Looking for signs of greatness in Hitchcock's early work.
Alfred Hitchcock was one of the most recognisable cultural figures of the last century, but people have different levels of engagement with his work. At the millipede level are those who have a vague sense that the man wrote mystery books (to my horror I find that there are adults who believe Hitch penned the Three Investigators series, which his name was associated with for publicity reasons). At a somewhat higher level are people who have a fleeting acquaintance with his best-known films (and are frequently disappointed with them because they were expecting murder mysteries), and beyond that the buffs who know about the differences between the early classics of the British period (e.g. The Lady Vanishes, The Thirty Nine Steps) and the full-blown masterpieces made for Hollywood studios in the 1950s (Rear Window, North by Northwest, et cetera).
And at the Evolved Primate level of Hitch-cognition are the fanboys like yours truly, who have seen nearly all of the 54 films multiple times, studied technique and content from every angle, and who scoff even at Truffaut’s famous book of Hitchcock interviews because it isn’t analytical enough. But even so, I admit to having glossed over the films AH made in his first few years as a director — between the mid-20s and the early 30s, a time when movie-makers were trying to come to terms with the many advantages and limitations of the sound technology.
Now, Palador Pictures has released a box-set of DVDs containing five Hitchcocks made between 1929 and 1932 — Blackmail (Britain’s first sound feature), The Manxman, Murder!, Rich and Strange, and The Skin Game. These are understandably creaky movies, very much products of their time, and it’s difficult to imagine them having mass appeal today. But they are of great value to the serious film buff, and even the most laboured of them have many scenes where you can see traces of the artistry to come from their director.
The one I was most intrigued by was the 1931 feature Rich and Strange. On the surface, this is very atypical material for the future Master of Suspense — it’s about Fred and Emily, a working-class couple who unexpectedly come into an inheritance and take off on a round-the-world cruise, slowly becoming bored and corrupted along the way. But this morality tale has many solid Hitchcock touches and early signs of his trademark economy. For one, the screenplay is mercifully short on flab — the film doesn’t feel the need to keep talking, as many of the early, self-conscious sound films did — and Hitchcock has space for some of the visual flourishes and experiments that he would refine in his later work. As Fred experiences a dizzy spell brought on by seasickness, the camera’s movements mirror the swaying of the ship and the food descriptions on a menu seem to hop off the page and fly at him. A letter slowly goes out of focus as the person reading it tears up (a clichéd technique today but innovative in the early 1930s). There are funny title cards, blurred point-of-view shots to reflect a drunken perspective and delicate character-defining touches such as Emily surreptitiously removing her shoes for comfort at a show in high-society Paris. All this adds up to a valuable look at an artist’s embryonic development, as do many scenes in the other films in this collection.
With a career as lengthy and a style as identifiable as Hitchcock’s, it’s always interesting to look at early films for seeds of what was to follow, and this box-set offers a fascinating dive into the past. But only after you’ve experienced his more accessible work.
