Rich and Strange (Alfred Hitchcock, 1931)

Henry Kendall and Joan Barry in Rich and Strange

Fred Hill: Henry Kendall
Emily Hill: Joan Barry
Commander Gordon: Percy Marmont
The Princess: Betty Amann
The Old Maid: Elsie Randolph

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville, Val Valentine
Based on a novel by Dale Collins
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox, Charles Martin
Art direction: C. Wilfred Arnold
Music: Adolph Hallis

One of Alfred Hitchcock's early talkie flops, Rich and Strange begins well, with an opening shot of Fred Hill at work in an expressionist-style depersonalized office set, followed by a montage showing his attempt to make it home on the Underground, dealing with elbowing crowds and a recalcitrant umbrella. There's a nicely synched bit in which umbrellas open to musical flourishes before Fred's fizzles. Then it's home to a drab and chaotic existence before the Hills receive their wished-for deliverance from the daily muddle: A rich uncle tells Fred that he can have an advance on his inheritance so he and his wife, Emily, can live a little. They set off to see the world. This early part of the film is perhaps the best because it mostly picks up on the skills Hitchcock learned through his work in silent movies. In fact, it is shot through with droll title cards and very little dialogue of consequence. The Hills are overwhelmed by Paris and shocked at the Folies Bergère, then board ship -- not a promising moment for Fred, who succumbed to seasickness on the Channel crossing -- for a cruise on the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal toward Asia. (The American title was East of Shanghai.) And then the talk takes over, as both Fred and Emily have shipboard romances, she with a somewhat dashing bachelor on his way to Ceylon, he with a German "princess" who cons him out of his money. Rich and Strange is a curious mess, with Henry Kendall, a once-well-known music hall comedian, awkward in the romantic part of Fred's story. Joan Barry steps out in front of the camera behind which she was lurking to speak the lines for Anny Ondra in Hitchcock's  Blackmail (1929), but she's not much more than pretty.  Hitchcock liked the film, but nobody else did very much, and opinion doesn't seem to have changed with time.

Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)

Cyril Ritchard and Anny Ondra in Blackmail

Alice White: Anny Ondra, Joan Barry
Frank Webber: John Longden
Tracy: Donald Calthrop
The Artist: Cyril Ritchard
Mrs. White: Sara Allgood
Mr. White: Charles Paton
The Landlady: Hannah Jones
The Chief Inspector: Harvey Braban

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Benn W. Levy
Based on a play by Charles Bennett
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox
Film editing: Emile de Ruelle
Music: Jimmy Campbell, Reginald Connelly

Anny Ondra has the distinction of having appeared in both Alfred Hitchcock's final silent film, The Manxman (1929), and his first talkie, Blackmail. Unfortunately, it was the arrival of sound that put an end to her nascent career in English-language films. Blackmail was begun as a silent movie, but not long after filming started Hitchcock got what he wanted: permission to turn it into a talkie. Which presented a problem for Ondra, who was born in a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire that is now Poland and grew up in Prague, where she was a successful stage actress, and had been unable to lose her accent. In the infancy of film sound, a satisfactory technique of dubbing another actor's voice had yet to be developed, so actress Joan Barry was hired to speak Alice White's lines off-camera as Ondra silently mouthed the words. (After Blackmail, Ondra returned to the continent and was a major star in Czech and German films; she married boxer Max Schmeling in 1933.) The tricky problem of synching Barry's voice with Ondra's performance only spurred Hitchcock to other innovative uses of sound, for example the scene in which Alice White, stunned by having stabbed her assailant to death, hears a neighbor chattering about the murder and repeating the word "knife," which becomes increasingly louder until Alice breaks down in hysterics. Hitchcock also pioneers a gag he will use again: Alice opens her mouth to scream, but in a quick cut the scream comes from the landlady who has discovered the victim's body. The cut anticipates the one in The 39 Steps (1935) in which a woman's scream becomes the shrill whistle of a locomotive. Sound was still such a novelty that a silent version of Blackmail was made for theaters still not equipped for it. And even in the sound version the first six minutes of the film, which take place in the streets where the London police "flying squad" makes an arrest, are silent except for the background music, even though we see cops talking to each other and there are plenty of opportunities for ambient sound. Some scenes also have that curious slackness of pace of early talkies, as if the directors were uncertain about how quickly audiences could assimilate spoken dialogue. But it's far more "Hitchcockian" than most of his late silent films in that he's working effectively with thriller material, including a chase through the British Museum that anticipates his later exploitation of such landmarks as the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (1942) and Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest (1959). It also contains the longest of Hitchcock's familiar cameo appearances, as a passenger on the Underground being tormented by a small boy.

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