pretended that their shoes were delivering the terrible performances.

Ostensibly the story's about a poor Dublin family living in the slums while the Irish Civil War rages around them.  The husband is a drunken, bloviating, layabout.  The wife complains about his inebriated slothly bloviations.  The daughter shames the family by getting knocked up outside of wedlock.  The one-armed son rats on the IRA and gets murdered for it.  There's an A-hole friend.  An A-hole bartender. And a bunch of other A-holes.

I have no doubt the play itself was of interest, but the film is not.  What's most frustrating is that Hitch was just coming off of Blackmail, his most solid film yet, and then turns in this unimaginative lazy turd.

In Hitchcock's own words:

"The film got very good notices, but I was actually ashamed, because it had nothing to do with cinema. The critics praised the picture, and I had the feeling I was dishonest, that I had stolen something." (Truffaut 69)

So what we're trying to say is that it's a fabulous film.

---

Murder! (1930)

Murder!

Herbert Marshall!

Brandy!

A bit of Hitchcock trivia:  Brandy makes an appearance in every single one of his films.  I don't know why.  She wasn't that good in "Moesha".

Zing?

"Listen very carefully to the sound of my handsome."
(pic Source)

There's a murder amongst a theatrical acting group.  One of the actresses is convicted by a jury and receives a death sentence.  One of the jurymen, also an actor, has second thoughts after the sentencing and leads his own investigation to get to the truth before the woman is hanged.

Yes, there are considerable logic issues with the story.  But Hitchcock and company have such a great time toying with reality, theatre, and theatre-reality that I wouldn't doubt some of the hiccups are part of the fun.  Also to be considered, Hitch's previous film was a labored (to be polite) adaptation of a theatrical piece, while this film plays with themes that surround The Theatre itself.

Plus, unlike Juno and the Paycock, the camera keeps moving and the quicker editing is tight.  Hitch even shows off a bit in one scene, dollying between two rooms, back and forth a half dozen times in one conversation, only to have all of that action dismissed by the other characters.

Some more good stuff:
-- Herbert Marshall, acting!
-- The jury: 12 Angry Men?  No, 12 Foolish People.
-- Death sentence handed down offscreen while the janitor cleans up the jury room.
-- Shadow of the gallows rising to mark time.
-- An impressively gruesome suicide.
-- A lisping transvestite mixed-racial acrobat.

And if you can catch it on Netflix (Quickster, R.I.P.) Watch Instantly, you'll get treated to two versions of the ending.

Though not at the same level as Blackmail, Murder! is an enjoyable film, especially if you like The Theatre.  Makes one look forward to the next films on Sir Alfred's slate.


Sources:
Spoto, Donald. The Art Of Alfred Hitchcock. Anchor Books, New York. 1992.
Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. Simon & Schuster, Paris. 1984.

---

RUTH
(1917)

(Source)

Ruth's pitching prowess continued in 1917, as did his relative dearth of hitting.  He led the AL in complete games by a considerable distance.  He finished 35 out of his 38 starts, a 92.1% rate, 5th best in the history of the AL up to that point.  He finished 2nd in wins, 2nd in innings, 3rd in opponent BA, 4th in WAR, but led lefties in every major pitching category.

He allowed only 2 home runs, but he hit only two home runs, again.  He led all pitchers in hits, singles, home runs, BA, OBP, SLG, and runs created but not by his previously impressive measures.  He was only brought in to pinch hit eleven times.

Boston did not make the World Series, finishing far behind the White Sox in the American League.  Their pitching continued to be the best in the league, but their hitting was amongst the weakest.  Management was sitting on a offensive gold mine, something they would begin to exploit in 1918, but only after switching managers and losing a considerable chunk of the lineup to the WWI draft.  But in 1917, the team struggled.  Ruth grew increasingly moody, picking fights in the clubhouse and on the field.  This culminated in a famous/infamous game on June 23rd.

Ruth walked the first batter on four pitches, arguing each call by umpire Brick Owens.  As the batter walked to first, Ruth cussed Owens out from the mound.  Owens threatened to toss Ruth from the game.  G.H. Ruth then declared that if he were to be tossed, he'd punch Owens in the face.  Owens made good on his threat.  The Big Bam made good on his.  He charged Owens, knocked over his catcher, and punched the umpire in the head.  Ruth was suspended and fined for his actions.  Meanwhile, Ernie Shore came in to replace Ruth.  The runner on first was caught stealing and Shore retired every single batter that came to the plate.  A perfect game.  With an asterisk.

1918 was to be much different, as mentioned above.  A new lineup.  A new manager.  No umpire punching.  A restless Ruth was going to get to bat, but first he had to prove his worth, next in Chapter 4: The 39 Steps.


Sources:
Creamer, Robert. Babe: The Legend Comes to Life. Simon & Schuster, New York. 1974.
Jenkinson, Bill. Baseball's Ultimate Power: Ranking the All-Time Greatest Distance Home Run Hitters. Lyons Press. 2010.
Jenkinson, Bill. The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs: Recrowning Baseball's Greatest Slugger. Carrol & Graf. 2007.
Montville, Leigh. The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth. Broadway Books, New York. 2006.

The George Herman Hitchcock project, Chapter 3A: Champagne

Introduction

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2A and 2B


HITCHCOCK
(1928-1930)

It was an admirably busy time for Hitchcock.  He completed seven features and two short  films of varying genres, subject matter, and tone amongst the medium's most massive shift.  In the previous section, I'd covered The Farmer's Wife.  In this chapter I'll cover Champagne (light comedy), The Manxman (romantic melodrama), Blackmail (thriller), Juno and the Paycock (comedy/tragedy stage adaptation), and Murder! (a whodunit).  He also directed segments for the musicals Harmony Heaven and Elstree Calling.  AND he directed a German version of Murder! called Mary.  Sadly, these last three are unavailable for viewing.

He was wrapping up production on Blackmail when the producers came to him with the pitch to turn that silent film into Britain's very first sound feature.  So it was clear by that point, Hitch's previous films' financial successes were significant enough for the financiers to bank on him to deliver such a pivotal film.

Let's take these remaining features one by one:

Champagne (1928)

Hitchcock's next to last silent feature is a very light comedy.  Though Hitch dismisses it as "probably the lowest ebb in my output" (Truffaut 57), Champagne is much more relaxed than most of his earlier films.  Kind of goofy, a cheap sweet bubbly, a trifle that's aware of it's triviality.

A rich man is tired of his daughter's lavish partying lifestyle, so he decides to teach her a lesson and pretend that the family has lost all of their money in the stock market.  She's forced to get a job and be responsible to which she fails and succeeds at varying degrees until the ruse is revealed and she's a better person as a result.

That's the whole thing.  Not much actually happens, but some of the comedy is actually funny.  He has game actors (Betty Balfour, Jean Bradin, and Theo van Alten) whom are good with their close-ups.  The characters are all a bunch of shmoes, but they're clear and understandable enough to follow through the 85-minute runtime.  Balfour's character is much less of a coquette than any of the previous Hitchcock femmes, though she dreams up a surprise fantasy sequence wherein the bad guy physically overtakes her.

There are lovely bookend shots of champagne being emptied and action being seen through the bottom of the glass like so:

(Source)

And though there's no sound, the bounty of silent dialogue spoken throughout the film shows some level of subconscious(?) yearning for audio on Hitchcock's part.  Either that or he got a little lazy with this one, which he'd almost admitted.

(On a side note, the crummy DVD had terribly matched random classical music running throughout the film.  It distracted because it never fit any of the action and overlapped scenes and shots.  "Bolero" worked really well when it randomly came up, but that's probably because Ravel's composition feels so cinematic.)

Ultimately, the movie is paper thin, but should not be completely written off as a waste of time.

---

The Manxman (1929)

On the other hand, there's The Manxman.  Hitch had nothing nice to say about this one either.  And neither do I.

In what the great Hitchcock expert Donald Spoto described as "this relentlessly unhappy melodrama" (Spoto 19), a love triangle forms between three friends on the Isle of Man: a sailor, a judge, and a gaspingly irresponsible coquette.  The Flirt's been hooking up with the sailor for some time, but because he's poor he's not allowed to marry her.  So he leaves, declaring that he'll return with great wealth.  She promises him that she'll wait for his return.  She then almost immediately starts shagging his best friend, the judge.  A letter arrives saying that the sailor died at sea.  She declares her undying love for the judge.  Then (for reasons unexplained) the letter turns out not to be true.  The sailor returns home a success.  He gets the coquette's hand in marriage.  Neither the woman nor the judge have the fortitude to tell the sailor.  After the wedding, the coquette reveals that she's pregnant.  But it's not the sailor's child, it's the judge's!  And they still don't tell anyone!  The baby is born.  The sailor raises the kid.  The woman runs away.  She tries to kill herself.  Then everything is revealed in an interminably drawn out court sequence.

The best thing about this movie is that the Director of Photography's name is Jack Cox.  Actually Jack Cox was Hitch's DP eight times.  Jack Cox.

The male leads are from earlier Hitchcock films, each playing similar roles to their previous ones.  Pete the Sailor is played by Carl Brisson, who was the "good guy" from The Ring.  Malcolm Keen, the paranoid police boyfriend from the The Lodger plays Philip the Judge.  Anny Ondra who plays Kate is incredibly cute, but that doesn't distract from the fact that either her character is callous and daft or she's the true antagonist, destroying everything by taking no responsibility for her whims.

The film is frustratingly predictable.  I wound up unpacking five boxes of books while the story lumped along.  I described it to my wife as "The film before Hitchcock got his sh*t together."

---

Blackmail (1929)

The film wherein Hitchcock got his sh*t together.

Or to phrase it less crassly, Blackmail is of great artistic and historical interest.

As mentioned earlier, this was the first British sound film.  Unlike the US's Jazz Singer, Blackmail utilizes sound carefully, imaginatively, and effectively, much like Fritz Lang's M (Germany's first talkie).  There are long periods of silence where dialogue is unnecessary.  The word "knife" is repeated as a POV audio moment as a character mulls over her crime.  A bird chirps incessantly building up suspense.

There's great Expressionist-style high contrast lighting throughout the fast well-edited opening.  And there are fantastic distorted visuals throughout the British Museum chase at the climax.

(Source)

And there's this...

(Source)

...from a scene (34 minutes in) where it feels like Hitchcock has first pulled everything together:  blondes, sexuality, violence, suspense, morality, and questioning innocence.  Negligee and knives. The moment just clicks.  A birth of something new, taken from elements that were already there, like Pete Townsend discovering power chords.  I recommend clicking on the image to enlarge.  Along with the murdered child's balloon caught in electrical wires in Lang's M, this is one of the great visceral visual moments in the early sound era.

Oh yeah, there's a story in this film too.  PLOT SPOILERS HERE ON IN!

Alice (Anny Ondra, again, hot hot hot) ditches her detective boyfriend for another man; a horny artist that tries to take advantage of her.  He sexually assaults her, she defends herself with the above blade.  Then he quite dead.  She runs away.  The body is found.  While combing the scene the policeman-boyfriend finds her gloves.  He pockets the evidence, trying to shield her.  But there's a criminal who had witnessed her leaving the scene.  He blackmails both her and the policeman.  The policeman pins the murder on the blackmailer.  The police chase the blackmailer, who then falls to his death.  Alice goes to the police chief to confess, but their conversation is cut off.  And her boyfriend leads her away, her confession never delivered.

The film isn't perfect (it takes much too long to get going) but it's full of so many visual and auditory flourishes that it stands a full head over The Lodger.  But Blackmail's flourishes serve to bolster the storytelling of the film.  The aforementioned "knife" scene gets the viewer into Annie's head as she obsesses over her crime.  The heightened imagery of the chase sequence illustrates the twisted moral morass of the moment.

But I must stress this because it's an important part of Hitch's cinema:  In Blackmail, he is never asking us to meditate on society's ills.  He's crafting a piece of grand entertainment.  So if you like this particular flavor of cinematic ice cream, I recommend this film.

---

In Part B, I'll cover the last two films from this period, as well as George Herman Ruth's 1917 season.

TO BE CONTINUED...


Sources:
Spoto, Donald. The Art Of Alfred Hitchcock. Anchor Books, New York. 1992.
Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. Simon & Schuster, Paris. 1984.

The George Herman Hitchcock project, Chapter 2B: The Ring

Introduction

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2A:


HITCHCOCK
(1927-1928)
continuing from Chapter 2A...

The Ring (1928)

After Downhill and Easy Virtue, Hitchcock directed another drama, The Ring.  Sadly it has nothing to do with the future horror series or vice versa.  It's a love-triangle tale about two boxers (wait, there's more!) and a woman.

Not much happens over the 89 minute cut, goodness knows how the 116 minute UK cut played out.  The events are simple.  Jack is a local boxer who fights in front of small crowds (think Rocky Balboa as a carnival attraction).  Nellie's his girl.  Bob is a world-class boxer who has a crush on Nellie.  He fights Jack and defeats him.  He hires Jack to spar with him, but really just wants to get his gloves on Nellie.  Jack and Nellie get married, but when their marriage goes sour she runs off with Bob.  Jack gets back at Bob by fighting him at Albert Hall.  During the match Nellie sees Jack getting his butt kicked, so she goes back to his side of the ring.  Jack is instantly Popeye-ed and defeats Bob.

It's edited at a good pace, but not much seems to happen.  There are no surprises or twists.  The knockout at the end doesn't make any sense.  There's a quick final scene that at best is unnecessary and at worst deflates whatever emotional/sexual tension that had existed in the film.  The long shots of the boxing matches look great, but then Hitch intercuts awkward melodramatic close-ups that don't match the action.

On the positive side, there are a lot of great double-exposure shots.  Plus there's a fantastic time-lapse shot of champagne going flat.  It not only serves to telescope time, but also serves as a metaphor for the moment when the marriage goes flat.

The male leads seem to have gotten their direction switched.  Jack is whiny, spastic, and vengeful while Bob is calm and friendly.  Nellie on the other hand is another example of an early-Hitchcock flirty destructive coquette.  She's eyeballing Bob from the first moment, but marries Jack anyway, then leaves him for Bob.  It's unclear what her character's values or intentions are other than to be a jerk.  This in turn makes it even more challenging for the viewer to care what happens next.

So what I'm saying is:  Where are the thrills, Alfred?

---

The Farmer's Wife (1928)

The thrills are not here.

The Farmer's Wife is, I think, a comedy.  I don't know.  I couldn't finish it.

It starts off looking like a drama.  An idyllic farm.  The farmer's wife has died.  As the farmer sits in his chair staring off into space, Hitchcock lingers on his face.  Over and over and over.  I began to wonder if this was going to be some sort of awesome Scandinavian-style film about a man pondering existence.  But, nope, suddenly it's a comedy!  Whee!  Thirza Tapper, Churdles Ash, and Dick Cooker (actual character names) run around the house mugging and hamming and falling down.  The farmer is pushed to find a new bride, so he invites over All the Single Ladies for a party at which point they all make F*** Me eyes at him.  But when he later professes his humble marital hopes, they're all offended.  He then responds by making fun of how old, fat, and ugly they are.

I fell asleep right there, 40 minutes in.  I was irritated about how this was beginning turn into a proto-Sandler film: "You're fat and ugly.  Wackety Shmackety!  Oh no, my pants are falling down!"  I was disappointed in the abrupt tonal changes.  The ending was as obvious as a turd in the pool.  And the poorly chosen film score was lulling, sleepy sleepy sleepy.

When I woke up and saw the DVD sitting there, I went back to sleep.

I understand the class themes that are confronted when he ultimately marries his housekeeper, but that doesn't negate the fact that the rest of the hired help act like they're mentally disabled.  Add to that my disappointment that Alfred Hitchcock was responsible------

It's amongst the five worst silent films that I've ever seen.  It's even worse than all of the films starring this guy:

---

Hitchcock achieved a certain level of attention with the artistic and financial success of The Lodger, yet followed it with four films fully outside that thriller genre.  None of them lost money, but none of them garnered any attention.  One can applaud him for the efforts, his attempts to expand his craft.  But as a viewer, one yearns to see him take on a subject ripe for suspense, twists, and the macabre.  Would such a film be on the horizon?


Sources:
Spoto, Donald. The Dark Side Of Genius: The Life Of Alfred Hitchcock. De Capo Press, New York. 1999.
Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. Simon & Schuster, Paris. 1984.

---

RUTH
(1916)

Source: Major League Baseball

As Hitchcock was experiencing moderate box office success, while treading water (at best) artistically, after his initial successes, Ruth erupted onto the baseball scene, albeit differently than what would later make him famous.

Ruth was the best left-handed pitcher in Major League Baseball in 1916.  It really did happen that quickly.  While Grover Cleveland Alexander was decimating the NL, Ruth and Walter Johnson were nautical leagues ahead of every other pitcher in the AL.

Ruth was first in ERA, first in Opponent Batting Average, first in shutouts, and third in strikeouts.  In advanced stats, he was first in Advanced ERA+ and led pitchers in Wins Above Replacement.  This wasn't due to a small statistical sample size since he led the league in games started and was third in innings pitched.

He also won his very first World Series ring as the Red Sox beat the Brooklyn Robins four games to one.  In Game Two, Ruth pitched a 14-inning complete game, a World Series record that still stands today.  Ruth's only weakness was his lack of control.  Like everything else about him, Ruth's fastball was big.  Though he'd learned to mix in an off-speed pitch from time to time, batters were tied up by the erratic hammer.

Walter Johnson was the best pitcher of the decade and has been considered by many to be the greatest of all time.  Johnson's only weakness in 1916 was Babe Ruth.  They faced each other five times, Ruth went 5-0.  Ruth actually won six in a row against The Big Train, something no other pitcher ever accomplished.

Johnson and Ruth each allowed zero home runs for the entire season.  Meanwhile, Ruth's crowd-silencing home run feats from the previous season didn't repeat in 1916.  He did hit three home runs, which was tied for the best on the team (even though he played in only 43% of their games).  But all of his batting statistics dropped off.

His focus was on his pitching (and hookers and blended whiskey, but I digress) which now garnered attention and provided his first championship ring.  Like Hitchcock, Ruth was succeeding outside what had first caught him high regard.  But while Ruth's acclaim was much larger much quicker, Hitch would venture back to his bailiwick sooner......in Chapter 3: Champagne.


Sources:
Creamer, Robert. Babe: The Legend Comes to Life. Simon & Schuster, New York. 1974.
Jenkinson, Bill. Baseball's Ultimate Power: Ranking the All-Time Greatest Distance Home Run Hitters. Lyons Press. 2010.
Jenkinson, Bill. The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs: Recrowning Baseball's Greatest Slugger. Carrol & Graf. 2007.
Montville, Leigh. The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth. Broadway Books, New York. 2006.

The George Herman Hitchcock project, Chapter 2A: The Ring

Introduction

Table of Contents

Chapter 1


HITCHCOCK
(1927-1928)

Like the American film industry, production and distribution at British International Pictures and Gainsborough Pictures occurred with assembly line efficiency.  Audiences turned over their nickels, dimes, and quarters at an intense rate so the supply needed to meet the demand.  Individual production budgets were smaller, sets were few and recycled, location shoots virtually non-existant, stories were kept short, and editing began the moment the exposed film was printed.

Today our favorite director's films release once every 18 to 24 months.  It's not unusual for features to take almost a year to develop, then spent many months in complicated post production.  But between 1927 and 1928, Alfred Hitchcock had a new film out every four months.  He proved to executives he could run streamlined productions that found moderate box office success.  He continued this pace right through 1931, after which he rarely made more than one film a year.

I'm sure that most artists would prefer more time to work through their creations, but it's debatable whether having that luxury would have benefited Hitch.  For instance, he pushed out Dial M for Murder and Rear Window in the same year (1954), but it took him two years to release I Confess, his only (rightfully) dismissed film from the '50s.  In 1955, he directed two films (To Catch a Thief and The Trouble With Harry) and three television episodes for a series he had created himself ("Alfred Hitchcock Presents"), while it took him over a year to complete Jamaica Inn.  Never heard of Jamaica Inn?  There's a good reason for that.  I still haven't finished it myself.

After his success with The Lodger, Hitchcock was hired to direct four films over less than 16 months.  Curiously, none of these were thrillers, horrors, or mysteries.  By this date in the American film industry, directors were assigned to specific genres per their box office successes.  Yet it would still be a few years before Hitchcock would be consistently hired for thrillers.  Instead, over this 16 month period, he directed three dramas and a comedy.

Downhill (UK) or When Boys Leave Home (US) (1927)

(This film wasn't part of the cheapie Hitchcock DVD set that I'd picked up for this study.  Instead it's available for viewing right on YouTube!)

After his friend impregnates a party girl, Roddy, a promising student from a wealthy family, takes the blame and is kicked out of his boarding school.  His father then kicks him out of the house.  A theatre's lead actress marries him when she discovers that he's inherited 30,000 from a relative.  She spends all of his money, cheats on him, then ditches him.  Roddy then becomes a escort/prostitute to earn a living.  He winds up on the docks broke, starving, and insane.  He stumbles home and is welcomed back by his father and the school who have learned that he was innocent of the original accusation.

First, the title.  "Downhill" is appropriate, kudos to the UK distributors.  There really is no story arc here, it's just downhill.  The character is completely passive, continually getting beaten down by the world.  The title that the American distributors gave it is "When Boys Leave Home", which is so wrong it's as if they never saw it before they named it.  It's not about "boys", it's about one guy: a schoolboy played by a 34 year-old Igor Novello.  And he doesn't leave home, he's kicked out of the house.  That's the whole point of the first act.  Why change it from "Downhill"?  Did they think American audiences would expect skiing?

Aside from the cloying melodrama, lack of rounded characters, and no real story momentum, Downhill is the best of these four films.  I'll focus on the positive elements.

Hitch's past experience as an art director shows.  Every set is full of dimension, depth, and detail.  Columns, arches, windows, bookcases, vertical lines, and boxes frame the continually trapped Roddy.  There are also some nice effects shots -- upside down, diagonal, double exposures.  They may be jarringly obvious, but they do serve the story.  And there are also nice visuals of descent.  Roddy rides an escalator downwards after being booted out of his house, then he takes the elevator down when he's kicked out of his marriage.

Hitch also introduces a repeating theme here: the flirtatious, scheming, backstabbing woman.  We'll see this type of character reappear often throughout his silent films.  I'm not sure what to make of it yet, it's unsettling to witness it so often.  In "Downhill" both of the female leads flirt, consume, then destroy.

In fact the only person who is nice to Roddy is a transvestite.  Yep, I'm saying it here.  There's a tranny in this film and no one writes about this, yet.  At the tail end of his male escort career, a "woman" invites him over to her table.  Hitchcock's camera focuses on her masculine face, too much makeup, huge arms, hidden Adam's apple, distinct facial hair, and labored attempts to look ladylike.  Before "she" asks him to dance, she expresses affection and concern for him.  No one else does that.  And it's actually kind of moving.  And riveting.  For a moment the film seems to poised to take risks.  Then he ditches her out of disgust for himself.  This viewer says  :(

---

Easy Virtue (1927)

"I'm afraid that I have no eyes for anything but you."

That odd dialogue title card is the most memorable thing about this film.

Though it's based on a Noel Coward play, the story is piffle and even pains me to type it.  C'mon Noel.

Larita marries a jerk, he catches her not cheating on him with an portrait artist.  He divorces her and she gets publicly labelled a woman of easy virtue.  Though it actually sounds like a positive thing presently, it was once shorthand for SLUT.  Larita runs away to another town, marries a rich guy who takes her home to his manipulative hateful mother (future Hitchcock theme!).  When Larita's easy virtue past catches up with her, she ends marriage #2 to allow that guy to marry the woman (Sarah) he really loves.

"Shoot!  There's nothing left to kill!" Larita exclaims at one point.  I would have shot her.

What I mean to say is, maybe if she died at the end the film would have been lent a degree of tragedy.  Otherwise Larita's somehow both passive and accusatory, whiny and sullen.  Husband #2 is constantly grumpy, dismissive, and never defends his wife.  So yes, in addition to a weak narrative, the characters are not interesting.

There is some innovative cutting between the past and present in the first act.  There are some heavy-handed eye-piece and tennis racquet effects that highlight trapped characters.  Hitchcock shows some better instincts when instead of filming the proposal scene, he shows us a telephone operator listening in and reacting to it.  Finally, there's this moment between Sarah and Larita at the very end of the film:

It's the most intimate moment in any of Hitchcock's films so far.  It's a pity that these two don't wind up with each other at the end.  Now THAT would be a great twist.

......Goodness, there are two films left AND Babe Ruth's 1916 entry...... Coming soon...

The George Herman Hitchcock project, Chapter 1: When Boys Leave Home

Introduction

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: When Boys Leave Home

RUTH
(1914-1915)

(Source)

George Herman Ruth was called many names.  Before 1914, due to his dark skin tone and ethnic facial features, most of those names began with "N*gger".  In 1914, Jack Dunn, the owner of the independent minor league team the Baltimore Orioles, signed Ruth to join his team of young prospects who were often known as "Jack's babes". Because of Ruth's size and prodigious skill the local press enjoyed calling the boy, Babe Ruth.

Ruth had honed his skills for years at St. Mary's Industrial School in Baltimore.  He had a blinding fastball, strong curveball, and a big looping uppercut swing.  No one in the pros swung like that.  The objective for major league hitters at that time was to perfect the line drive, thus batters used a slight downward chop to achieve the right backspin on hit balls.  Ruth instead modelled his swing after one of the Brothers at his school who used to clout massive drives that the little boys used to ooh and ahh and chase down.

Jack Dunn and his scouts found Ruth at the nearby boy's school doing everything on the field.  For instance, in 1913 the school paper reported on Ruth pitching a complete game one-hitter, striking out twenty-two batters, and getting four hits.  That's the kid that Dunn saw and that's the kid that Dunn signed.

And that's the kid that Dunn turned around and sold to the Boston Red Sox that same year when his financial troubles set in.  The Sox saw a solid left-handed pitcher who rarely connected with his wild swing.  So Boston sent him to their top farm team, the Providence Grays.  For the Grays, the 19 year-old kid won 26 games and hit a home run into Lake Ontario.

In 1915, the Sox called Ruth back up to the majors to join the starting rotation.  On May 25th, the 20-year-old kid hit a ball 475 feet, out of Sportsman's Park into the streets beyond.  It was one of the longest home runs yet struck by a human being.  It was one of three home runs Ruth hit in a four-game span.  He hit four overall that year, playing less than 1/4 of his team's games.  The rest of the Sox team combined had only ten homers.  The league leader had seven.  Though Ruth pitched well -- 2.44 ERA, second in the league in opponent batting average, fourth in winning percentage -- paying fans weren't coming to his games to just watch him throw.  At some point, Ruth was going to have to get to the plate more often, but that wouldn't be for a little while longer.

Sources:
Creamer, Robert. Babe: The Legend Comes to Life. Simon & Schuster, New York. 1974.
Jenkinson, Bill. Baseball's Ultimate Power: Ranking the All-Time Greatest Distance Home Run Hitters. Lyons Press. 2010.
Jenkinson, Bill. The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs: Recrowning Baseball's Greatest Slugger. Carrol & Graf. 2007.
Montville, Leigh. The Big Bam: The Life and Time of Babe Ruth. Broadway Books, New York. 2006.

---

HITCHCOCK
(1922-1927)

(Source)

Alfred Hitchcock was born four years after Ruth, in 1899.  Ruth's mother had died when he was a teenager, while Hitchcock's father passed away when the boy was fourteen.  Both were sent away to live at boys' schools to learn a craft.  In Alfred's case, he went to the London County Council School of Engineering and Navigation.  After graduating he went to work for an electric cable company putting his engineering skills to use as a technical estimator.  His night school art studies at the University of London aided his transfer to the advertising department to work as an ad designer.  From there, his enjoyment of cinema and his design skills helped him land his next job as a title card designer for the London branch of the Famous Players Film Company.

Title cards are the pauses in the action of silent films when printed text comes up providing dialogue or action description that can't be seen in the image.  These intertitles can thus sculpt the film if the filmmaker doesn't capture the story in the moving images.  By designing title cards for films Hitchcock was learning cinematic storytelling, and also meeting with screenwriters every day.  With their help, he began writing scripts on the side.

When the American owners sold Famous Players to a British company, Hitchcock approached the new management for new work.  From 1922 to 1925, he was hired as an assistant director on six films and the art director on nine.  He also gained three screenwriting credits and one editing credit.

Sadly all of these films have been lost, like so much cinema from this period.  The nitrate film stock from this era ages poorly, crumbles, and is highly flammable.  On a positive note, the first three reels of 1923's The White Shadow (credited as assistant director, editor, and writer) were recently discovered in the New Zealand Archives.  It's doubtful that one could learn everything about Hitch's early influences from thirty minutes of this melodrama, but it's a great addition to cinema history and culture.

From Hitchcock's personal descriptions of these films, they all appear to be dramas or melodramas.  None of them action films or mysteries.  And from his words, these productions gave him a solid understanding of the labor and mechanics behind a production as opposed to helping mold his style.  Except in one case.

In his final art direction gig, the production of The Blackguard (co-produced by UFA) brought Hitchcock to Germany.  While there, Hitch had the opportunity to watch a number of productions in process, including Murnau's The Last Laugh.  Influenced by Expressionism, many German films at this time were much more visually intense and held closer to artistic styles than anything being made in the UK.  Hitch took note of the storytelling being done within the images as opposed to the title cards.  (The Last Laugh originally had NO titles.)  It was a full commitment to the visual medium, free of associations with the printed word.

His first directing job was on The Pleasure Garden.  The film (unavailable in the US) is a melodrama about a chorus girl whose new husband cheats on her, kills his mistress, and then tries to kill his wife.  In his conversations with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock has much more to say about the production of the film than the content or quality therein.  He's entirely dismissive of his next film, The Mountain Eagle, saying bluntly "It was a very bad movie."  Nothing remains of this film and Hitch doesn't seem to be too saddened about that.

The Lodger (1927)

Hitchcock's next film, The Lodger, is available everywhere, even in the public domain, thus resulting in many cruddy home video versions.  The copy I own is particularly poor.

The story: While a Jack-the-Ripper-type serial killer targets blond women throughout London, a very odd man takes up lodging with a small family.  The daughter of the family, a blonde model (of course), takes a weird liking to this stranger.  Her boyfriend, a police detective (of course), gets jealous.  His feelings mix with circumstantial evidence and he begins to suspect that the lodger is the murderer.  Suspense ensues!

The film is soaked with German Expressionist influences: high contrast lighting, exaggerated performances, and distorted imagery.  The style is strongest in the film's eight minute opening sequence of a murder and resulting word-of-mouth news.  It's a well paced montage with an exceptional amount of cuts for an English film of its time.  Like the rest of the movie, the titles are kept at minimum but when they are used they're stylized (likely influenced by Hitch's title card jobs).

The editing and visuals hold up better than the acting and screenplay.  There's a lot of coincidence and characters making unnecessarily dumb horror-film-cliche decisions.  The lead, Igor Novello, plays very weird just so that the audience suspects him, then is suddenly completely normal when the weirdness is inconvenient for the story.  But again, the visuals are dynamite -- overexposed kissing faces, feet pacing back and forth on an invisible floor, the silent screams of the murder victims.  The aforementioned opening is comparable to Fritz Lang's 1931 masterpiece, M.

We also witness the birth of much of Hitchcock's style.  The obsession with blondes.  The meddling mothers.  The pursuit of the wrong man.  The grim gallows humor.  Upon hearing about the first blonde murder, a newspaper man exclaims, "Tuesday's my lucky day!"  A brunette model announces, "No more peroxide for yours truly."

I can't imagine how audiences of the time reacted to that sort of happy irreverence over manslaughter.  Ultimately the film itself was a box office success, so audiences did take to this new director's style.  This afforded him a future.  But could he keep this burst of style burning?  And what sorts of films would he direct next?

We'll explore this and more in Chapter 2: The Ring.

Sources:
Spoto, Donald. The Dark Side Of Genius: The Life Of Alfred Hitchcock. De Capo Press, New York. 1999.
Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. Simon & Schuster, Paris. 1984.