12. NUMBER SEVENTEEN
To be honest...after a bout of celebratory daydrinking, I caught very little of what was going on. But what I did absorb was a formal sensibility liberated from the tedium of exposition, a frenzy of images decoupled from plotting. Energetic, thrilling, chaotic, visual, kinetic...I liked it a lot.
13. I CONFESS
14. STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
15. THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
16. SECRET AGENT
Furthering THE 39 STEPS' comic inversions, marriage in SECRET AGENT is a foreign object to all involved. To Mr. and Mrs. "Ashenden" it is a bemusing facade, to the General and Marvin it is an accursed impediment. A game for all to play until the counterfeit married couple decide it might suit them after all. Hitchcock seems to have great fun tweaking this most solemn of social conventions in his 30s films, yet by the end his phony lovers stumble their way into real romance. Madeleine Carroll, here as before, manages to strike a winsome balance between insouciance and affection. How unfortunate that Hitchcock seems intent on belittling her throughout. His impish love stories would feel much more earned if Carroll weren't made to suffer such indignities along the way.
17. YOUNG AND INNOCENT
It's the wrong man accused once more, but this time with an interestingly sexist angle. YOUNG AND INNOCENT opens with a suspicious scene of the male lead fleeing a corpse that has washed ashore. Two young women see him departing and interpret it as proof of his guilt. When all three speak to the police, the man claims he was leaving to get help. The women are having none of it. They persist to condemn him for his actions, persuading the entire crowd of their viewpoint while the man looks on helplessly.
In Hitchcock men are often the playthings of fate. They are tossed into situations beyond their understanding, sometimes on purpose or sometimes just by sheer bad luck. But in YOUNG AND INNOCENT we can see the political limitations of Hitchcock's favored structure. The mistaken young women are not viewed with hatred per se, yet the man's desperate quest for absolution is what garners sympathy. Hitchcock stacks the deck: we know this protagonist will triumph in the end, but is it not perfectly reasonable for witnesses without our omniscient perspective to suspect him? And what about this dead woman anyhow? Doesn't she deserve all these efforts to stop her apparent killer?
By making the man's accusers women, an uncomfortable facet of Hitchcock's style is revealed. For men are often not innocent, and women are frequently all too correct in their assessments. It is not good practice to regularly focus on male virtuousness threatened by uncomprehending onlookers. And Hitchcock, a sexual predator himself, is certainly not one of his unjustly accused male innocents. Yet he spent much of his career returning to this scenario, envisioning variations on plausible deniability to his enraptured audiences. Could he have been deliberately promoting disbelief in criminal accusations? Were all these films rehearsals/tutorials for himself and other men under the spotlight? I would not ordinarily assume bad faith on the part of an artist, but few other directors are so (in)famous for being master manipulators.
The wrong(ed) man often appears as an apolitical archetype in Hitchcock. THE 39 STEPS perfected the formula early, and it appears to have had a primal appeal to both Hitchcock and his viewers. I am however wondering now if it isn't an elaborate alibi. An epistemological argument for granting leniency to men in suspicious circumstances. How guilty was Hitchcock, in the final score? And how guilty did he believe himself to be? How much time did he spend, in his art and in life, obsessing over unwanted accusations? I am inclined to believe art imitates life with Hitchcock, that his preoccupations shaped him to the core. There may well be no bottom here.
18. THE SKIN GAME
Not bad at all! An early critique of the spirit of capitalism, something so odious even white British people find it offensive. Among the better early Hitchcocks, perhaps because he was working with more layered material than usual.
However, I'm a little off-put by its climactic tragedy. It's not that Hitchcock handles the spiral of shame poorly or even insensitively. Rather, I'm not sure how sterling his motives are in revealing a young girl's disreputable secret, thus driving her to suicide. It recalls his own sadistic predilections a little too closely.
This is part of the trouble with abusive artists. Even when the films are otherwise commendable, real life looms darkly over their work. Parallels, unbidden, suggest themselves. THE SKIN GAME's theme of class precarity isn't so different from Pansy Osmond's predicament in The Portrait of a Lady, but Hitchcock isn't Henry James. So his film ends up seeming suspect where James' novel feels profoundly sympathetic to the plights of its women.
I hope it's clear enough by now that I'm not watching all the Hitchcocks I can just to denounce them one-by-one. In some cases, my feelings about Hitchcock and his films hardly dovetail at all. What I'm trying to discern is when (and how) life's ugliness putrefies art. Especially because Hitchcock is such an influential figure, I'm curious about how his psyche has infiltrated this medium he was so instrumental in shaping. The correspondences are obscure and inconclusive so far, but some things are indeed becoming clearer. I have one more British film to watch, and then I'll be taking a lengthy break before embarking on his American works. Hopefully this informal database will be of use to other people, but if not, I think it's at least given me some insight.
19. MURDER!
Flatly paced, and Hitchcock seems hamstrung by the dull Sir John character. Herbert Marshall's performance never evokes much more than cursory intrigue.
Also, the weight of psychological deviance coming down so heavily on the "half-caste" "female impersonator" is...concerning.
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