Alfred Hitchcock: The '40s
Rebecca (November 19/06)
Alfred Hitchcock's first American feature, Rebecca casts Joan Fontaine as a sweet and naive (and unnamed) young woman who finds herself falling for wealthy widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier). Problems ensue after Maxim takes his bride-to-be home to his palatial estate, where his sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) takes an immediate disliking to the new mistress of the house. Rebecca moves at an extraordinarily deliberate pace and is by and large fairly uneventful, but there are - as expected - a number of genuinely electrifying moments spread throughout the film's overlong running time (a mishap at a costume ball being the most obvious example of this). Hitchcock - along with cinematographer George Barnes - has infused the film with an unmistakably gothic sensibility, ensuring that Rebecca remains endlessly fascinating in terms of its visceral qualities. The meandering storyline, however, ultimately prevents the film from living up to its reputation as one of Hitchcock's best (the overly talky third act surely doesn't help matters).
out of
Foreign Correspondent (January 17/07)
Though stylishly directed (obviously) and teeming with snappy dialogue, Foreign Correspondent remains a strangely uninvolving thriller - something that's due in no small part to the egregiously deliberate pace and undeniably overlong running time. Joel McCrea stars as Johnny Jones, a wisecracking reporter who finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy with global implications. Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock has peppered Foreign Correspondent with several expectedly impressive set pieces - including a famous sequence in which an assassin works his way through a crowd toting black umbrellas - and yet the film never quite becomes anything more than a sporadically intriguing curiosity. McCrea's strong performance is hampered by the ridiculousness of his character, a figure who doesn't seem to break a sweat during moments of high intrigue and proposes to a woman mere days after meeting her. The action-packed conclusion is admittedly quite thrilling, although - like many of Foreign Correspondent's positive attributes - its impact is severely diluted by the talky and seriously padded-out vibe.
out of
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Suspicion
Saboteur (July 16/07)
Relentlessly uneven and ultimately quite dull, Saboteur casts Robert Cummings as Barry Kane - a factory worker who must go on the run after a shady figure frames him for a deadly fire that kills a colleague. In an effort to clear his name, Barry - along with shoe-horned love interest Pat Martin (Priscilla Lane) - embarks on a cross-country journey from Los Angeles to New York and subsequently comes across a whole host of quirky characters along the way. Director Alfred Hitchcock - working from Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, and Dorothy Parker's screenplay - has infused the proceedings with an episodic structure that proves to be disastrous, as the majority of Barry's encounters (including separate run-ins with a blind pianist and several circus freaks) are ultimately far from engrossing. Cummings' inability to transform his character into a wholly compelling figure only exacerbates Saboteur's various problems, although there's certainly no denying the effectiveness of Otto Kruger's turn as the film's exceedingly sinister villain. That being said, Hitchcock's expectedly masterful directorial choices provide the film with brief flashes of electricity - with the most obvious and overt examples of this being a chase through a crowded movie theater and the climactic confrontation atop the Statue of Liberty. Yet such sequences are invariably rendered moot by the overly talky script and general ambiance of pointlessness, ensuring that even the most avid Hitchcock fan will have a tough time embracing the film.
out of
Shadow of a Doubt
Lifeboat
Spellbound
Notorious
The Paradine Case
Rope
Under Capricorn
