(1950) ****
After living and working in Hollywood since 1939, Hitchcock returned to London to film this mystery/thriller starring Jane Wyman and Marlene Dietrich.
It's a fascinating murder mystery with Wyman playing a young aspiring stage actress trying to prove the innocence of the man she loves, who is suspected of murdering the husband of Dietrich's character--she's typecast well as a stage legend. Indeed, the young man was having an affair with the Dietrich character, and in an early flashback scene that he recounts to Wyman, he explains how he tried to help Dietrich cover up her own accidental killing of her husband.
Marlene Dietrich has some fine eyebrows.The script is taut, and the performances are uniformly good, but there's a movie-stealing performance put in by Alastair Sim as the Wyman character's droll father. Pretty much everything he does in this is pure gold. Dietrich is also mesmerizing as an insecure star actress obsessed with the spotlight. Think Norma Desmond 20 years prior to the events of Sunset Blvd...still on top, yet the downward arc of her career fast approaching. This is the first time I've seen Dietrich in a starring role, btw, and I "get it." (She had a bit part in Welle's Touch of Evil that I watched a couple years ago for the 'thon).
It's worth seeing for Sim's performance alone. (You know him as Scrooge)Because so many of the major characters are actors in this one, and some of the action takes place in/around the theater (including a good final set piece) Hitchcock has some fun with the play-within-a-play trope. This is perhaps most controversially demonstrated in the big reveal, which calls into question the reliability of narration, and indeed the camera itself as a truth telling device in cinema. In that, it feels a very "modern" movie, and it apparently pissed a lot of people off. Even today, many critics seem miffed at what they see as Hitchcock "cheating," though such reactions seem pretty pedantic to me.
While I wouldn't put this right up amongst his masterpieces, it isn't a huge step down from them.
3 comments:
I haven't seen this film in many years. In fact I barely remember it. I am loving your analysis and will probably wind up watching a flood of Hitchcock over the winter thanks to your fine reviews.
Cool. I think theaters are excellent settings for horror flicks. There's so much opportunity to utilize what can be a creepy space.
I agree! That first picture does exactly that. An empty theater is so cool but so off-putting at the same time.
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