Hitchcock’s cameo
MURDER! B-
Great Britain (104 mi) 1930 d: Alfred Hitchcock
Great Britain (104 mi) 1930 d: Alfred Hitchcock
Opening with Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, Toscanini - YouTube
(6:07), often thought of as the sound of death knocking on the door,
simultaneous to a flurry of frantic knocks at the door by the police as a
murder has been committed, this is one of the more provocative of Hitchcock’s
early 30’s works, only his third sound film, playing out more like a radio
play, using the sound of voices to greater effect than any visualization, where
often the dialogue turns into a chorus of collective voices, expressing a kind
of groupthink where the power of the collective is greater than any individual
voice. While the film attempts to get
into racy themes, it’s all disguised, hidden behind theatrical flourishes of
silent era film to avoid having to actually deal with issues of sex and race,
which simply weren’t talked about in these times. Nonetheless, this adds to the intrigue of the
film, which is essentially a story about hidden homosexuality, using multiple
layers to achieve the overall effect, which isn’t particularly a success in
terms of building suspense, as the elements don’t exactly come together, but it
works better as an experimental film that takes plenty of risks. Oddly enough, the movie was filmed in two
languages, English and German, using a different lead actor (Alfred Abel) for
the German version, with an almost completely different cast, released as MARY
in 1931, which failed miserably, as none of the English language jokes were
understood within German culture.
Hitchcock developed a special fondness for those European directors who
were able to successfully make the transition to another language, like Ernst
Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, and Billy Wilder, while René Clair, Julien Duvivier, and
Jean Renoir all experienced difficulties in the United States. Despite the seriousness of the subject
matter, the story of a falsely accused woman, joining the falsely accused man
theme of The
Lodger (1927), this plays out as a comical farce, with more than the usual
number of secondary characters, each exaggerating their roles with a certain
theatrical relish, as the actors are given greater freedom than typical
Hitchcock films to expand their limited roles with comic flair, where there may
be more extended talking throughout this film than any other in the Hitchcock
repertoire.
The film is essentially a whodunit, adapted from a novel
about the theater called Enter Sir John
written by Clemence Dane and Australian actress-turned-playwright Helen de
Guerry Simpson, who would later contribute dialogue for Sabotage (1936) and
write the 1937 historical novel that Hitchcock adapted for Under
Capricorn (1949). According to
Hitchcock, “It was one of the rare whodunits I made. I generally avoid this genre because as a
rule all of the interest is concentrated in the ending. They’re rather like a jigsaw or crossword
puzzle. No emotion. You simply wait to find out who committed the
murder.” Because of the stagy effect,
this is often thought of as an adapted play, especially the way Hitchcock keeps
intermingling themes of illusion and reality, as so many of the characters work
in the theater. The accused is a young
actress Diana Baring (Norah Baring), discovered with blood on her dress sitting
next to the dead body of another rival actress, a fire poker laying next to the
body, and no recollection of what happened, as she’s found in a daze when the
police arrive. There’s immediate
confusion as members of the same theater company begin offering rumors and
behind-the-scenes details that only enlarge the mystery, while the accused
herself seems to be deliberately holding back pertinent information, even while
incarcerated, apparently protecting the identity of a man she refuses to
name. The beauty of the film is often
merging their stage characters with real life, blurring the lines between
what’s real and what’s not, especially the hilarious police investigation
sequence that takes place on the side wings of a stage, with Hitchcock
returning to the theatrical setting of his first feature The
Pleasure Garden (1925), as the two detectives only grow more confused by
the myriad of cast members who offer a few seconds of information before
returning to character as performers on the stage. Hitchcock himself was an avid devotee of the
theater, but he seems to take particular delight in transferring the farce
taking place onstage, that the viewer observes only through an entrance door
leading to the stage and the sound of a howling audience, to another one taking
place on the wings with a stream of heavily costumed characters quickly coming
and going. It’s only here that the speed
of the film is most effective, as otherwise there is little camera movement,
often standing fixed for prolonged periods of time, moving in and out of
conversations, going from character to character, where the relentless pace of
the speech is what dictates the action, while there continue to be oddly out of
place sequences still shot in the silent era style that slow the pace of the
film enormously.
It’s only during Diana’s murder trial that we meet the lead
character, Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall), a renowned stage actor and
manager, who is also a juror on the case, where all the evidence seems to point
to an open and shut guilty verdict, but Sir John is one of the holdouts who is
not convinced. Hitchcock uses an
artificial wall of voices that resemble a lynch mob mentality all shouting
“Murder!” in the face of Sir John, who unlike Henry Fonda in TWELVE ANGRY MEN
(1957), quickly acquiesces to the swelling group pressure and changes his
vote. Plagued by a guilty conscience
afterwards, he rounds up the stage manager Markham (Edward Chapman) and
recreates the scene of the crime, including the actions of each member of the
cast that night, literally restaging the crime as a play within a play, making
note of clues not obtained by the police, who were convinced this was an open
and shut case. In one of the more
inventive shots, we hear Sir John narrate his inner thoughts as he looks in the
mirror, while a live orchestra behind the set (as sound could not be separated
from the live performance) plays Wagner’s “Liebestod” Wagner - Tristano e Isotta -
YouTube (conducted here by Arturo Toscanini, 5:58) heard on the radio in
the background. Sir John is convinced
there was someone else in the room that night, certain Diana would acknowledge
as much during a prison interview, where she’s watched over by the female
guards who never leave her side. The
scene is brilliantly set up where each is on one side of a long table in
between that barely leaves any room at each end, exaggerating the distance
between them, shot with such an austere style, reminiscent of Carl Theodore
Dreyer. Despite being charged with
murder, surrounded round the clock by grim looking guards, she still refuses to
acknowledge his name, though she inadvertently blurts out that the man she’s
trying to protect is a Half-caste, a racially derogatory term in little use
today, where the shame isn’t so much the racial aspect, but the fact he comes
from a lower caste, so would never be accepted in her social circles.
The half-caste is none other than the defendant’s fiancé,
Handel Fane (Esme Percy), seen earlier during the police interviews playing the
role of a cross dresser onstage, where “she” could easily have fled the scene
of the crime undetected. Using the same
trick as Hamlet in his play within the play, The Mousetrap, hoping to prey upon the guilty conscience of the
actual murderer, Sir John restages the scene of the crime with Fane, asking him
to fill in the missing details, which he’s able to do quite easily. With the theater shut down, Fane has resumed
work as a transvestite trapeze artist at the circus, based on a real-life
transvestite trapeze artist from Texas in the 20’s and 30’s named Vander Clyde
Broadway, stage name Barbette (performer), where his deviance from
sexual norms was the only way gays could be presented onscreen during this era. Fane’s dubious character begins a long line
of sexually ambiguous Hitchcock villains (often inaccurately described as
Hitchcock’s “murderous gays”) that includes Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains) from
NOTORIOUS (1946), Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Granger) from ROPE
(1948), Bruno Antony (Robert Walker) from STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951), Phillip
Vandamm (James Mason) in NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959), and Robert Rusk (Barry
Foster) in FRENZY (1972). In this case,
it’s Britain’s suffocating class system and its implied homophobia that
actually leads to the murder and a suicide.
While the trapeze act itself is a thrilling climactic moment, cast under
a looming shadow of death, the finale is a bit of a disappointment, as the
murder mystery is resolved through the contents of a suicide letter read aloud afterwards
that explains everything. The final shot
once more reveals the theatricality of the film, as Sir John greets the freed
prisoner Diana with what appears to be romantic inclinations, as the camera
pulls back to reveal they are mere performers onstage as the curtain
falls.
Note – Hitchcock’s cameo comes just prior to the one hour
mark walking past the house where the murder was committed with a female
companion (Hitchcock closest to the camera), which comes just after the end of
Sir John's visit to the scene with Markham, who are both seen standing outside
the front door.
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