From the Cheap Seats

I was recently tasked with reviewing a new box set which gathers up the thrillers Alfred Hitchcock made in the 1930s, and which also throws in a few of his silents for good measure. This wasn’t difficult, as I’m extremely fond of this period in the master’s career. He would make objectively ‘better’ films but personally, I’ll take the ‘minor’ Young and Innocent or even the inexplicably reviled Jamaica Inn over the ‘masterpiece’ Shadow of a Doubt or the inexplicably praised Strangers on a Train any day of the week.

I like to think that, after God knows how long watching and considering Hitchcock, I have a fair understanding of his work: the motifs and mannerisms that he liked and the sorts of themes he liked to explore. I can survey his entire career from my digital vantage point, spotting similarities between The Pleasure Garden (his first film, an Anglo-German production he made in Germany in 1926, where he was exposed to the expressionist touches that significantly coloured his own conception of cinema) and Family Plot (his last, made in 1976).

And yet, I wonder if this bird-eye view explains the director as well as it might. Looked at like this, it flattens the career out, making it seem smoother than it undoubtedly was. A few inches separates The Pleasure Garden from Family Plot on my shelves but fifty years separated their creation: a lot remained constant but an awful lot more changed.

A few years ago, I watched Hitchcock’s films from the original The Man Who Knew Too Much to The Lady Vanishes in sequence. It wasn’t planned, it just worked out that way and it was a fascinating experience. You get a much better sense of the director’s personality seeing them that way, watching him experimenting, developing ideas and learning from his mistakes.

Most of all, watching them in sequence showed me how they related to the era in which they were made. With the exception of Young and Innocent, the films from The Man… to The Lady… concern nefarious ‘foreign powers’ threatening British interests. This element gets more urgent as the films progress and when you think of what else was happening at that time, you realise why. Contemporary audiences would surely assume any sneaky ‘foreign power’ with worrying military objectives had a swastika on its flag.

The Lady Vanishes, as has been noted elsewhere, is especially overt, a parable warning against appeasement. Indeed, one of its best jokes assumes audiences came early to watch the newsreel; British cinema’s greatest double act, Messrs Charters and Caldicott, are introduced worrying about England and the threat she faces … not of imminent war, of course, but something far more important – defeat in the cricket.

Of course, one of the measures of a great film (or any work of art, for that matter) is that it works irrespective of context. I think it’s more interesting as a piece of social history. Sometimes, a film can capture a feeling you won’t find in history books concerned with facts.

Consider Powell & Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (AMOLAD). It’s a beautiful film, a glorious fantasy. But this lush Technicolor dream preserves something of the popular mood of its time. ‘Heaven’ is a monochrome place, staffed with bureaucrats and contemptuous of individuals; although it’s been largely forgotten today, that was how many saw Britain under Atlee, as it struggled to build the Heaven of Socialism (see also: A Private Function).

We don’t need to know any of this stuff, any more than we need to know the circumstances that lead Shakespeare to write Macbeth (which is almost as good as AMOLAD.) But since we try to restore movies as closely to their original versions, why don’t we sometimes try to reconstruct how audiences might have approached it? It might help us find new ways of seeing.

After all, it doesn’t make AMOLAD any less glorious or diminish The Lady Vanishes if we know this stuff: the little rascals will always find new ways to delight you. They haven’t let me down yet.