While this is certainly one of Hitchcock’s least-known films, it actually holds an important place in film history. Not only was it Hitch’s first sound film (he had already filmed the bulk of the movie when sound technology reached England, prompting several scene reshoots), but it’s England’s first sound film to boot. Perhaps it’s not quite as prestigious as The Jazz Singer (the first feature length talkie ever made anywhere), but it was still an important milestone to our Redcoated Nemeses.
The plot would almost count as a twist on Hitchcock’s normal Wrong Man motif, if that had become a regular occurrence in his films by now. To wit: a young woman (Anny Ondra) accepts an invitation by an artist to visit his studio, where after showing off his artistic “skills” (sorry, maybe I have no real eye for artistic talent, but the naked woman he drew while she watched looked little better than a high schooler’s effort), he drags her onto his bed (located tastefully behind a curtain) and attempts to rape her. She successfully stops him by stabbing him with the knife he always keeps handy by his bed, and flees the scene. Her boyfriend (John Longden), who works for Scotland Yard, is assigned to the case, though while he is discovering that his girlfriend may have committed the crime, another criminal saw the murder occur, and takes one of her gloves from the scene so that he can…well, I don’t want to spoil everything, but let’s just say that what happens in the title may indeed also happen in the movie.
While the technology is obviously new to Hitch, he already shows an amazing ability to play with his new toy. First we have the very first instance of “dubbing”, done before the technology to do so actually existed, by way of having an actress with a pleasing voice reciting Ondra’s lines from off-camera while Ondra just moved her lips, so as to disguise her thick German accent. He also quickly twigged to the idea that, as long as you keep the audio low enough that the audience can’t make out what’s being said, he could just pepper the soundtrack with snippets of mumbling to mimic the noise of a crowd. He also has one great moment when Ondra, fretting over her secret crime, is sitting at a table while another character is ranting about nothing in particular. Her whole rant is kept fairly quiet, except whenever she says the word ‘knife’, when the soundtrack suddenly jumps up to a near-scream to better emphasize the point, so to speak. It’s a fairly elementary touch, but a nice one.
Overall, the film is nothing special, but is a clearly superior early effort for him than The Pleasure Garden was. We’re actually seeing him start to play around with the tools of his trade here, and while he wouldn’t start making anything really impressive until the 30s, I’ve certainly reviewed much worse movies for this blog. Like most of his early films (in fact, I think all of his early British efforts), this is public domain, so if you seek it out your print quality may vary, but the copy I bought (linked below) looked just fine, with minimal issues. And it’s cheap too, so how can you go wrong?
Rating; **
P.S. I had some trouble finding the trailer anywhere online, but I did find what appears to be the entire damn movie on Youtube. So there you go, yay for the public domain!
Friday, July 2, 2010
Blackmail
Thursday, July 1, 2010
The Pleasure Garden
So yes, shortly after announcing my grand return to this blog, I wound up leaving for Mississippi for over a month to help clean up the oil spill, during which time I was without easy computer access or, more importantly, any of my movies. The timing could have been better. So, by way of apology to all of you dear readers, for the duration of July (barring any further unexpected road trips) you’ll be getting to enjoy a theme, as we’re rolling out Hitchcock Month for all of you! Every weekday you’ll be getting a new review of an old film by the Master of Suspense, so that we can both benefit: all of you by having twenty or so new reviews to read, and me by having a way of justifying owning so many of his films. While there’s not enough time in a month to review all of his movies, I’ll try to hit all the important ones.
Which brings us to The Pleasure Garden, his directorial debut (aside from a couple uncredited efforts where the studio had him take over for another director partway through filming). The first sign I had that something was awry with this film was in how it’s one of Hitchcock’s only films that has never been released on DVD (at least in the U.S.). Of course, such a problem isn’t enough to stop anyone with an Internet connection these days, and anyone hoping to play along shouldn’t have any real difficulty finding a copy for their computer. Regardless, when the man’s directed over sixty films, and all but a couple are easily purchasable, you get to wondering about the ones that aren’t, and this shows that such concerns are fully justified.
The main word one would describe this with would be “boring”. It plays like a typical silent melodrama, with all the overacting and lack of plot one expects to find in such films. It follows two women that are working at a theater as dancers, giving us the pleasure of seeing what appears to be the same dance routine over and over again throughout the film’s thankfully short running time (IMDB says 75 minutes, though the copy I got runs only an hour, which means it would be an ideal addition to a future Mill Creek collection). One is married, while the other has a boyfriend, and the men both head on out to a Caribbean island for work, leaving the women behind to dance some more. The film does get better at the climax, set on the island when it abruptly switches over into thriller territory by introducing a ghost, a sword, and a gun, but by then it’s too little, too late.
While I tend to not be the most forgiving person imaginable with movies, I do have to say that this is a perfectly forgivable debut effort from the man who would go on to be arguably the most popular director of all time. After all, not only was it his first movie, but the concept of a film being an hour or longer had only existed for a decade by then. Almost everybody was making regrettable early efforts like this, even the wildly popular directors, so I can hardly single Hitchcock out and sneer at him for making a boring movie in the mid-20s. Still, this is a film that only true die-hard fans will want to see, making it a tad awkward to start Hitchcock Month off with this. Ah well, such is life, no?
Rating: * ½
For those interested, by the way, the trailer can be found here.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Faust
I feel I should take a moment and defend the integrity of the 100 Rare and Obscure Horror Films You Should See Before You Die, as, in the world of silent movies, F.W. Murnau is admittedly not all that obscure. That being said, however, there really isn’t a great surplus of people my age (or in general) that have seen any silent films at all, except perhaps in a film class. Even then, any silent film is likely to be Nosferatu, the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or a non-horror movie. I feel confident, therefore, that few if any of you have seen this silent classic, about a renowned doctor who makes a deal with the devil to help his people, and surprisingly finds that it doesn’t turn out quite how he imagined it would.
The film, based on Goethe’s play that I’ve yet to read (I have read Marlowe’s version, if that makes up for it at all), opens humbly with the four horsemen of the apocalypse flying through the land. This turns out to be an opening gambit by the Devil, who, when confronted by God, argues that the human race is thoroughly corrupted and belongs to him now. God obviously disagrees, and so they make a wager: if the Devil can completely corrupt and ruin a pure soul – the aforementioned doctor – then the world is his.
The film, presumably like the play, is structured rather oddly. It’s bookended with some startling imagery that partially floats away from a conventional narrative, as when they show the Devil infecting Faust’s city with plague via him spreading his wings out to surround the land. However, during a good chunk of the middle portion, the film seems to turn away from the dark and fantastical, and towards romantic comedy territory, as Faust is given his youth, and spends his time chasing after a girl. I can only assume this section is meant to show us that even someone renowned for his wisdom and intelligence can turn into a damned fool when youth and beauty come along. It tends to go on a bit overlong (as the comedy sequences in Marlowe’s play did, come to think of it), but at least it wraps up appropriately miserably, as a story of a man making a deal with the devil should.
While the pacing is off (as was often the case with silent films), the movie is filled with such great imagery and tells such a classic, dark story, that you owe it to yourself to check it out. Also, if you find you just can’t bring yourself to watch a silent film, or if you’d just prefer a film that goes completely surrealist and weird, you can also check out Jan Svankmajer’s Faust from the mid-90s, which is also totally awesome. Sadly, though, it’s not available in full on Youtube, as Murnau’s is.
Also, keep in mind you can never go wrong with 1920s tits.
Rating: *** ½
*Further proof: on Amazon, Faust’s new 2 disc special edition DVD is currently ranked at 15,786 in DVD sales, while Basket Case, a cult horror movie about a man whose murderous mutant twin brother is kept hidden in a basket, is ranked at 8,934. This is scientific proof that Faust is only half as popular as semi-obscure cult movies from 1982.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
The Cat and the Canary
This was famed silent German filmmaker Paul Leni’s first film after fleeing Germany to the U.S., closely followed by a good number of his contemporaries (the rise of the Nazi party pretty much permanently crippled the German film industry, though it turned out quite well for Hollywood), and it’s further proof that the Germans were far and away the best in the world at making great art out of the silent film medium.
This is not to say that the film is without flaws; it is, after all, pretty much fluff all the way through, and while Leni was much better at wielding the camera than any American directors were at the time, he still paled in comparison to his German contemporaries Lang and Murnau. Still, this is pretty much the definitive Spooky Old House film, upon which all others were based, and it gets a lot of mileage out of its premise and location. The plot, which should be more than slightly familiar to anyone reading this, concerns a family gathering at the old mansion of a dead relative for the reading of his will. He leaves his entire fortune to one relative, but throws in enough complications and addendums to the will that all the others have to do is drive her mad and the fortune will go to another of them. You can naturally see where this is going.
Like pretty much every horror movie made in Hollywood by then, it’s played for laughs as much as screams, and it all holds up pretty well. Some of the jokes are a bit creaky by today’s standards, but it still has enough charm and visual flair to entertain all the way through. Now I want to see the late 30s remake that helped launch Bob Hope’s career. It’s not often a movie is so big that it can be remade just a decade later.
Rating: ***
