30s Hitch: Introduction
I was astounded at how many of Hitchcock’s early sound films
were available online. I’ve been a huge booster of his pre-Hollywood work
because much of it is well-crafted and entertaining. You can see him putting to
use what he’d learned from the German filmmakers and, of course, Sergei
Eisenstein. However, there’s more to it than expert technique. Hitchcock begins
to really fuse his thematic explorations in suspense, fear, crime, redemption,
and identity in this decade bracketed within British class society of the time.
There are oddities in this decade, including Britain’s first
all-star cavalcade musical (Elstree Calling) and a weird almost anti-Hitchcock
folly in Jamaica Inn, his last film made in England and his first use of Daphne
Du Maurier as a source. We’ll visit both in due course.
A number of these reviews/analyses were written over a
period of three years and I’ll be taking second and third passes at editing and
updating and maybe even re-watching some of the films.
I’m willing to say that Hitchcock may have been the most
important filmmaker of the twentieth century. He took the film grammar that had
been established early on by Griffiths, Eisenstein, and the German
expressionists and built a body of work that has influenced almost everyone
since. While it’s true much of the same could be said of, say, Howard Hawks,
it’s with Hitchcock we see a fever pitch of a run from the forties through the
sixties of films that while crowd-pleasing in many cases, were also diabolically
challenging in formal execution and wouldn’t be out of place in avant-garde
repertory.
That we can feel his influence directly down through
Scorsese, de Palma, and Lynch makes huge sense. But his influence can be seen
on the French New Wave (where he was an acknowledged source of their narrative
theories) and even in post-modern Asian film (I’m thinking of Bong Joon-Ho’s
recent masterpiece Parasite).
If Hitchcock hadn’t left England, or if his filmography
stopped with Jamaica Inn, what would be his legacy? Many of the films suffer
from the technical limitations of the time, some are clunkily edited, but it
would be difficult to not accept “The Lodger” and “Blackmail” as silent
masterpieces and not see the greatness in “Murder!”, “The Man Who Knew Too Much”,
and “The 39 Steps”. It’s from this latter perspective that I want to approach
these works and not so much through his legacy work that followed once he left
Britain.
Admittedly, he practically disowned some of his early work –
and not without understandable reasons – but even in the runts of the litter,
there’s a kind of mastery such that they wouldn’t be considered failures were
they the work of lesser hands.
In what follows, I’m relying solely on streaming sources. Fortunately,
I’ve seen a fair amount of Hitch’s early output on the big screen. Thanks to
living in cities that have (or, sadly, had) strong curatorial repertory
cinemas, I’ve seen a lot of wonderful stuff. I’ve been pleased with the prints
available on YouTube and can watch them on a large enough screen (42 inches)
for the purpose of review. I’m extremely happy – super psyched, in fact – to
share these gems with you.
Mary (1931)
Waltzes from Vienna (1934)
The Thriller Sextet - Introduction to the Next Six Films
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
The 39 Steps (1935)
Secret Agent (1936)
Sabotage (1936)
Young and Innocent (1937)
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Jamaica Inn (1939)
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