Monsieur Verdoux (1947)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 124 mins.


The following review discusses major plot points.

The appeal of Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux is, I think, rooted in the dichotomous fact that it's profoundly anti-Chaplin and yet a near-pure embodiment of his philosophy and creativity. A story about a struggling banker during the 1930s global depression who marries wealthy women, coolly knocks them off, and casually pockets their money to support his invalid wife and charming son is not the sort of film an audience would expect from Chaplin, particularly because it's also a blistering post-war critique of western society. But it also makes a great deal of sense that Chaplin, whose ferocity in politics had grown to match his famously gigantic ego, would come to end up with something like Monsieur Verdoux, a curious and complex and ultimately flawed black comedy. The distance between this film and his silent films is quite remarkable; Chaplin as Henri Verdoux doesn't just kill women for their life savings — he kills The Tramp as well, once and for all.

At its best, Verdoux is methodical in its take-down of war and violence, less bombastic than The Great Dictator and more pointed than A King in New York. All three films possess urgent political messages, but only Verdoux's continues to feel crucially relevant. The lasting impression is of Chaplin's mind at work, and for sympathetic liberals what he has to say is rousing and sincere. Words matter more in Verdoux than any Chaplin film previously; although he had already done sound and dialogue in The Great Dictator, it wasn't until Verdoux that he made his first true film in sound. The film lacks the elaborate and virtually silent setpieces that are worthy many good laughs in The Great Dictator. The topic here may be murder and death — the most corporeal of subjects — but for Verdoux Chaplin took everything out of the physical realm and made it more cerebral. The dialogue is punchier, wittier, subtler than any he'd written before. The metaphor built into the man is stronger in Verdoux than The Great Dictator, and the satire is less an indictment on something singular (Hitler and totalitarianism) than it is on something more dynamic, widespread, and fragile (democratic Western societies).

"Under the right circumstances, murder can be funny," Chaplin is to have said, and Verdoux is a funny film. For long stretches, Chaplin plays his hand close to his chest, preferring to drop his jokes with dainty wit and boyish insouciance. His murders have an air of the Hitchcockian — in one he menacingly ascends a staircase after one of his wives, cautioning her that everything has been taken care of, and awakens the next day to jaunty music. Others, or rather other attempts I should say, are patent Chaplinesque absurdity. Comedienne Martha Raye plays Annabella, an ingratiating and extraordinarily lucky lottery winner who continually and unknowingly foils Verdoux's attempted slayings. (The director Claude Chabrol has suggest Annabella epitomizes the obnoxious pluck of Americanism that the Europeans were never able to kill off.)

So when Verdoux takes Annabella fishing with the intent to drown her, and just as he's about to chloroform her she rocks the boat and he falls backward, the cheesecloth landing on his own face, Chaplin's humor radar is exacting. Ironically, if Verdoux were simply a comedy of these murderous errors, it might have been more successful upon its initial release. What makes it thrive, especially today, is Chaplin's equally shrewd ability to do math. One murder can be funny; one murder repeated for a film can build rhythm; any more than that, particularly as you begin to approach the level of warfare, and there's nothing worth joking about. In that regard, although it's considerably darker and bleaker than his other films, Verdoux is no less humanistic than Chaplin's previous works. The most famous and poignant scenes come at the end, where Chaplin is as moralistic as The Great Dictator but with a softer touch. On the stand at his trial, he revels in his own homicidal amateurism compared to the industry war complex, scientifically honed and encouraged around the globe. As he awaits his beheading, a few of his final words to a reporter loom as some of the best Chaplin ever penned: "Wars, conflict — it's all business. One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify."

The production history of Verdoux contributes to understanding how the film succeeds when it does. Orson Welles, fresh off Citizen Kane, wanted to make a film about Henri Désiré Landru, a real Bluebeard serial killer, and offered Chaplin the lead. Always one to call his own shots, Chaplin bought the idea from Welles and wrote the script for himself to direct. Although the entire script was initially rejected by Joseph Breen and his readers at the Production Code office as "unacceptable," "blasphemous" and atheistic, and guilty of trivializing murder, Chaplin only had to make a few tweaks in dialogue and scenes to gain approval. More significantly, however, is the fact that for the first time in his long career, Chaplin was forced to make certain concessions. He had previously had such broad creative control over his films that he was able to take his time, experiment on the set, and feel his way through to the end. However, the soaring cost of film stock after the war canceled his traditional creative process of improvisation and perpetual tweaking. Whereas he'd previously film a scene dozens of times, trying something new with each take until he proclaimed he'd found it and was ready to move on, Verdoux forced Chaplin to be completely prepared — he began filming with storyboards, a finished script (which was new to him), and a shooting schedule. Writing the film took years; all told, making it took less than three months.

The controversy that followed, however, would last a lifetime. Chaplin planned the film's Washington, D.C., premiere to follow the day a close friend was scheduled to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, intentionally stoking the flames already burning around him. Because the film pulled no punches in its critique of war and mass murder, throngs of sore post-war Americans came out in protest. (Incidentally, it was a hit in Europe.) United Artists caved and withdrew it from circulation. Congress called Chaplin a communist, senators called for his deportation, and in the coming years his reentry visa would be revoked and he'd spend the rest of his life living in Europe. (Still, Chaplin's script, which had originally been rejected in toto, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, which went to the decidedly happy Miracle on 34th Street.)

And certainly one of the more intriguing footnotes is that Verdoux has a cinéaste favorite, even more than his silent masterpieces. Bosley Crowther of the Times, writing in a retrospective of cinema's 50th birthday, called it "the most extraordinary of all Chaplin's films." André Bazin and Federico Fellini embraced as a masterpiece. Jonathan Rosenbaum and others count it among the century's finest comedies. The great James Agee devoted three essays to it in The Nation, continuing to praise it even after it closed. (I've even seen it sitting in the cushy #1 spot on a reproduction of Agee's list of favorite films.) All of this praise doesn't surprise me — film criticism can sometimes serve as a necessary corrective to previous artistic misunderstandings. But the greatness of Monsieur Verdoux, if it's there, continues to elude me. The wit is sharp, yes, and Verdoux's failed attempts at murdering Annabella do provide some belly laughs, but the strongest sections of the film bookend a soggy middle, which I think keeps it from true greatness. But this is still a wicked and important film, and above all, a testament to the fact that there was and will only ever be one cinematic mind like Chaplin's. You can't ignore a fact like that; as Verdoux himself says, numbers sanctify.

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Pinocchio (1940)

d. Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen / USA / 88 mins.


Many argue Pinocchio is as close as Walt Disney came to technical perfection, and, although it is not my favorite film of his, I find it difficult to disagree. Of all the animated features he produced, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1938 to The Jungle Book in 1967, the art of Pinocchio feels the most alive. Its location in the canon — as Disney's second animated narrative feature, released the same year as his first avant-garde film, Fantasia — seems to contribute to this sense. The excitement of feature animation hadn't yet become standardized, and the exuberance of his animation crew (which had honed its skills on Disney's Silly Symphonies and ultimately Snow White) is still radiates. Now remastered in preparation for its seventieth anniversary, it looks crisp and new. The artwork pops from its careful detail, and patented multi-plane camera produces its best work here, creating an illusion of depth that is almost as convincing as it is visually stunning.

They still make films this beautiful, but rarely do they animated films this frightening. Its parable is as subtle as its carnivorous whale: "good" boys get respect and love and become something, "bad" boys are cast out, isolated, punished, abused, and transformed into donkeys. Pinocchio (voiced by Dickie Jones) is a marionette made by the kindly and lonely old Gepetto (voiced by Christian Rub), who longs for the wooden boy to be flesh and blood, someone to love and someone who will love in return. Then, as these things are wont to happen in the world of animation, the Blue Fairy visits and anthropomorphizes the toy, giving him the chance at experiencing life and the opportunity to become a real boy. As a guide he has Jiminy Cricket (voiced by the magnificent Cliff Edwards), his insectoid and de facto conscience. But Pinocchio soon finds himself in the hands of villains.

Naturally in this realm we're stretching the limits of credulity and lacks almost any semblance of realism. So how does Pinocchio manage to still be disturbing? I think the answer lies in the boy's anxiety-inducing innocence. Even when he is lured by a walking-talking fox named Honest John and put into the hands of a Russian sideshow tyrant, he's all smiles. Pinocchio's famous number "I've Got No Strings" — performed on the sideshow where he dances with other puppets — is done with a smile. Sure, he's confused a little bit and very curious, but the film wisely (and nervously, for me) never imbues its character with any adult characteristics; the mission is to become a real boy. Pinocchio only realizes how much danger he is on until he is locked in a cage hanging from the ceiling. It helps too that Jones, the voice of Pinocchio, was only thirteen at the time, his light and cheery falsetto layered gently in the background of otherwise bizarre and suggestive imagery, which, let's not forget, is unsettling on its own. The bad children on Pleasure Island, who smoke and drink and gamble, are transformed into donkeys, stripped of their ability to speak and are eventually put to work on the salt mines. Even as an adult, it can give a chill.

When Pinocchio won Best Score and Best Original Song at the 1941 Academy Awards, it was the first animated film to win in a competitive category. It has truly wonderful songs — there isn't a dud in the bunch — and no doubt that comes from the fact that the film is economical with its music. Although it's 90 minutes long, there are only five songs in Pinocchio (and two reprises). All of them are catchy and appropriate to the film, and Disney front-loads them — we make our way through all five songs before plot of Pinocchio-gone-missing actually begins. They're all well known today: the lovely "When You Wish Upon a Star," frequently covered but never as tender as when Edwards sang it; Gepetto's "Little Wooden Head," Jiminy's "Give a Little Whistle," the aforementioned "I've Got No Strings," and Honest John's snappy "Hi Diddle Lee Dee (An Actor's Life For Me)."

Ironically, for all its stranger and unexpectedly twisted elements, Pinocchio is still often dismissed for sentimentalizing the sketches of Italian writer Carlo Collodi, whose fairy tales of a boy marionette became collected as the book The Adventures of Pinocchio. It's undeniable that the film has heaping spoonfuls of sugar in traditional Disney fashion, but the effect is remarkably balanced. One of Disney's purest talents (in addition to his visionary genius and knack for selecting engaging stories) is a striking sense of pace. If you'd asked me years ago what I thought of Pinocchio (or Snow White or many of the other golden age films), I'd have told you it was boring. Half-hour television might be to blame for why I remember these slim animated features as overly long, but when you enter adulthood, it's nearly impossible not to feel how fast the story gets underway. I've been watching animated films literally since I was an infant, but I was well into my teen years before I truly began to appreciate them. Re-watching Pinocchio, boring was the furthest thought from my mind. The film is slim, yes; stunning yes; terrifying, yes; but hardly boring.

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The Great Dictator (1940)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 124 mins.


The Great Dictator was Charles Chaplin's first film with spoken dialogue, and boy, did he have a lot to say. Audiences knew from his previous film, Modern Times, that he had a few political bones in his body, but the difference between the degree of politics in Modern Times and The Great Dictator is as loud as the difference between silence and sound. This film blows out the doors and windows as far as satire is concerned: the world's most recognizable comedian unleashed his scorn on the world's most treacherous tyrant.

Chaplin had been told he and Adolf Hitler had more than a few physical similarities. Both were short, with dark hair and the toothbrush moustache that the latter stole from the former. Both were actually born within days of each other, too, but that's obviously where the similarities end. You couldn't have two more unalike characters, which is precisely why Chaplin was the best person to sharpen his harpoon and set course to deflate the tyrant. In the film, Chaplin plays two characters: one is a Jewish barber, injured during World War I and stricken with amnesia that metaphorically resonates when he is reintroduced to society. When he returns to his old barbershop, he finds the word "JEW" painted in the windows and police patrolling the ghetto. This is thanks to Adenoid Hynkel (Chaplin again), the infantile, pompous, and ruthless dictator of fictitious Tomania. With a wink and a nudge, the credits coyly warn us in the beginning that "any resemblance between Hynkel the dictator and the Jewish barber is purely coincidental," as if after seeing Hynkel we're going to be concerned with the fact that he looks like the barber; by the time we meet Hynkel, similarities with the barber are the last things on our minds. It's an utterly unveiled send-up of Hitler, with Chaplin caricaturing all the megalomaniacal qualities to the nth degree.

I've read a large selection of criticism that suggests The Great Dictator isn't as good as Chaplin's earlier films, specifically The Gold Rush, City Lights, and Modern Times. Well, of course it's not. There aren't many films out there that can claim to be as good as that trifecta of silent masterpieces — and "silent" might be the imperative word there. Comparing Chaplin's silent oeuvre to his sound films is a logically flawed starting point. We're tempted to say that the romance of The Great Dictator doesn't blend as seamlessly into the film as a whole as the romance in The Gold Rush or City Lights. That's a perfectly acceptable complaint (and one that I'll actually second), but at the risk of sounding like a Chaplin-in-sound apologist, I don't re-watch The Great Dictator for the romance, just as I don't watch A Night at the Opera for its silly romance that distracts from the genius of the Marx Brothers. In a way The Great Dictator is doing things Chaplin had always done and also never done before. He pantomimes, he gets hit on the head with a cast-iron skillet, he dances until he falls down; that is the Chaplin standard, something he did better than almost anyone in his silent films. But Chaplin's humor became Chaplin's humor because it had a certain heart to it; that heart is unmistakably romantic in The Gold Rush and City Lights, and partially romantic in Modern Times. Between 1936 and 1940, his heart (like many in the western world) re-situated itself. The Great Dictator is a satiric dirty bomb. Now he could rely on dialogue to move the plot, and for once, dialogue to make a joke. What this film shows is that Chaplin hadn't yet found the perfect way to write the dialogue of innocent love (he'd never fully reclaim it, but Limelight comes close), but he had discovered more important ways to let his comedy speak for itself, literally.

So, as Chaplin's first film with spoken dialogue and full barrage of sound effects, The Great Dictator shouldn't be expected to keep the same company as his earlier silent works. Certainly Chaplin employs a few nice bits here that would have played as well in a silent film (a dud artillery shell spins around and follows the barber as he inspects it; Hynkel and the graceful ballet with the globe balloon; the barber shaving a man in perfect rhythm to Brahms; etc.), but aside from the very skillful slapstick, most of the humor here is strictly dialogue driven. The key to the joke lies in the vocal inflections: the innocent wonder in the barber's dialogue; Hynkel's germanic-based rants of pure gibberish and the meek translations that follow, followed by the dictator's trying-too-hard-to-be-indifferent voice later. Other characters are blessed with good voices, like the overblown high spirits of the idiotic Herring (Billy Gilbert, in a parody of Hermann Gorring); the deadpan delivery of Garbitsch (Henry Daniell, in a parody of Joseph Goebbels, in a name that must be said outloud to truly enjoy). These are characterizations and jokes Chaplin was not able to do before. In one scene, Garbitsch visits Hynkel to discuss the complaints of the masses. Hynkel wants to know what they have to complain about.

"The quality of the sawdust in the bread," Garbitsch says.

"What more do they want?" Hynkel responds. "It's from the finest lumber our mills can supply."

It seems to be requisite in every review of The Great Dictator to mention Chaplin's own thoughts about the production. He became increasingly uncomfortable as production went on and Hitler began to squeeze Europe tighter and tighter in his vice grip. Chaplin wrote later that if he had known the full extent of the Nazi Party's evil, it would have been impossible to make The Great Dictator. But that sort of analysis has always set a little uneasy with me. Would the film have really been impossible to make? I doubt it, and although I'm no Chaplin biographer, I doubt Chaplin meant it would be truly impossible. For a man as gifted as Chaplin, nothing seemed impossible, but I'll grant him it would have been more difficult, just not for the reasons we most commonly assume. It's because Chaplin would have been more self-conscious, and self-consciousness limits comedy. The fact that he wasn't entirely bound makes the film as casually acidic as it is. (This is not to say he wasn't bound at all; to the same extent he was, as others were, since the closer it came to 1940, the more information about the inhuman horror reached the citizens of the world).

There's nothing inherently offensive here (at least to me), only an awful lot that's tremendously sad. Although his satire on Hitler is a bit one-sided, it often brushes the edge of darkness. When Hynkel says after the Jews he's going after the brunettes, it's impossible not to cringe at how close Chaplin's joke was to the truth. Taken as it is, in its 1940 incarnation, it's perfect for what it does, and wanting anything else is wading out too far into a catch-22 where we want Chaplin to deliver commentary on events of which he doesn't know the extent. It simply can't be both ways, and that's where I think The Great Dictator trips up many who do want it both ways. What's evident then is that, even if Chaplin didn't know the brutal and atrocious horrors of the European ghettos, he knew the projected path of fascism and what resulted is a movie as ridiculous as it is fearful of the bleak reality had been descending on Europe's Jews.

The film ends with an impassioned speech from Chaplin, delivered from the barber who has been mistaken as the tyrant. It stretches credulity—why doesn't anyone try to stop him? where did he find these words after so much innocence? Many think it shifts the film in a fundamentally large way and mucks up the ending; after two hours of making us laugh, Chaplin the professor takes over and delivers a lecture criticizing authoritarianism, tyranny, and senseless bigotry that ends in the deaths of too many. "It didn't work then, and it doesn't work now," Roger Ebert writes. Mark Bourne says: "Whether it's underwritten or overwritten is hard to say. Yes, Chaplin's appeal for reason and kindness is inarguable, yet as the speech rambles forth trying to open our eyes to too many ills at once, it's punctuated less by plain-speaking Lincolnesque oratory than by naive kumbaya. Its truths are swamped by airy truisms. His intent is honorable, no question. It's the execution that's so damned frustrating."

But I love the speech. It raises my pulse, and it makes me proud to love Chaplin. When the end of the film comes, Chaplin, as he did with the romance of The Gold Rush and City Lights, manages to convince me to turn off all the centers of my brain that deal with logic and the intricacies of filmmaking. When he takes that stage, confused to be Hynkel, he gives us a version of the world as it could be, and that bypasses my brain and speaks to my heart. Although I've read a tremendous amount of criticism against it, I've never read a proposal that moves me even a fraction of how Chaplin can.

As expected, Hitler and all Axis powers banned the film, although the tyrant's curiosity got the best of him and he procured a copy through Portugal and screened it twice. ("I'd give anything to know what he thought of it," Chaplin later said.) In places such as Franco-controlled Spain, the film stayed banned as far into the 1970s. But what may be unexpected is that it was Chaplin's most commercially successful film, and it secured five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay, but won none. That's a bit of a shame, but it does disprove claims that it was a film ahead of its time. True, the full measure of its humor might only be recognizable this far removed from the age of propaganda and from the war, but it was by no means a failure upon its initial release. I think with time it's gotten better. For the absurdity of tyranny, I'll take Duck Soup, and for subverting Nazism with ridiculousness, I'll take To Be or Not To Be. But The Great Dictator is a film I simply cannot leave behind. It's an impassioned and courageous satire, balancing humor with tragedy, pathos with rationality, all while championing a world of peace and tolerance. Chaplin has a voice, a real voice in sound and in politics. He's brave, he's earnest, he's a prophetic dissident of the highest order. He wants nothing less than to the change the world. He didn't, but he was among the first to shoot an arrow into the eye of evil. As far as I'm concerned, that's a hell of an accomplishment.

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Under Capricorn (1949)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / UK / 117 mins.


As a high school student – all those splendid years ago – I worked at a movie theater in various capacities: projectionist, cashier, etc. My favorite role was always the shift as the official ticket-tearer and welcome-to-the-theater greeter. It was tedious, except when I wasn't working (which was often) and I could listen to my barrel-chested boss behind the cashier's desk as he spun tales, anecdotes, and philosophical musings. He'd worked in the film business for years, mostly on the business side, and had many screenings under his belt. One day he asked who my favorite director was, and I told him Alfred Hitchcock. After slowly nodding and stroking his chalk-white beard, his wily eyes began searching my face and suddenly he claimed: "But what about Under Capricorn!"

Indeed. For many, Under Capricorn is a quasi-unfathomable blemish for the director who had hit an impressive stride in America in the early 1940s. It is a talky film, often slow and droll, and emotionally cold in a problematic way. The film was one of the director's only forays into an explicit period-piece genre (and his other notable entry, Jamaica Inn, is also among his worst). It bears some passing similarities to Hitchcock's last melodrama – his great work Rebecca – namely in the way the hired help seems to taunt, push, and punish the mistress of the house for selfish gains, but it lacks all the narrative explosions and manipulation he pulled off so well previously.

Under Capricorn is melodrama, yes – and bad melodrama, at that – but thematically it is not unchartered territory for Hitchcock. Others have speculated that he chose the project because it was cheap (psychological biographer Donald Spoto claims it cost one dollar) or that Hitchcock's fondness for the novel's author, Helen Simpson, might have played a role (she worked with him on Murder! and Sabotage). But Under Capricorn is also a hotbed of dark and disturbing elements: someone is covering for someone else's murder; there are terrifying and dramatic psychological breakdowns; the locale of Australia, and its former position as an English penal colony, provided a tangible reform of crime-to-riches. Set in the early nineteenth century and in Australia, the film follows the arrival of Charles Adare (Michael Wilding), the nephew of the colony's governor, and his friendship with an ex-convict named Samson Flusky (Joseph Cotton, his second collaboration with Hitchcock). Samson has climbed the ranks into the higher levels of Australia's society after finishing a term for a murder he supposedly committed, but Charles becomes quite interested in the man and his wife Lady Henrietta (Ingrid Bergman, in her third and final collaboration with Hitchcock), who was once a friend of Charles's sister. Henrietta is a terrible alcoholic, and while Samson hopes Charles could counteract her substance abuse, Henrietta is secretly tortured by the couple's maid (Margaret Leighton) who wants Samson for herself.

Cotton and Bergman seem like they might be a splendid combination, but for whatever reason (the weight of the clunky plot, I'm guessing) their work is not worth much value. Bergman, who at this time in her career reportedly only wanted to sign on to potential "masterpieces," doesn't get good until nearly an hour and fifteen minutes into the film (which is also when the film itself becomes moderately engaging). Burt Lancaster was Hitchcock's original choice for Cotton's role, but I'm not sure he would have done much better. Cotton, playing an Anglo, abandons all pretense of masking his American voice against Bergman's multi-national intonation and Wilding and Leighton's British accents; it reaches a point where the disregard is so flagrant that the line "Ladies and gents look at things in their own way" might just be intentionally spoken as a John Wayne impression. Remarkably, the one performer I'd never really heard of – Leighton – turns in the best work of the film as the manipulative housekeeper, a chilling villainy in the vein of Judith Anderson's Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca (although, it should be noted, Leighton is nowhere near as good as Anderson, and Cotton and Bergman ain't no Olivier and Fontaine either).

Under Capricorn was Hitchcock's second film in color, and although the film itself provides little by way of entertainment, Jack Cardiff's cinematography really displays the full possibility of Hitchcock in Technicolor. (The director would go back to black-and-white film stock for his next three films, then shoot largely in color for the rest of his career, with some notable exceptions.) Cardiff, who collaborated as a cinematographer with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in the early 1940s on The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death, won an Oscar the previous year for Black Narcissus. His camerawork for Under Capricorn is something to behold, with a rich tapestry of expressive blues, purples, blacks, and oranges. The colors "pop" in Under Capricorn in a way they wouldn't again until The Trouble With Harry and Vertigo.

After the modest success of shooting with the long-take in Rope, Hitchcock utilized the technique again in Under Capricorn. The film isn't entirely made in long-takes, nor is there an attempt on Hitchcock's part to obscure or conceal the actual cuts as he did in Rope. Critics and scholars, who have given Under Capricorn more credit than I'm willing to give it, have long argued the long-take in the film is rooted more in character psychology than anything else, that the unbroken examination of characters is a tangible representation of their own trapped thoughts and emotions. I find that proposal compelling, and perhaps even correct, although I think the result is altogether disappointing. While Hitchcock transports the long-take to a greater technical level (the camera swirls in and out of a house and in and out of rooms with most fluidity than in Rope), the effect doesn't quite work as well as Rope; it might simply be the difference between Rope being an adaptation of a play and Under Capricorn an adaptation of a novel, which doesn't lend itself to the long-take in the same way a single-set play does.

It wasn't until I began digging around the Hitchcock coves on the Internet that I discovered a small band of Under Capricorn loyalists who see the film as one of Hitchcock's most psychologically complex and lavishly haunting productions. I see no reason to deny them their pleasure, although there's no doubt in my mind that it is really one of the least important and enjoyable films the director made. The ironic thing is that today it's perhaps best remembered as a failed experiment in the long-take, the cinematography is, to me, one of the more interesting aspects of the film and among the least of its numerous problems. I don't foresee myself rushing to watch it again any time soon, but I wonder if it would be more enjoyable on mute, downplaying the stilted acting and the leaden plot and letting Cardiff's colors and camerawork shine?

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Rope (1948)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 81 mins.


It's sometimes easy to forget from the "Master of Suspense" moniker that Alfred Hitchcock was also a master of cinematic experimentation, and Rope, much like the single-stage Lifeboat four years prior, is one of his most successful sleights of hand. Famously told through eleven unbroken shots and made to seem as if it were entirely continuous, today the film is either hated or adored based solely around its camera technique. I side with those who like and admire it, although ironically it's the shots Hitchcock tries to hide (zooming in someone's back and zooming back out to "conceal" the cut) that are the most noticeable.

Leaving critical opinion aside, let's chew on this idea: in the strait-laced studios that dominated Hollywood in the 1940s, what other marquee-name director would have attempted something like Rope? John Ford? William Wyler? John Huston? Billy Wilder? Probably none of these men, and for the similar reason (mostly due to an instinctive feeling that audiences and critics might not like it). Of all the big names working in Hollywood at the time, I suppose I could have seen Orson Welles try it, but it was Hitchcock who took the dream of filming in long-takes to a new reality. Years later, the director would admit he didn't understand why he found himself so drawn to the possibility of a long-take film. Biographer Patrick McGilligan poses a number of potential reasons, all without answers: Was he trying to prove something in the form; was he trying to be intentionally, and defiantly, artistic in the sparsity of the studio system; was he simply trying his old trick of getting around the censors, by drumming up attention to certain elements so others would slide through? It's just not clear, but it's mighty to behold.

Buoyed by the support of Sidney Bernstein and Warner Bros. (this would be his first film with the studio), Rope, and all its technical wizardry, began to take shape. But technique alone cannot carry a film, as we know, and fortunately the script – adapted by Hume Cronyn from Patrick Hamilton's stage play of the same name – is devilishly smart, dabbling in philosophy, intellectualism, and the boundaries of human behavior. Title aside (all the shots are "roped" together with little seams), it might have been the best possible script for this sort of film: two Nietzsche-loving egotists, presented as good friends, conspire to pull off the perfect murder and then flaunt their crime to the victim's family, friends, and their former prep school housemaster as an expression of their own genius. The story has roots in reality, with two gay University of Chicago students named Leopold and Loeb who kill an acquaintance in "perfect crime" style, only to be caught in their mistakes. (With the combination of murder and homosexuality, many producers in Hollywood were understandably scared of Hamilton's play, and it's no surprise the director proudly seized upon that fact in interviews.)

James Stewart, in his first Hitchcock film, gives a surprisingly wry and cynical performance as Rupert Cadell, the former prep school housemaster of Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Granger) who are the philosophy-obsessed murderers. Brandon and Phillip have thrown the body of their friend David inside a trunk that they set in the middle of their apartment for a party. Rupert swirls wine and skeptically eyes Brandon, who is the more flagrant of the two in his hint-dropping, while Phillip holds steady and begins to be eaten alive from the inside by his guilt and the possibility of being caught. The party continues and seems to come to an end, with everything seeming to go the way of the killers, but the wheels have been turning in Rupert's head and he pins down Brandon and Phillip for their erratic behavior. Dall, it should be said, is great, but the same can't be said though for the comical overacting of Granger, who deflates a lot of kinetic energy between Stewart and Dall.

Hitchcock had intended Rope to be a Cary Grant film (after scrapping an idea of putting Grant into a production of Hamlet), and envisioned Granger as Phillip and Montgomery Clift as Brandon. Grant and Clift, however, slowly began pulling away from Rope (Grant even falsely avowing never to work with Hitchcock again), and today rumors of their respective sexualities shine a great deal of light on their decisions. (Ironically, however, Granger – also gay – stayed on and the part of Brandon went to Dall, another gay actor.) Although Rope is relatively bowdlerized of its billboard-style sexual elements, much has been written about the homoerotic undertones in the movie, and, from a critical standpoint, much of it seems quite valid. Rope does indeed go out of its way to skirt against the acceptable limits, which, in 1940s Hollywood, was basically nothing. Hints are dropped here and there, but while residuals remain on Brandon and Phillip, it seems to be removed from Rupert. Knowing Hitchcock's proclivities toward all things taboo, it shouldn't surprise anyone that he knew what he was doing the whole time.

Rope was another first for Hitchcock: his first film in color. Although he had wanted his potential remake of The Lodger to be his first film in color (McGilligan notes the director saw it as a way to revamp the entire production, and he had long visualized a scene where red blood drips onto white flower pedals), it wasn't until 1948 that he made a production in Technicolor. For Hitchcock, color was an extra – a narrative bonus, so to speak, that could influence an entire production of the film. "Color for reason, not just color to knock people's eyes out," he said. "Make color an actor, a defined part of the whole. Make it work as an actor instead of scenery." Rope is memorable for being in color, although it is certainly not the director's best use of the medium; the whole palette seems flattened and drained, often without any sort of life in itself. Both Vertigo and Marnie use color the best as an effective narrative tool; The Trouble with Harry is certainly the director's most painterly film, with the gorgeous Vermont landscape beaming in color; and while Rear Window could possibly have been in black-and-white, its veneer seems to benefit the most from Technicolor that is not directly tied to an emotion or a sensation.

And the film works – quite well, too, if I can add. Perhaps I'm lured into complacency by Hitchcock's tricks, or, to be more benevolent to the director, his style and talent. The suspense hits all the right buttons, and Stewart is at once both suave and shrew. Regardless of its reception today, the one thing undeniable aspect is that Rope took a great deal of the director's attention and focus; it was a behemoth to stage and film, requiring all the actors to be at their prime and the crew to flow like clockwork. The camera had to move at the right time, and the sets had to pull apart and come back together to accommodate its movements. The script, too, is subtle and suggestive but in no way do we read into it our social perceptions anachronistically. While I firmly believe Rope is not one of Hitchcock's masterpieces, in the end I must say I do think it is a highly successful film, and being his most experimental, certainly worth an examination.

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The Paradine Case (1947)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 125 mins.


Alfred Hitchcock's personal obsessions played out so vividly in his own films, and his masterpieces – Vertigo, Rear Window, Psycho, Notorious – are so evident because the audience can sense how extraordinarily invested in them he was. When he lost interest in a production, however, his apathy was as unfortunately evident.

The Paradine Case was Hitchcock's third and final film for the megalomaniacal producer David O. Selznick, who tended to bring Hitchcock nothing but frustration during their seven-year collaboration (although the making of Rebecca was considerably smooth as Selznick was still tied up with finishing Gone With The Wind). The quality of the Hitchcock-Selznick films depreciated through their time together, with their first – Rebecca, Best Picture of 1940 – being their greatest. Their second, Spellbound, is bizarre and interesting but nothing stellar, and Hitchcock abandoned it to Selznick after assembling a rough cut.

There isn't much to note about The Paradine Case. It's a sub-par Hitchcock film, but a Hitchcock film nonetheless. Inside it are the seeds of obsession, love, and sacrifice that were better in Notorious and would be better explored by Hitchcock in the mid- to late-1950s. British lawyer Anthony Keane (a very un-British Gregory Peck, who makes no attempt to hide his Americanness) falls in love with his alluring client (Allda Valli), who is on trial for the murder of her husband. This love is apparent to his Keane's own wife (Ann Todd), and she pushes him to make the case a slam dunk so he can come back to her with his psyche in tact. She can see, quite plainly, that while Keane shows no sign of potentially leaving her for his client, he will never be the same man if the woman is he falling for is sentenced the die.

This theme is right up Hitchcock's alley: a man succumbing to his darker and weaker impulses, caught in a trap that he must overcome to save himself mentally and emotionally, his cool wife standing (nealry) silently by his side. But after watching The Paradine Case again, I realize my interest in the theme stops short of anything else in the entire film. The cast is uniformly weak across the board, but particularly Valli, who plays her character in such a humdrum way that it's hard to understand why Keane would fall for her. (Now, if it were Ingrid Bergman ... that might be a different story.) The murder itself is blasé, and the characters you end up rooting for the most are those on the jury, who can't move fast enough to end the boring trial. To make matters worse, the film feels quite long for two hours – although the original rough cut was reportedly closer to three.

On a technical note, Hitchcock devised an ingenious setup for filming the dramatic courtroom proceedings: four cameras, each positioned to record one of the principals as the scene played out. In the past, multiple cameras had been used to record the movements and words of one actor before, but never multiple cameras on multiple actors. While it sounds intriguing to the cinephile's mind and probably made editing less burdensome, it doesn't affect the appearance of the courtroom drama in any profound way. The cameras ran for entire reels though, which would flip a switch in Hitchcock's mind and prompt him to experiment with long-takes on his next two pictures, Rope and Under Capricorn.

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Notorious (1946)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 101 mins.


Note: An earlier version of this review was previously published at the blog Deadpan as part of a retrospective on the career of Alfred Hitchcock.

Notorious is Alfred Hitchcock's mid-career masterpiece. He made great movies before it (The 39 Steps, Rebecca, Shadow of a Doubt), but Notorious is a stand-out addition, and turning point, in his canon. From 1946 onward, Hitchcock's great movie to average movie ratio would begin to tick upward: Rear Window, Psycho, North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, Vertigo. This particular film is not only the best he made in the 1940s, it's one of his greatest overall.

In many ways, too, it might very well be considered his crowning achievement in terms of sheer synthesis. It ostensibly combines the thriller with the love story, then the love story with film noir, and filtered both through the standard glossy Hollywood look and Hitchcock's overtly stylized visuals. It twists and complicates its conflict into an ultimate statement on how far duty and love can drive two people apart (then together) and how much is at stake when it seems like all might be lost. There is not a single moment in Notorious where you might mistake it for any of the multitude of films made in the post-war boom of the late 1940s; without a question, Hitchcock is in control of every single frame.

The story takes place shortly after the end of World War II in the waning months where the Nazis still invoked fear. A German spy ring has fled to Brazil, and the U.S. government wants to infiltrate their organization with a spy. T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant), an espionage agent, drafts Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), a patriotic America whose father was nevertheless recently found guilty of being a Nazi sympathizer. Just as Devlin feels himself becoming attracted to Alicia, he receives orders to have her begin socializing with a friend of her father's, Alex Sebastian (the great Claude Rains). Devlin and Alicia part ways – until, of course, Sebastian becomes wise to Alicia, and ...

Well, it wouldn't do justice to this movie if I told you what comes next.

Notorious is not often credited with being among Hitchcock's most insidious explorations of his own internal issues – instead we cite Rear Window, for its voyeurism; Vertigo, for its obsessive makeover; Psycho, for its unrelenting mother issues; and lesser famous films like I Confess, for its religious tension, and The Wrong Man, for his fear of the authorities. But Notorious is surprisingly complex in its own internal turmoil. "The story of Notorious is the old conflict between love and duty," Alfred Hitchcock told François Truffaut in their book-length interview, characteristically simplifying himself and his art. It is an old conflict, but the astute Truffaut saw through the minimalization and nonetheless stood firm by his words that Notorious is the single film that best encapsulates Hitchcock as an artist.

The film was Hitchcock's second collaboration with Grant (previously in Suspicion) and Bergman (previously in Spellbound). Both were gigantic stars by 1946 – Grant for his comedies like Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, and Bergman for Casablanca above all else – and both perform in a way that is nearly independent of the film. As Hitchcock learned from his work with Grant in Suspicion, if your stars are working well you can devote your time, mind, and resources to other effects. Both had their images manipulated by the director who was interested in burrowing into the darker elements of the human psyche. Devlin, played by former screwball actor Grant, is cold and calculating in his manipulation of Alicia. Hitchcock and the elegantly romantic Bergman bring Alicia to life initially as a promiscuous lush, then allow her to become self-destructively submissive and sacrificial, putting her in Sebastian's arms and bed, and she obliges, all for the sake of earning Devlin's love. They are phenomenally deep as lead characters: Alicia ignores her physical reality for the emotional lure of Devlin, and he ignores his emotional reality for the professional lure of what Alicia can access inside Sebastian's cadre of Nazis. The potential attraction is always immediately below the surface for Devlin, although the woman he pushes Alicia to become is not the sort of woman he thinks he could ever love. (Not to mention the film contains one of Hitchcock's earliest incidents of running afoul with the Production Code. At the time, the Code limited kisses to three seconds, so Hitchcock has Grant and Bergman keep with the merit of the Code by kissing for three seconds, then breaking, then kissing three seconds, then breaking, etc. The entire hint-hint-nudge-nudge sequence runs 180 seconds.)

The great screenwriter Ben Hecht was behind the richly layered script, which took an elementary scenario from a short story called "The Song of the Dragon" and transformed it into something original. His screenplay was nominated for an Oscar, one of the two nominations the film earned. (The other was Rains for supporting actor; neither won.) It is suspenseful and taut, particularly in its final twenty minutes. It is dense, but never confusing, and sly without being ostentatious. Production started only months after the nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan, and the use of uranium as the trafficked-element-of-choice for Sebastian and his German cadre is one of Hitchcock's all-time great "MacGuffins" (the item everyone is concerned with but that really doesn't matter in terms of anything but the gear that keeps the film rolling). As it places Alicia in harm's way, it makes a credible case that she is in a magnificent amount of danger. (Certainly Sebastian's mother, one of the great evil women in all of Hitchcock's films, has not qualms about slipping her a little something and attempting to solve the problem.)

And, oh, the look of this film: I could devote thousands of words to its elegant and evocative style. Anyone interested in the power of cinematography should settle into Notorious with one hand on the pause button and another devoted to a pen and a steno pad. Although Hitchcock experimented with the constraints of the camera through his entire career (shots with limited range, like in Lifeboat and Rear Window; long takes, like in Rope and Under Capricorn; obtuse angels, like in North by Northwest), his most effective camerawork might just be in Notorious, working alongside cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff. The famous ones are so famous it's as if no one has dared try to imitate them. There is the high-mounted wide shot of the gigantic foyer at Sebastian's mansion, which leads to an continuous zoom that ends outrageously close to a key in Alicia's hand. There is a party scene where a silhouetted head looms along the bottom of the frame, and although we cannot see the face of the man whose head we see, it is as if Hitchcock knows we will be able to identify it as Grant's. There is a shot where Alicia, just waking, sees Devlin in her doorway, and he walks toward her and she repositions herself, the shot in her point of view rotates in a perfect arc. There is an exhilerating shot near the end where Devlin carefully escorts Alicia to a car, and once inside, the camera zips and captures him as he smoothly locks the door and essentially gives another character a death sentence. No part of these miraculous technical achievements is done for pure flair; like the film itself, they are surprising, but slyly informative, and they build suspense while pushing the mechanics of the narrative along. Notorious is Hitchcock in absolute control of all the gears, and with an unbeatable team of Grant and Bergman, no lover of movies can afford not to see it.

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Spellbound (1945)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 111 mins.


Spellbound is a bizarre production from director Alfred Hitchcock. I think there's a great film probably looming around somewhere in Spellbound, perhaps the way our great thoughts and emotions can be revealed when we've brushed away the artificial clutter of the human mind and exposing an inner and suppressed truth. But what is on the screen here sometimes feels like nothing but stumbling and untidiness.

It's important that, as a viewer, you know as little of the plot as possible going in because this is one of the few Hitchcock films where the unraveling of the mystery is just as important as how the characters react to it. To whet your appetite, I will simply say that the film is set in a mental institution and stars Ingrid Bergman as a resident psychoanalyst, whose new boss (played Gregory Peck) might be hiding a thing or two about his own past, to put it mildly. Spellbound was the first collaboration with Hitchcock for both Bergman and Peck; Bergman, under contract to Selznick, and Hitchcock hit it off like old friends, and she would work again with him on two more productions (Peck on one more).

Hitchcock and screenwriter Ben Hecht set out to develop the novel The House of Dr. Edwardes with the intention to making it a dramatic exploration of human psychology, but what interested Hitchcock as a filmmaker was the possibility of breaking outside the standard mold and experimenting with how dreams could be filmed. Their first draft infuriated the film's producer, the ever-touchy David O. Selznick, who ordered edits and consulted his own psychiatrist (May Romm, a Freudian loyalist) to give the film "authenticity" – a concept that, as far as Spellbound as concerned, didn't seem necessary to Hitchcock.

All told, Spellbound is an interesting premise and it stays consistently interesting through to the end. This wasn't a throwaway project – its use of symbolism, with omnipresent doors and black-lines-on-white-backgrounds, makes it too smart for that – but Hitchcock left production the day after he assembled a rough cut. He was back under the watchful eyes of Selznick, whose nannying was an extraordinarily sore spot for the director. (Fortunately for the director, history seemed to repeat itself: while working on Rebecca, Selznick was preoccupied with Gone With The Wind, and while working on Spellbound, Selznick was preoccupied with the World War II home-front drama Since You Went Away.) Still, after leaving the film to Selznick, what was probably at one time crystal clear in Hitchcock's head became muddied by the producer's meddling. In post-production, Selznick brought in a new art director and re-edited the film with re-shot segments. The producer was possible of exhibiting great judgment (re: the entirety of Gone With The Wind), but his egotism and obsessiveness could also make a commit critical errors, and his devastating decision on Spellbound to cut severely cut engrossing contributions by surrealist painter Salvador Dalí.

During the screenwriting process, Hitchcock kept Dalí's potential involvement hidden from Selznick. Hitchcock admired Un Chien Andalou – Dalí's 1928 surrealist film with Luis Bruñel – and envisioned a partnership with Dalí to help construct four elaborate dream sequences in the film. Historically speaking, until the mid-1940s, dreams in cinema were mostly alternative scenes, cut to and cut away from by a wavy blur effect; for Spellbound, the dreams would help provide clues to the mystery in a visually arresting way. Dalí would sketch and draw dreamscapes and Hitchcock's art crew would convert them into sets. And surreal they were: walls with gigantic eyes, pianos dangling from ceilings, Bergman as a statue, gigantic scissors, etc. But Selznick never warmed to Dalí and hated the dreams, cutting them down to barely a minute in length in the film. (Bergman claims that Dalí's actual work on the film was originally "a wonderful twenty-minute sequence that really belongs in a museum," although many others refute the assertion and say the dreams occupied no more than possibly four or five minutes total.) Regardless, Selznick cut one of dream vignettes entirely, snipped away at Dalí's other work, and excised up to twenty minutes Hitchcock had placed in his director's cut. Today, ironically enough, Dalí's contributions are probably the most memorable aspect of an otherwise flawed film.

The film stumbles over bumps in the plot, including a simplified version of psychotherapy that results in a rather preposterous "all-is-good illumination" on the part of Peck's character. Bergman and Peck are both very capable in the film and are a pleasure to watch. There is the typical Hitchcock camera brilliance, though, including wonderful low-angle shots of Peck's character in a potentially violent trance and a point-of-view shot of someone pointing a revolver at another character.

Spellbound was Hitchcock's third film to be nominated for Best Picture and his third nomination for Best Director, and lost in both categories to Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend. I'm not sure either nomination was completely warranted; ironically, the nomination here probably cost Hitchcock the possibility of being nominated in the next year for one of his best films, Notorious. Although Hitchcock shrugged off Spellbound later in life (most notably in his interviews with François Truffaut), it's hard not to see what must have captured his attention: solving a crime that is locked inside a suspect's head and teasing it out through complex psychology. Hitchcock's abandonment of the film probably damned it as much as Selznick crossing the line and obsessively controlling it, but like the deeply flawed and deeply psychological Marnie nearly twenty years later, there's still something interesting and entertaining about the director's forays into the subconscious, even if it's occasionally ridiculous.

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Bon Voyage (1944) & Aventure Malgache (1944)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / UK / Two shorts, 57 mins.


"I was overweight and overage for military service, but I knew if I did nothing I'd regret it for the rest of my life." - Alfred Hitchcock

When production was complete on Lifeboat – Alfred Hitchcock's 1944 war thriller – he left America and traveled back to England. He had made a commitment with producer Sidney Bernstein to direct two short propaganda films, made in England but spoken in French, to be distributed by the British Ministry of Information to encourage the efforts of the French Resistance. Although the director had been assimilating himself in American culture and cinema, he still felt a tenacious patriotism with his home country and sought to help the war effort any way he still could.

The results are Bon Voyage (1944) and Aventure Malgache (1944), made in that order and each about thirty minutes apiece. Although they weren't features, they also were not trifles. Hitchcock had been assigned the two because of their political depth and nuance, and the Ministry of Information believe he, of all directors, would be able to deliver nuance in a superior way. Propaganda was also a serious business, and Hitchcock and the producers sought to make the two films as authentically French as could be, fearing the slightest flub in French mannerisms or lifestyle could lead the film to be scoffed at in France. (On a side note: Bon Voyage was given an initial treatment by V.S. Pritchett, and both shorts were written by Angus MacPhail, a writer and story editor whom Hitchcock had met when he worked as a young director in England.)

Of the two, Bon Voyage is the superior film in all regards. Its story is of a young RAF pilot who crashes into France and is helped to escape, although the identity of his accomplice is mysterious. The short feels very much like the kind of espionage film Hitchcock might have made for a studio in England or Hollywood (and indeed, he frequently mused that he wanted to bring a feature-length version of it to life). The story unfolds through two points of view – a structural effect that would reach its pinnacle in Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, six years later – and there is good editing and lovely expressionistic cinematography. Whether it is effective as propaganda is an interesting point to consider; it is subtle (no more rousing than any anti-Nazi and pro-civilian film that came out of Hollywood) and at times I was rather caught up in its filmmaking style rather than in its story. Still, while brief and largely unseen, it would have been endlessly intriguing to see what kind of feature Hitchcock could have assembled without the constraints of the MOI.

Aventure Malgache – literal translation, "Malagasy Adventure," or an adventure in Madagascar – is perplexing and befuddled. While both films play around with the timeline of their plots, Aventure Malgache is not as successful. It is talky and dense, and although its narrative structure is out of joint like Bon Voyage, there is far too much cutting and time shifting to be appropriate for only thirty minutes. The story begins with the Molière players, sitting in the dressing room before a performance and swapping stories about a man who betrayed the Resistance and then their own adventures in the war, but it all runs together in sort of an incoherent blur. The Ministry of Information had its own troubles with Aventure Malgache, outside what a film critic might see. Called it too nuanced: high-ranking officers believed Hitchcock was incorrect in showing slight in-fighting and disagreement within the ranks of the French Resistance. The Ministry has a vested interest in portraying a solidly unified front with the Allies, and while Bon Voyage saw a limited release, for all intents and purposes Aventure Malgache was shelved.

The great historical irony of the excursion to England for the two propaganda shorts is that even though they were directed by Hitchcock – who had already overseen multiple masterpieces and whose first American feature won the Academy Award for Best Picture – they were scarcely shown. Bon Voyage was released into some French theaters, but Aventure Malgache, deemed unfocused in its criticism and advocacy, was shelved.

After the war they were hardly screened again and sat mostly unseen on the shelves at the British Film Institute for fifty years. In the early 1990s they were given proper release, mostly for curiosity's sake, and curiosity should be the only reason you check them out today.

Note: As short propaganda films, they are not frequently associated with Hitchcock's standard filmography and are thus not rated on the star scale.

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Lifeboat (1944)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 96 mins.


Note: The following review discusses significant plot elements.

Between 1940 and 1944, Alfred Hitchcock – like many loyal Hollywood studio men – spent approximately half his time making films that contributed to the effort behind World War II. The war was either featured prominently as the backdrop (Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur) or was conspicuously absent altogether (none of the young men in Shadow of a Doubt seem to be veterans or bound for military service). The war, while devastating, was good fodder for classical Hollywood cinema: clear good guys, clear bad guys, the opportunity to entertain on the home-front while subtly including stay-strong, stay-vigil propaganda to those making sacrifices.

Outside two explicitly propagandistic shorts he made in England during that time, the film with the greatest connection to the war was Lifeboat, a 1944 thriller set entirely in the title device, where American and British characters struggle to stay alive after their ship is sunk by a German submarine. The survivors are a microcosm of Allied life: a sassy and savvy journalist (Tallulah Bankhead), a brawny and furious crewman (John Hodiak) and a calm, standard-protocol crewman (Hume Cronyn), as well an industrialist, a nurse, a steward, and a mother with her baby. When they bring one more person aboard, they realize he (Walter Slezak) is a German from the attacking U-boat. After a debate that resembles an afternoon discussion in foreign policy, they let him stay so his maritime skills can help them survive – although their nervousness never subsides.

Regardless of its plot and thematic success (which is certainly up for debate), Lifeboat is one of Hitchcock's most superior technical achievements. At only forty-feet long, the lifeboat – set in a water tank on the Twentieth Century–Fox lot – is reportedly the smallest set ever used for a feature film. But it works more than you might imagine. Hitchcock, methodical planner that he was, worked along with cinematographer Glen MacWilliams to constructed an elaborate series of alternating and rotating shots, so that the film wouldn't become repetitive in its visuals. For their efforts, MacWilliams and Hitchcock both received Oscar nominations. (This would be the second of five the director would not win.)

Hitchcock had been playing musical chairs in Hollywood since his arrival: first at Selznick International, then United Artists, RKO, Universal, and now Twentieth Century–Fox under Darryl Zanuck. Inspired by his successful collaboration with Thornton Wilder on Shadow of a Doubt, Hitchcock sought to work again with a leading American author on the Lifeboat screenplay. His first choice, Ernest Hemingway, replied via telegram: "THANK HITCHCOCK FOR ASKING ME STOP PERHAPS WE CAN WORK TOGETHER ANOTHER TIME BEST REGARDS." The director's next choice, John Steinbeck, had never worked with Hollywood but took the assignment of crafting Lifeboat as a work of prose that would then be adapted into a screenplay. The collaboration wasn't as successful as the director's with Wilder, and although the studio was able to tout Steinbeck's name on the film, Hitchcock and screenwriter Jo Swerling changed many elements from the Steinbeck novella. (Lots of legal action followed, too bureaucratic to discuss here, but suffice it to say all parties involved were quite bitchy.)

In its time Lifeboat was derided for its latent sympathy to Willie, the German U-boat captain, but today it's derided for the categorically opposite reason, as an overtly pro-American piece of propaganda. Somehow I imagine the critical inconsistencies must be amusing Hitchcock in the afterlife. Ironically, aren't both views correct in their own way? After all, we're talking about Hitchcock here, the director who loved to turn convention on its head and co-mingle unlike elements to create not only causal suspense but thematic suspense. Lifeboat is simultaneously kind and cruel to both the Nazi and the Allies, that sort of emphasis on the intellectual gray the director did so well in his previous film, Shadow of a Doubt. Willie isn't presented as an oafish Nazi, but rather one who is cunning and manipulative and, for most of the film, successful in those acts. The Americans, our ostensible heroes, come from different socio-economic backgrounds and feud with each other openly, and it's not only their at-sea situation that causes discomfort in the viewer but the misguided and misappropriated anger that skims over a vital piece of the puzzle. And it's because of this, as well as its clockwork tension, that I find Lifeboat to be one of Hitchcock's most complex war-time thrillers, stocked with a strong cast and the director's trademark filmmaking veneer.

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Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

d. Alfred Hitchcock. United States. 108 mins.


"You go through your ordinary little day, and at night you sleep your untroubled ordinary little sleep, filled with peaceful stupid dreams. And I brought you nightmares." - Joseph Cotton, as Uncle Charlie, in Shadow of a Doubt

Those who read regularly know I have a fascination with the National Film Registry in the Library Congress, always curious to know what U.S. films people think should be preserved for future generations. The order in which films are inducted, of course, has very little relevance to their quality, although the first few years saw more American masterpieces than the last few have. It's no surprise that Alfred Hitchcock's most revered film, Vertigo, was his first film included, but perhaps a bit more surprising is that Shadow of a Doubt was his second.

It had taken him a few years to assimilate cinematically, but by 1943 Hitchcock's films were beginning to resemble apple pies served with a deadly blade. With Saboteur a year before, Hitchcock's films began breathing Americanness, most notably in the climax set atop one of the most recognizable landmarks in the entire country. But Shadow of a Doubt – one of his ten best films – is a nose-dive into bucolic, small-town America, tinged with psychological complexity and a murder mystery ("the idea of bringing menace to a small town," as Hitchcock's daughter Pat has said).

The small town in question is Santa Rosa, California, where Hitchcock filmed on location. Charlie Newton (Teresa Wright) is the eldest child of a typical middle class family, and the ordinariness of her life is causing her a standard level of teenage angst. But two developments threaten to shake up the Newton family. One is that her beloved namesake Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) has come to town, and the other is that two detectives are roaming Santa Rosa looking for the "Merry Widow Murderer," who woos wealthy women then robs and murders them. The possibility of the two being connected eventually overcomes the younger Charlie, and her investigation into her uncle leads to some unsettling revelations.

The names originally floated for the leads were William Powell's and Joan Fontaine's, but Cotton and Wright are an unbeatable match. Cotton came to Shadow of a Doubt already a quasi-star (he'd been in performing in theater and, being Orson Welles's close friend, had appeared in Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons). Like Cary Grant in Suspicion, he was cast in his darkest film role at the time under Hitchcock; both relished the idea of playing bad, but it is Cotton who seems to embrace the potential of his role whole-heartedly. At the other end (or the other half), Wright is a polished blend of small town wholesomeness and disillusionment, and the supporting cast is strong. Charlie's mother, and Uncle Charlie's sister, Emma (Patricia Collinge) is warm and steady while Charlie's father (Henry Travers) is humorously oblivious to the possibility of an actual murderer because he and his neighbor (Hume Cronyn) are wrapped up in pulp stories and ridiculously devising the "perfect murder."

The source of the script came from Gordon McDonnell, who sold plots to film studios and whose wife Margaret was a story editor David O. Selznick. What began as a slim idea called "Uncle Charlie" would be expanded by Alma Reville (a.k.a. Mrs. Hitchcock) and award-winning writer Thornton Wilder into an Oscar-nominated screenplay. Of all the lauded writers he worked with, Hitchcock got along with Wilder the best; Wilder wasn't afraid to look outward for inspiration and could pen striking dialogue that fit squarely in the realms of shadows. (He is believed to have been the one who penned the Cotton dialogue above.) In Hitchcock's eyes, Wilder was a splendid coworker because he didn't look down on the director's work; many in the theater and film industries did, dismissing Hitchcock as a pure genre artist, but Wilder – whose novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and whose play Our Town both won Pulitzers – was up to the challenge of the thriller.

Film noir had yet to hit its stride in America, but the early films in that style still seem to have influenced Hitchcock during production. Upon Uncle Charlie's arrival, Santa Rosa is bright and sunny, but as his niece begins to suspect he is hiding something, more and more shadows seem to creep into the frames. Thematically, Shadow of a Doubt is best remembered for its eerie doubling effect: Uncle Charlie and Niece Charlie are presented as two sides of the same personality – the shadow and the light, the bad and the good, the immoral and the moral. The doubling is structurally resonant (Cotton and Wright are frequently filmed in two-shots or imitative framing), but hardly subtle. It's not the doubling that seems to interest Hitchcock but the way such doubling can be complicated. It's not as easy as Wright wear the white stetson and Cotton wears the black stetson. Uncle Charlie is deliberately charming (his leitmotif is Franz Lehár's Merry Widow Waltz), both socially and physically, and revered by his niece as someone who is exciting and invigorating, not unlike how Satan himself is frequently characterized in later films. It's the young Charlie who investigates her uncle and becomes determined to bring him to justice and who ends up guilty of killing someone herself. "What it boils down to," Hitchcock said, "is that villains are not all black and heroes are not all white. There are grays everywhere."

It has become ingrained in Hitchcock lore that Shadow of a Doubt was his personal favorite of his fifty-three feature films (a fact reiterated by his daughter Pat), but he flatly denied that statement to François Truffaut in their lengthy interview and told Peter Bogdonavich that it was one of his favorites, but not the only one. The one statement that he never publicly backed away from was that making it was his "most satisfying" experience in the director's chair. Still, that concept is intriguing on its own. The film didn't provide Hitchcock any technical puzzle he had to solve with wizardry (the most compelling technical shot is one where the camera swoops in and follows Cotton as he bounds up the stairs and stops to look over his shoulder), nor was it his most difficult to squeeze through the censors – both challenges that the director loved to conquer. It might very well be that Wilder's contributions helped his self-esteem, and it might be the fact that Shadow of a Doubt served as American terra firma for his British soul, and the on-location filming allowed him to turn himself into an American director. In many ways it's atypical for a Hitchcock film (not counting the fascination with murder in a small town, which as he would say later on his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, is "where it belongs"), but it is still one of the director's best and his satisfaction seems entirely warranted.

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Saboteur (1942)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 108 mins.


There's not much to Saboteur except the feeling that it's a pastiche of Alfred Hitchcock's earlier wrong-man films (including The 39 Steps) and a rough draft for North by Northwest, which would turn a cross-country manhunt into a light-hearted slice of genius.

Robert Cummings stars as Barry Kane, a sort of chummy everyman working in a California aircraft factory for the U.S. war effort. Through a series of simple slips and errors, he is accused of being a conspirator in an act of arson at the factory – a charge no less than sabotage. As all of the Hitchcockian wrongfully-accused come to realize, it's not only about proving your own innocence but capturing the man who has perpetrated the crime, a weasely man named Frank Fry (Norman Lloyd). With the saboteur heading east, Kane goes on the run with the help of a young model (Priscilla Lane) he befriends after some help from a blind man.

Hitchcock wanted Gary Cooper for the role of Kane (it was his second overture for the actor, whom he pursued for Foreign Correspondent a few years earlier; the two never worked together). It's hard to imagine Saboteur would be better with Cooper in the lead, but he would have most likely been an improvement over Cummings, who feels out of place. He has the banality to be somewhat believable as an every-man, but in his acting he lacks the mettle to be believable as a man who would go on a cross-country chase to capture the guilty saboteur and prove his innocence. (He seems like the kind of guy who would have turned himself into the authorities and just hoped for the best.)

Saboteur is justifiably famous only for the climactic ending atop the Statue of Liberty, which, although quite brief, was quite advanced at the time in terms of its special effects. It is a landmark scene in Hitchcock's canon, and its influence is still reaching through contemporary action films. The director's fascination with setting scenes of high intensity at public monuments began back in 1929, when Michael Powell, working under Hitchcock's tutelage, proposed the climax of Blackmail to be set in the British Museum in London. And like Blackmail (and eventually, North by Northwest, with Mount Rushmore), Hitchcock would be denied permission to film at the actual location and forced to use camera tricks and sets to construct a facsimile. The sequence took months for Hitchcock and his crew to plan, and was filmed on a to-scale set of the statue's torch at Universal Studios. On screen, it is potent: the soundtrack is nonexistent, the dialogue is strained, the only effects being the high winds and the torn seams of Fry's jacket as he dangles from the torch.

Excepting the Statue of Liberty scene for a moment, the film has some other noteworthy asides. My favorite has always been a moment that occurs as Kane hitchhikes with a trucker. When he glances out the window, there's a gorgeously Hitchcockian billboard: "YOU'RE BEING FOLLOWED ... by the cars that don't use Comet Oil!" Others include a shot from Kane's point-of-view underwater as he swims to his escape the police in a river (The Fugitive did a stellar homage); a deft attempt to communicate from an upper floor of a New York skyscraper with someone on the sidewalk below; and a chase through a movie theater that mixes on-screen gunfire with actual gunfire.

Acerbic humorist Dorothy Parker (one of many writers for The New Yorker that Hitchcock worked with) contributed to the script, along with Peter Viertel and regular Joan Harrison. Parker is credited with a side-splitting scene involving compassionate circus freaks on a train who espouse anti-fascism, pro-democracy political sentiments. (The commentary on the war effort is at times slightly too preachy.) The scene is perhaps too offbeat for even Hitchcock, but as a film Saboteur seems to be grasping at anything it can hold, so the scene ends up not only working but being one of the more memorable elements. Parker and Hitchcock were originally slated to have a double cameo as an old married couple who slow down to help an feuding Kane and Pat – "My, they must be terribly in love" – but it was scrapped and Hitchcock did a standard walk-on.

The problem is these fleeting moments are too few to make a movie and the stuffing isn't meaty enough. There are a few golden sequences in Saboteur, but the pieces are too disjointed to form a coherent and tight narrative. The director's other wrongfully accused films are better worth your time, although even a cursory examination of Hitchcock's work wouldn't be complete without watching that stunning moment with the Statue of Liberty.

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