Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

Judith Anderson and Joan Fontaine in Rebecca

Mrs. de Winter: Joan Fontaine
Maxim de Winter: Laurence Olivier
Mrs. Danvers: Judith Anderson
Jack Favell: George Sanders
Frank Crawley: Reginald Denny
Major Giles Lacy: Nigel Bruce
Colonel Julyan: C. Aubrey Smith
Beatrice Lacy: Gladys Cooper
Mrs. Van Hopper: Florence Bates
Coroner: Melville Cooper
Dr. Baker: Leo G. Carroll

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Robert E. Sherwood, Joan Harrison, Philip MacDonald, Michael Hogan
Based on a novel by Daphne Du Maurier
Cinematography: George Barnes
Art direction: Lyle R. Wheeler, William Cameron Menzies
Music: Franz Waxman

Rebecca is a very good movie. Would it have been a better one if Alfred Hitchcock, directing his first American film, had been left alone by the producer, David O. Selznick, an incurable micromanager? That's the question that lingers, especially since Hitchcock later expressed some dissatisfaction with the film. It does lack the director's sense of humor, manifested for example in the scene in which the horrid Mrs. Van Hopper snuffs a cigarette in a jar of cold cream, a gag Hitchcock liked so much that he used it again 15 years later in To Catch a Thief, in which the substitute ashtray is a fried egg. The differences between Hitchcock and Selznick largely lay in the realm of editing, in which Selznick loved to dabble, insisting that scenes be shot from various camera angles to give him latitude in the editing room. Hitchcock was a famous storyboarder, working out scenes and planning camera setups well in advance of the actual shooting -- "editing in the camera," as it's usually called. The story would probably also have been very different in the Hitchcock version: According to one source, the original version suggested by Hitchcock began on shipboard, with various people being seasick. Selznick, however, liked to stick closely to the novels on which he based his films: The opening title, for example, refers to the movie as a "picturization" of Daphne Du Maurier's bestseller. (This was doubtless a comfort to Du Maurier, who hated Hitchcock's version of her novel Jamaica Inn (1939) -- but then so did Hitchcock, and both of them were right to do so.) The glory of Rebecca lies mostly in its performances. Although Laurence Olivier never makes Maxim de Winter a fully credible character -- I think he felt he was slumming, doing the film only to be near Vivien Leigh, and disgusted when Selznick didn't cast her as the second Mrs. de Winter -- he was always a watchable actor, even when he wasn't doing a great job of it. Joan Fontaine is almost perfect in her role, making credible the crucial character switch, when she stops being shy and stands up to Mrs. Danvers. And Hitchcock must have loved working with the gaggle of British character actors who had flocked to Hollywood and populate all the supporting roles.

Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941)

Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in Suspicion

Lina McLaidlaw Aysgarth: Joan Fontaine
Johnnie Aysgarth: Cary Grant
General McLaidlaw: Cedric Hardwicke
Mrs. McLaidlaw: May Whitty
Beaky Thwaite: Nigel Bruce
Mrs. Newsham: Isabel Jeans
Ethel: Heather Angel
Captain Melbeck: Leo G. Carroll

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison, Alma Reville
Based on a novel by Anthony Berkeley as Francis Iles
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Music: Franz Waxman

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you," as Joseph Heller put it in Catch-22. Considering how many plots of Alfred Hitchcock's films are variations on that theme, he might well have had the phrase posted on his office wall. Suspicion is one of the purest explorations of that premise: A woman thinks her handsome rotter of a husband is out to murder her, and the evidence keeps piling up up that she's right. Of course, she isn't, but it takes an hour and 39 minutes to reach that rather anticlimactic conclusion. Suspicion was Hitchcock's fourth American film, and it shows that he was still getting used to working in a rather different studio system than the one he had in England. After the micromanaging of David O. Selznick on his first, Rebecca (1940), he had a comparatively easier time with producer Walter Wanger on Foreign Correspondent (1940) except for the difficulty of making a film about impending war in Europe while the United States was still officially neutral -- so the bad guys could never be explicitly identified as Nazis, for example. But his third film, Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941), his first set in the United States, was a dud, in large part because Hitchcock had yet to master American idiom: The prissy character played by Gene Raymond, for example, was supposed to have been the best fullback at the University of Alabama. I doubt that Hitchcock knew what a fullback was, let alone one from Alabama. So for Suspicion he retreated to familiar territory, England at a time when there wasn't a war going on, and some actors he had worked with before: Joan Fontaine, Nigel Bruce, and Leo G. Carroll from Rebecca, as well as May Whitty, who had starred in The Lady Vanishes (1938). The chief newcomer was Cary Grant, who would become, along with James Stewart, one of Hitchcock's most reliable leading men. But Grant's presence in the film presented its own problems: He was known as a charming actor in romantic comedy. Would an audience accept Grant as a potential murderer? One story, reportedly verified by Hitchcock himself, holds that the studio, RKO, didn't want to mar Grant's image and insisted on a change from the novel's original ending, in which Johnnie Aysgarth really is guilty. Biographers, however, have disputed that story, claiming that Hitchcock really wanted to focus on Lina's paranoia and not on Johnnie's villainy. In any case, the film's ending feels wrong, mostly because it resolves nothing: Is Johnnie's fecklessness really curable? The chief problem is that Lina herself is an unfocused character, improbably wavering between shyness and passion, between common sense and paranoia, between tough determination and a tendency to faint. Fontaine did what she could with the part, and won an Oscar for her pains, but the film really belongs to Grant. Hitchcock was the one director who could really bring out Grant's dark side.* He did it more brilliantly in Notorious (1946), but in Suspicion Hitchcock effectively exploits Grant's ability to turn on a subtle, cold-eyed menace.

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*A possible exception to this statement is George Cukor, who first explored the "other" Cary Grant as the Cockney con-man in Sylvia Scarlett (1935).

Saboteur (Alfred Hitchcock, 1942)

It's heresy to suggest it, but Alfred Hitchcock needed movie stars. It's no accident that some of his most admired films featured Cary Grant, James Stewart, Grace Kelly, and Ingrid Bergman. They seemed to inspire him to do his best work. I don't know if Saboteur would have been a better movie if Hitchcock had got his first choice of leads: Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. But I do know that they would have supplied the kind of charisma and finesse that are sorely lacking in Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane. Cooper and Stanwyck might also have inspired Hitchcock to give the film more than just more than a few now-familiar suspense tricks and one deservedly famous set piece -- the final scene on the torch of the Statue of Liberty. He might have been moved to prod his usually more-than-competent screenwriters -- Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, and Dorothy Parker -- to shape the story into something that makes a little more sense. It's the familiar Hitchcockian "wrong man" premise, one that was done far more skillfully in The 39 Steps (1935), would be improved on in Strangers on a Train (1951), and reach its apotheosis in North by Northwest (1959) -- whose climactic struggle on Mount Rushmore was surely inspired by Saboteur's Statue of Liberty sequence, one national monument standing in for another. Cummings and Lane don't strike any sparks with each other, but they aren't bad considering since they're flung into absurd situations -- his initial flight from prosecution, his encounter with a truck driver and a kindly blind man who are mysteriously motivated to help someone suspected of treason, their rescue by a troupe of circus sideshow performers, their blithely elided cross-country journey, their entrapment in a mansion full of high-society fascists, their perfunctorily treated escape, and the loony decision of the villain (Norman Lloyd) to flee to what amounts to a cul-de-sac, i.e., the Statue. Granted, almost every Hitchcock film can be picked apart on the grounds of plausibility, but he usually does a better job of covering it up. In the end, Saboteur reminds me of his earlier film, Young and Innocent (1937), another movie with charisma-deficient stars and a jury-rigged plot in which the director seems to be trying out things he will accomplish with more skill in his later work.

Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

Foreign Correspondent was made by people walking on eggs as they worked their way through a minefield. It displays Alfred Hitchcock's gift for witty surprises and edgy suspense, but it was made at a peculiar moment in history: Britain had gone to war against Hitler, but the United States was officially neutral -- thanks to a series of Neutrality Acts forced through Congress by isolationists. Moreover, Hitchcock himself had left his native country, signing a contract with David O. Selznick shortly before the war began in Europe.* So making a film about espionage and the outbreak of war in Europe that stuck to the American party line was tricky business, especially if your director was an Englishman. The surprise is that Foreign Correspondent turned out as well as it did. The plotting is fairly ramshackle, which is not surprising, considering the number of hands that were put to it: The screenplay is credited to Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison, but there's also a dialogue credit for James Hilton and Robert Benchley, and it's well known that lots of others, including the ubiquitous script-doctoring Ben Hecht, were involved. The romantic subplot involving the titular foreign correspondent Johnny Jones aka Huntley Haverstock (Joel McCrea) and peace activist Carol Fisher (Laraine Day), whose father (Herbert Marshall) turns out to be the villain, is particularly flimsy, but even the central espionage plot, involving an especially obscure MacGuffin, doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. And yet Foreign Correspondent zips along because Hitchcock's direction distracts us from the niggling inconsistencies. If we ever start to wonder if things make sense, there's a new gag -- a chase through a crowd of umbrellas, a windmill whose blades are turning backward,  a new threat on the hero's life, a spectacular plane crash at sea -- to distract us. Or there's a bit of witty casting: Edmund Gwenn, who also played Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (Robert Z. Leonard) in 1940 and later became one of the more beloved embodiments of Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street (George Seaton, 1947), here plays a murderous Cockney, and the usually villainous George Sanders is the stalwart if cynical good guy named Scott ffolliott, complete with funny story about why his surname is spelled without a capital letter. So much is going on in Foreign Correspondent, in short, that thinking too closely about its plausibility feels irrelevant. Despite the pressures to keep the film's message neutral, at its end there's a sense that even isolationist America is about to yield to reality, with a stirring speech, written by Hecht, urging the United States to "keep the lights burning." Foreign Correspondent received a best picture Oscar nomination but lost to Hitchcock's other film of the year, Rebecca.

*Hitchcock's American stay was much criticized in Britain, although he didn't become a citizen of the United States until 1955. His absence from Britain, especially during the war, may be one reason why, even though he retained dual citizenship, he was not knighted by Queen Elizabeth II until the year of his death, 1980. In 1943 and early 1944, partly in response to the criticism, he went to Britain to make two short propaganda films for the British Ministry of Information. Both of them, Aventure Malgache and Bon Voyage, were in French and were designed to be shown to the Free French forces as morale boosters for the Resistance, although whether they were actually released as such is unclear. After the war they disappeared into the British National Archives and were not rediscovered until the 1990s, when Hitchcock scholars retrieved them for public showing and video release. The story of Aventure Malgache is framed by a group of actors putting on their makeup. One of them remarks on how much another of the group resembles a Vichy official he knew when he was in the Resistance on Madagascar. The official had the actor imprisoned, but after the Vichy government was ousted by the Battle of Madagascar in 1942, the official hid his portrait of Pétain, hung a portrait of Queen Victoria, and stuck his bottle of Vichy water in a cabinet -- perhaps an echo of Claude Rains's dropping the Vichy bottle in a wastebasket in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). Bon Voyage is a more complex narrative about an RAF pilot who is shot down in France and is aided in his return to Britain by the Resistance -- or so he thinks. When he reaches London he learns that the supposed Resistance man was actually a German counter-spy using him to unmask real members of the Resistance. Neither film is first-rate, though both, especially the unreliable narrative of Bon Voyage, show the sure-handedness of an experienced director.

Jamaica Inn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1939)

According to Stephen Whitty's excellent The Alfred Hitchcock Encyclopedia, the director thought Jamaica Inn "completely absurd" and didn't even bother to make his familiar cameo appearance in it. Hitchcock was right: It's a ridiculously plotted and often amateurishly staged film -- although Hitchcock must take some of the blame for the scenes in which characters sneak around talking in stage whispers and pretending they're hidden from their pursuers when they're in plain sight for anyone with average peripheral vision. Much of Hitchcock's attitude toward the film has been ascribed to his clashes with Charles Laughton, who was an uncredited co-producer and resisted any attempts by the director to rein in one of his more ridiculous performances. As Sir Humphrey Pengallan, the county squire and justice of the peace who is secretly raking in a fortune by collaborating with smugglers who loot shipwrecked vessels after murdering their crew, Laughton wears a fake nose and oddly placed eyebrows and hams it up mercilessly. Maureen O'Hara, in her first major film role, struggles with a confusingly written character who sometimes displays fire and initiative and at other times seems alarmingly obtuse. The rest of the cast includes such stalwarts of the British film and stage as Leslie Banks, Emlyn Williams, and Basil Radford, with a surprising performance by Robert Newton as the movie's romantic lead, Jem Traherne, an agent working undercover to expose the smugglers. You look in vain at the young Newton for traces of his terrifying Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist (David Lean, 1948) or his Long John Silver in Treasure Island (Byron Haskin, 1950). The production design is handsome, and the film begins with an exciting storm at sea, but the screenplay, based on a Daphne Du Maurier novel and written by the usually capable Sidney Gilliat and Joan Harrison, quickly falls apart. Hitchcock's last film in England, Jamaica Inn was a critical flop but a commercial success.