IMPORTANT WORDS OF WARNING: There’s no way to discuss this movie without spoilers a-plenty, so if you’ve never seen it, I’d suggest ordering it off Netflix right now & then reading this blog entry after you see it. Yes, I recommend this one – it’s fun, witty, well-paced & clever, although the ending is a tad lame & it pulls a movie “cheat” in a way that makes it more fun to think about after rather than when you’re watching it and well, feel cheated!

Did you watch it? Good! Wasn’t Hitchcock’s cameo rather obvious this time? I thought you’d agree.

Hitchcock was drawn to this material since it involved the idea of people assuming different roles in everyday life for various reasons of deception, and how those deceptions would eventually overlap and implode each other – perhaps it’s why the middle chunk of Stage Fright works the best on you when you view it for the first time, since at that point the disguises & role playing by Jane Wyman in her determination to turn Nancy Drew and prove her unrequited love innocent of murder are laid out pretty explicitly to the audience. It’s only after the revelations towards the end that we are told that we too, along with Wyman, have been played by Jonathan (Richard Todd) as well as Hitchcock, who gives us a flashback sequence that turns out to be a total con job, breaking the usual rule of film where it’s one thing for a character to tell us a lie, it’s another thing for the director to show us that lie and have the plot spin off of it. In this way, Jonathan is also playing a role in real life – that of the wrongly accused innocent on the run, a character all too familiar to Hitchcock fans. Since amateur actress Eve (Wyman) buys his story, she uses her acting chops to play reporter, damsel in distress, and ultimately substitute maid to murder suspect Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich). These multiple personas cross her up when she falls for police detective Smith (Michael Wilding) and eventually must confess to harboring the fugitive Jonathan as well as messing around with her own investigations.

If this sounds more like a comedy, well, it actually plays better as one. In a way, it has the tone I think Hitchcock was trying for in his final film Family Plot, that of the comedy murder mystery, only it works better here since the story is simpler and the rear projection doesn’t look at hokey. The technical touches in this one are very nice indeed – from a very impressive cutless crane shot of Todd entering Dietrich’s apartment from the street and following him upstairs, to the way in which we know Eve is about to abandon her pursuit of the indifferent Jonathan aside for Detective Smith when we see her POV of the piano Smith had been playing earlier and we hear the music in her head, to the way that Hitchcock lights & focuses on Eve & Jonathan’s eyes in a final tense confrontation where Even can only save herself with one final bit of role playing, one that can overcome the stage fright we can feel in real life when we are threatened (something we see happen to Dietrich earlier in the film when confronted with a bloodied doll)… this one is put together very well. In the long view too, Stage Fright is masterfully paced – starting up at a breakneck speed (literally) as a speeding car down the road to the flashback of the murder – but then gradually slowing down and quieting, all the way to the final confrontation between Eve & Jonathan, which is all calm, deliberate, quiet – this time, in a still carriage, reflecting the opposite pole of where we started out, not only in terms of movement, but in terms of their relationship.

Though she’d never be in such a dangerous position if someone didn’t suddenly lose all their intelligence and yell out something totally unnecessary that only exists to set up the danger and nothing else (hence my “lame” alarm going off).

But forgiving that – Great performances all around! Wyman is very appealing and plucky (although never allowing herself to look as frumpy as a real nerdy maid, something that annoyed Hitchcock about working with her), Wilding does well as Mr. British Charm, Dietrich is vampy and (as per her own instructions, to no surprise) lit as well as Von Sternberg ever lit her. Alastair Sim is also good fun as Eve’s eccentric dad. Hitchcock felt annoyed at having been given Sim for the role since Sim was a leading British name at the time, but I thought he did a great job here.

In short – highly recommended! This was one of the Hitchcock films I’d never seen, it’s never shown too often, and that’s too bad. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a neglected masterpiece, but it’s certainly a neglected winner from the guy, certainly up there with To Catch A Thief or Dial M For Murder. Perhaps it gets overshadowed by the truly great films he made shortly after, like Strangers On A Train and Rear Window, but it’s definitely worth your while.

On deck: early Hitchcock from the big DVD collection I got some time back. Stay tuned!

The only Oscar Hitchcock ever “won” was the one that Selznick got for producing Rebecca, the best picture of 1940. They never gave him an award for directing film (nor did the DGA, by the way), and here’s another bit of trivia for you – Hitchcock had TWO of his films nominated for Best Picture that year, since Foreign Correspondent was also up amongst the ten nominees, but the directing award went to John Ford for Grapes Of Wrath. Typical motion picture academy – Rebecca was Hitchcock’s first Hollywood production, so he was probably viewed as a newcomer rookie, someone who needed to wait his turn behind more deserving veterans. And even though I like Rebecca, to be honest if Hitchcock were to win for something that year, it should have been Foreign Correspondent.

The plot follows the familiar gothic novel formula – sweet innocent girl marries elegant upperclassman with DEEP DARK SECRET and moves into BIG SCARY OLD HOUSE which has to be well stocked with CREEPY SERVANTS OUT TO GET HER before every secret is revealed and everything else catches on FIRE. Add Fabio and you have the cover of the paperback version. Add some vampires and werewolves and you get Dark Shadows.

Formula isn’t necessarily bad, however – after all, every Shakespeare comedy is basically the same formula (mismatched lovers somewhere in Italy disguise themselves and mix up identities! And then everyone gets married! Yay!) – if the characters are interesting, if the mystery is compellingly laid out, and the performances are strong, then what’s not to enjoy? And that’s what we have here, with Laurence Olivier playing the mysterious British gent with the deep dark secret – one that, by the way, would be solved fairly quickly if he were an American Jew like me and constantly whined out loud about every problem – no secrets there! But then we’d no story. No wonder these gothic novels are never set in a deli with the pastrami going up in flames at the end. None of these things work unless the woman is passive enough so as to never confront hubby and ask the simple questions about his past, and never say to the staff that all of the old wife’s stuff should be packed up and put into storage and by the way, this is MY house now and any of you that screw with me are as good as fired, got that? Everything has to be unsaid, repressed, secret and hidden – therefore, everyone involved in the story has to be British, puritannical-American, or both.

Joan Fontaine plays the innocent second Mrs. De Winter (she’s never given a name), an early role for her and an excellent one – Fontaine always played the ingenue well, whether here or again for Hitchcock in Suspicion a year later, or later on in Ophuls’ Letter From An Unknown Woman. She made a nice career of playing the girl who falls for guys with darkness to them while trying to lighten them up with innocent pain-hiding smiles. Granted, through much of this movie we keep waiting for her to grow a backbone and stop taking crap from everyone around her, but when two of the standout performances in the film come from the two villains – Judith Anderson’s evil housekeeper Miss Danvers and George Sanders’ creepy Jack Favell – it’s more cinematic fun to see the baddies have the advantage over her.

Anderson always made a good stern-speaking creepazoid, whether here or as Memnet in The Ten Commandments, and Sanders had a nice career of playing elegant sleazeballs.

Olivier wanted to play opposite his wife Vivian Leigh, and when Fontaine was cast, evidently Olivier treated her badly – so Hitchcock quietly told EVERYONE to treat Fontaine badly, since it would help her get into character more. Part of me thinks Hitchcock a manipulative bastard for doing this, but considering Fontaine worked with him again, she must have been okay with it.

What makes this movie work well is how it creates the omnipresence of the missing title character so well – if the memory of Rebecca looms with shadows over any possible happiness for Fontaine & Olivier, Hitchcock shows us those shadows throughout the house, as we share Fontaine’s perspective of finding the monogrammed linens and stationary, as well as the perfectly preserved shrine-room dutifully kept by Mrs. Danvers. A nice directing touch comes later when Oliver recounts their last night together and as he describes Rebecca’s movements on that night, the camera follows the blank space through the room as if following her in flashback – a wonderful way to relate a presence-through-memory-only of the character, which is the thing the entire plotline hinges upon.

A chick movie, to be sure, but a good chick movie.

Next up to bat: more familiar Hitchockian territory – murder with innocents wrongly accused – with 1950s Stage Fright!

In my quest to see all the Hitchcock films that I’ve never seen or haven’t seen in years, I’m at the point now where I’m thinking more and more clunkers I’ve avoided are going to start showing up. That’s certainly the case with Mr. & Mrs. Smith, a bad misfire of a screwball romantic comedy that Hitchcock directed mostly as a favor to star Carol Lombard.

In the excellent interviews with Truffaut, Hitchcock barely mentions this film, and when asked about it, only offers up a couple of anecdotes about Lombard, the house rented from her & the time she brought cattle to the set as a gag played on the famous “actors should be treated like cattle” remark. He has absolutely nothing to say about the film itself, which is quite telling.

Hitchcock merely followed the script by Norman Krasna – there aren’t any tell-tale Htichcockian touches, except perhaps for one pull-back tracking shot outside an apartment house (culminating in his director’s cameo), and a rather hokey crossed-skis-as-romance shot at the end. You’d never know this was a Hitchcock film if you missed his credit at the beginning, you’d only think you were watching a weak screwball comedy Lombard made towards the unfortunate end of her career.

There are many problems with the story and screenplay to this one – the premise is promising enough, that of a bickering married couple discovering their marriage is not legal after all, and this gives them the actual chance to live out the hypothetical “would you marry me all over again?” that turns up early in the dialogue – but unfortunately since neither Robert Montgomery or Carol Lombard’s characters are developed beyond barely two-dimensional bickerers who follow a script, they don’t do anything very interesting after this. Even the romantic rival, Montgomery’s law partner played by Gene Raymond, remains a dull dweeb who provides no threat, no conflict at all – it’s a mystery why Lombard would fall for him simply to spite Montgomery, though a bigger mystery is why Montgomery and Lombard love each other in the first place. When Lombard decides to throw Montgomery out when he won’t take the we-were-never-married seriously enough to re-wed, we are never given any sort of reason why Montgomery should want her back other than that fact that she’s Carol Lombard. Her character is a fickle annoying bitch. His character is a rather dull mediocrity who has NO elaborate clever schemes, NO potential to make her jealous in a comic fashion, and no real attractive quality that we are told could be her achilles’ heel if they were to separate. Lombard’s character lacks the same possibilities. So, we get endless unfunny gags of him pursuing her & her ignoring him – he never makes any attempt to turn this situation around because his character is too one-dimensional to have anything up his sleeve, and comedy does not build since the two of them are just plain boring.

There’s just nothing here but people going through the motions. What we wind up with are painfully forced set-pieces based on not so funny gags, trite dialogue, and scenes merely ending just at the moment when the possibility of comedy starts to build – the best example being in the scene where Lombard is meeting Raymond’s parents, who view her as a virginal fianceé and have no clue that she’s actually married – Montgomery enters the room and begins to discuss some safe-for-1941-movies intimacies that only a husband would know, driving Raymond’s parents to think she’s trash. The parents go into an office bathroom to discuss the matter with Raymond and then….. NOTHING. No cutting back to a bickering married couple upping the ante. Noisy pipes are supposed to be funny as they decide to give her another chance. We do NOT get what we can assume would be the resulting argument between actual husband and wife, possibly revealing more, potentially embarrassingly comic intimate secrets, in front of rival and shocked innocent parents – the scene just ends and we move on. Good God, what poor, lazy writing, and I don’t care if Krasna won an Oscar. It was for something else, obviously!

Wouldn’t it be more interesting if the man and the woman sniped at each other as intelligent people who knew each other intimately and used that information against each other, only to discover that the same knowledge is why they are in love in the first place? OR IS THAT TOO GOD DAMN OBVIOUS??? Jeesh, it made me want to watch His Girl Friday again, a movie I’ve never found uproariously funny, but at least in the banter between Cary Grant & Rosalind Russell it gets that nature of a relationship between smart man and smart woman right.

And why not develop Raymond’s character more? Why not make the rival a true threat by making him more appealing in specific ways than the husband? This would allow the wife’s character to be more developed as well. Instead, well… we just get pointless behavior by boring people.

So what are we left with? Well, the first rule of comedy is to be funny, and that rule is broken here. In romantic comedy, the first rule ought to follow enough realistic psychology so that audience members can relate both to the male & female behavior – a rule that is also broken here.

Not funny.

And it’s too bad, since Hitchcock understood comedy, especially dark comedy, using it in many of his suspense films or in the far more successful The Trouble With Harry. Perhaps if he had cared enough to totally overhaul this story keeping the same premise, developing the characters further and adding some dark touches to the humor, there might have been something here, but alas… it was not so.

I’d suggest watching My Man Godfrey or To Be Or Not To Be if you want to see how comically talented Lombard was. Perhaps Hitchcock was testing the waters of directing her and would have put her into other roles had she lived. We’ll never know.

So put this in the same category with Marnie: Hitchcock films that I don’t like. It’s a category with few items, I’ll admit, and I’m hoping it doesn’t grow as Hitchapalooza continues.