Written by Geoffrey O'Brien
Translator: Issac
Proofreading: Easy two three
Source: Criterion (August 26, 2019)
In the first 24 films directed by Alfred Hitchcock between 1925 and 1939, he always worked closely with his wife Emma Revel (who received various accolades for his work as an assistant director, screenwriter and field reporter), from apprenticeship to technical specialization to flourishing until he was internationally renowned.
After becoming famous, he quickly entered Hollywood. More than three decades ago, film critics often lamented that his American films had lost the passion they had brought from his best work in Britain, usually referring to The Thirty-Nine Steps and The Missing Lady. Today, his masterpieces in the United States, such as "Beauty Plan", "Rear Window", "Ecstasy", "North by Northwest", "Horrors", etc., have become unstoppable, overshadowing his early works, and their former preference for them seems somewhat outdated.
Rear Window
In fact, only a small fraction of Hitchcock's work in the UK has been widely distributed in the United States, and until recent restoration work, previous copies were often incomplete, faded, and barely audible. The rediscovery of these films reveals not only the deep continuity of all his works, but also the world in which they formed. Hitchcock's early films can directly touch the Uk.
In contrast, the United States in his later works has both a filter of Hollywood filmmaking and a more pronounced abstract tendency of Hitchcock. Even when he did a meticulous study of the American scene — through the location of "Hot Hands Destroying Flowers" and the quasi-documentary technique of "Justice" — he saw things through the eyes of an outsider. In his British work, he uses all the elements that make him up, adding tiny cues and associations to each scene. Even studio sets tend to have a rougher and noticeably tedious edge—a more life-like look—whether it's a rental room in The Lodger, an underground carriage in Stranger Things, a tobacco shop in Blackmail, or a narrow theater wing in Murder.
"Hot Hands Destroy flowers"
In the style of satirical works, Hitchcock depicted a nation of shopkeepers, policemen, preachy widows, gossipy boarders, troubled dentists, eccentric religious believers, lustful traveling salesmen, xenophobic cricket lovers, and occasionally arrogant aristocratic landowners. The often raucous pop scenes are constantly intruded, including choir girls in the dressing room, theater touring troupes, acrobats, eye-catching comedians, dance halls, community cinemas, and (in two of his most memorable climactic scenes) Albert Hall and London's Palladium Theatre. London's crowds are crowded, with heart-pounding neon signs and rushing traffic, reminiscent of the urban chaos that rarely appears in American movies.
It's a rough, often harsh world of class boundaries, thought to have a lot of humorous elements, but no sentimentality. In The Lodger, the family that took in Ivor Novello begin to suspect him of a terrible crime, but are reluctant to accuse him of "even if he's a little eccentric, he's a gentleman."
In Murder, when the famous actor Sir John (Herbert Marshall's debut) sends a destitute stage manager to a meeting, the latter walks up to him in fear on a surreal falling carpet. In the key scene of Downhill Road, Mabel, a female clerk, is playing with two boys from a traditional public school where she works. They went through the beaded curtains and into a dimly lit back room, where she shook her body provocatively and put on a phonograph record (Bohemian Band's "I Want Some Money"), while the two boys had no certain reaction.
Murder
Intertwined with the glaring differences in social privilege, Mabel flirts with a rich boy (Novello) and eventually reconciles with a less wealthy boy. The many eye contact between the three of them conveyed their rapidly changing intentions and reactions, interrupted several times by the client in the front room, and the whole process was untitled: such a fascinating scene that shows how far Hitchcock can go in conveying complex interactions only through visual means, the only drawback being Novello's poor performance.
"Tenant"
Hitchcock's path was tortuous. Suspense films that announce his future specializations, such as The Lodger and Blackmail, dotted with regular mission films, respectable literary adaptations, and occasional bizarre experiments such as The Strange Rich Man, a film that strangely mixes poor comedy and frustrating romances, setting the protagonist on a drifting ship full of Chinese pirates. From the sensational melodrama "Downhill Road" to the light comedy "Champagne", although there is no clear direction to specialize, Hitchcock has also tried various genres.
Champagne
These attempts at other patterns and types are not in vain. The variety of materials Hitchcock uses gives him the opportunity to experiment in a vast range of emotions and styles, from farce to tragedy to expressionist patterns. The elaborate Murder may not be the most compelling of his thrillers—it's a bit of a fuss about handwriting samples and empty brandy glasses—but he takes advantage of the intricacies of the story and experiments at every turn.
From the neighborhood uproar stirred up by the discovery of the murder to the final violent reckoning in the circus tent, it is full of discoveries large and small. The detective's questioning of the actor, in which the actor constantly goes on and off the stage during interrogation, switching to the corresponding identity as soon as necessary, is particularly wonderful, and there is a nuance in it, in which the detective recognizes an anti-string actor as a woman, and later learns that Handel Wayne (played by the unforgettable Esmi Percy) is "a complete woman". (For reasons that may be related to the 1930 code of conduct, the apparent gender ambiguity in the script is obscured by racially mixed themes: Vane's terrible secret is his identity as a "half-race.") Hitchcock will no longer be in charge of such a twisty scene — or at least not until "Spy Spirits" — but he seems to appreciate a project that includes Hamlet and Tristan and Isolde, with juries speaking in unison, female wardens with serious expressions, screaming babies, circus elephants and black shadows.
Contrary to the playful embellishments of Murder, Game of Face is a relatively simple film adapted from a play by John Golsworth, whom Hitchcock had admired on stage. Except for the scene of the skillful land auction, he goes in and out of the crowd, hanging in and out of suspense, and there is no gorgeous display of his originality here. But the play is brilliant, directly showing the class conflict between the land-owning aristocracy and the industrial upstart—there is a polite aristocratic woman who brutally tries to defend her privileges, and she is heartbreakingly performed by Helen Haye—Hitchcock achieves a simple and rhythmic style similar to the German "chamber play", perfectly satisfying his maxim: "The rectangle on the screen must be full of emotion", which set the stage foreshadowing his later single-set stage plays "Soul Snatcher" and "Telephone Murder".
"The Capture of the Murderer"
Hitchcock (1934) was written by Charles Bennett, and Hitchcock's next four films were also written by him, and since then Hitchcock has been known for making conspiracy and suspense films, and the following year, with Thirty-Nine Steps, he proved his superb skills thoroughly.
In this film, one invention after another emerges, with leaps and bound transitions, and the simultaneous maintenance of a comedic, erotic, and dangerous tone. If early films had a monotonous sense of everyday trivia, Thirty-Nine Steps was a romantic escape into Hitchcock's fictional world. Its rhythm is an accelerated journey, and the chase is also a search, in the process of which it likes to get rid of all the superfluous elaboration and even the obstacles of logic in order to achieve "eliminating the boring part of life". The only reality is what's on the screen. Thirty-Nine Steps is still a marvelous film, with unstoppable momentum that keeps rising at its peak. Look at Robert Donat, who, as he runs, hides his handcuffed hands in his pockets, mistaken for a political orator, and gives a speech out of thin air while metaphorically speaking to Madeleine Carlo in the audience, while sinister people linger at the door ready to arrest him, which is only a few minutes and is infinitely replayed in his mind—though the play is only a small link in this musically perfect work.
The Thirty-Nine Steps
This explosion of liberation continued into Young Girl and The Missing Lady, which were also influenced by the urgency of travel, which formed a sunny plateau full of vitality and joy with the release of Thirty-Nine Steps.
In the trilogy, "Young Girls" has been less well known, perhaps because Derek DeMani is not Robert Donat, or Michael Redgrave; perhaps because the plot is more casual and loose than the constant suspense of the previous two films. But loose is one of the joys of this movie. Although the film opens with a storm and a fierce brawl that ends with murder, it is essentially a comedy about young people fleeing adult authority, with the police chief's obedient daughter (Nova Pierbim) deciding to share her fate with the wrongly accused fugitives. As they weaved through country roads in search of key evidence—a lost raincoat—a picture of rural society was painted, including the pressures and hierarchies it concealed: the police chief, his sister, and the aristocrats represented by her mansion, the confused representatives of the local judiciary, the farmers who brought pigs to the market, the truck drivers in the roadside bars, the impoverished wanderers at The Nobie Inn, the hip-dressed finders in the big hotel, and the unforgettable "The Blackface Jazz Band" played with the blackface jazz band. No one can dance like a drummer.
"Young Girl"
It's like a final trip to the British spiritual world, interspersed with wonderful comedy clips (confusion at children's birthday parties), spectacular scenes (cars engulfed in collapsed mines), and finally legendary camera movements (comparable to the famous "key" shot in "The Beauty Plan"), with shots gliding through the air, through hotel restaurants, through crowded dance floors, and close-ups of twitching eyes. Soon we see Nova Pierbim smiling as she stands between her father and her lover, and now the two of them have reconciled.
Rarely has Hitchcock had such a clear ending that we ended in a moment of utter satisfaction, where all threats of violence were lifted and all clashes of classes and authorities were resolved. Even if he stayed in England, he could not become like this, nor did he want to become like this. The reason he left was professional, but he felt he had almost exhausted the opportunities the British film industry had given him, which was probably right. He has gained a lot in his progress, but people can still taste the part of the local knowledge and familiarity that will inevitably be lost in the process of transformation.