The fire next time

Easter weekend H6

That's H as in Hitchcock: a freebie (well, except for the popcorn) rainy-day film festival in my own bunker, part of the austerity campaign to pay for my Mets tickets.

The 39 Steps

(1935)

Inexplicably, I didn't find this wonderful when I first saw (or maybe even second--can't remember whether this was its second or third chance), but I've gotten over that bit of myopia. Donat is a perfect "wrong man," in a film that looks ahead in ways both thematic and logistical (spies spiriting some mysterious state secret from the country, a knife in the back inspiring a train trip on which the [eventual] love interest is encountered and the police intrude) to my favorite Hitch, North by Northwest. If anything, this is even less logical and more twisted, with a series of love-interest McGuffins, as well as the state-secret one: the sequence with the repressed Scottish farm wife is as sad in its sum and its conclusion as anything Hitchcock ever gave us. And then it's gone: get over it.

Young and Innocent

(1937)

Now, this is a mystery: I would have confidently listed this as a Hitchcock film I'd never seen, but from the first moments, I recognized that I had indeed seen it, and in recent years. But I have no idea under what circumstances: I certainly didn't Netflix it or see it on a revival-house screen, and it has been ages since I would have sat down in front of the TV and started watching a movie unplanned.

In any case, another good if not great example of the wrong man escaping the police and going on the run to find the evidence to clear himself, in the company of a young woman whose mistrust is clearly temporary. Nice twist here is that her father is the chief constable. Also interesting is that the film gives us one of the few Hitchcockian acknowledgments of economic conditions of the era.

Maybe it was that postdivorce stretch when I taped a few films from TCM? I remember hitting Woody Allen heavily, but maybe there was some Hitch too. That would be about right chronologically--but maybe it's best just to keep it a mystery.

The Lady Vanishes

(1938)

This was the first pre-Hollywood-era Hitchcock film I ever saw, and it remains one of my favorites, from the laughably fake opening miniature set to Dame May Whitty's laughably daft spy to the laughably English cricket fans played by Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford to the laughable love match between Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood. In short, Hitchcockian perfection in terms of letting the laughs rise above the suspense.

Rebecca

(1940)

Equal parts mystery and horror film, with Judith Anderson's Mrs. Danvers one of cinema's all-time scariest monsters. Olivier is a force of nature early, sweeping the round-shouldered, plainly beautiful, unnamed character of Joan Fontaine off her feet, then being gradually sucked into the vortex left by the first Mrs. De Winter's sinking boat. A long time since I've seen this film, which was long unavailable on DVD; probably won't ever be as long again.

Foreign Correspondent

(1940)

Awkward, sprawling, confused political suspenser-turned-actioner and, finally, shameless call to American arms. McCrea is fine doing McCrea-type false-bravado charm, less so as the hero of a who-do-you-trust spy story. Robert Benchley added dialogue and appears as . . . well, Robert Benchley.

Saboteur

(1942)

Speaking of the Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy Parker is one of three credited screenwriters here, but I defy anyone to find any Parkeresque bite in this goopy collection of didactic patriotic speechifying. Robert Cummings fails miserably in his attempt to be James Stewart, and Priscilla Lane is doomed to be Priscilla Lane, whoever that is, and the whole thing is just an ordeal of patience, a wait for the climactic Statue of Liberty sequence, which, frankly, is itself rather anticlimactic. Ugh; never again.