THE FARMER’S WIFE B
Great Britain (129
mi) 1928
d: Alfred Hitchcock
While The
Pleasure Garden (1926) dances around it, this film takes the subject of
marriage head-on, opening in an idyllic pastoral landscape that immediately
recalls The
Trouble With Harry (1955), a somewhat morbid screwball comedy that is one
of Hitchcock’s funniest films, and one of the director’s own personal favorites. This early silent film is more obscure, but
is one of the director’s earliest attempts at comedy, and is interestingly filmed
within the first years of his own marriage, so perhaps one can gage Hitchcock’s
initial ideas on marriage from viewing this film, which is essentially a comedy
on rural country manners, adapted from Eden Phillpot’s novel, Widecombe Fair, which had already been a
wildly popular, long-running hit play in London, which explores what life is
like in the 1920’s among the wealthy rural class, where all the households are
run by servants, and the male owners of the estate are called “masters.” Based on the folksy eccentricities of country
life, this is a character driven comedy that relies heavily upon dialogue to
establish personality and much of the humor, so there is heavy use of
intertitles continually interrupting and altering the rhythm of the film, an
obstacle the movie never really overcomes and something that would never be a
problem in a live theatrical performance.
One device Hitchcock uses is to allow the camera to linger on his
subjects, adding context to their characters, where we do get a good degree of
interior development, especially near the end, but all the jokes come from
dialogue, much of it written in slang. This
film, along with CHAMPAGNE (1928), are among the few times Hitchcock actually engages
in pure slapstick, where there are frenzied moments of anarchy when all mayhem
breaks out.
This film is unique for *not* having the usual Hitchcock
elements, existing outside the typical realm of his works, but the director had
a macabre sense of humor and must have found something here he liked. After his wife passes away, Samuel Sweetland
(Jameson Thomas) is a middle-aged farmer (who we never see do a single second
of work in the entire film, perhaps the ultimate irony) in Devon whose life gets
lonelier after marrying off his daughter, who then moves away, leaving a void
to fill. Sweetland’s listless,
perpetually grumpy handyman, Churdles Ash (Gordon Harker) provides the comic
relief and literally steals the show with his inclination to get away with
doing as little as possible, always moving in slow motion as if he has to be
pushed to move at all, but he’s never hesitant to offer his views, “He'll be
the next to wed now his daughter's marryin’.”
“Why not? There's something
magical in the married state…it have a beautiful side, Churdles Ash,"
answers Minta, short for Araminta, the loyal housekeeper played by Lilian
Hall-Davis, the reliably upbeat, generous to a fault, and warmhearted woman who
actually runs the place. Ash has an
altogether differing view, and once Sweetland decides it’s time to start
looking for a wife, he finds it disheartening, claiming “beer drinking don’t do
‘alf the ‘arm of love making,” describing marriage as “the proper steamroller
for flattening the hope out of man and the joy out of a woman.” Welcome to marital bliss—well at least no one
gets murdered in this one. Right then
and there Sweetland and Minta decide to draw up a list of eligible women in the
countryside, where they’re asked to consider the “possibles and the
impossibles,” as Sweetland imagines the “possibles” sitting in his wife’s empty
chair sitting across from his next to the fireplace. Minta rightly questions some of the choices, as
in her eyes they do not exactly seem like a match made in heaven, but this
allows plenty of lowbrow comedy. “Her
backview looks like that of a thirty-year old,” Sweetland says about one
potential candidate, “Yes, but you have to live with her frontview,” replies Minta
candidly.
In something of a riff on Buster Keaton’s SEVEN CHANCES
(1925), one of Keaton’s most hilarious films where he discovers he must find a
bride before 7 pm that same day or lose $7 million dollars, Sweetland similarly
takes his four chances with a certain arrogant expectation, comparing it to
foxes hunting hens or lambs being led to slaughter, believing he’s quite a
catch, thinking even if they’re not that interested in being the farmer’s lady,
they’d at least be interested in being the lady of the farm. To his surprise, when he goes courting them
in order, there’s a reason these women are not married and he’s about to find
out firsthand, checking off the local spinster’s names on the list one by
one. With each rejection, he loses his
temper and all evidence of any self-respect, refusing to ever come up the
widower Louisa Windeatt’s (Louise Pounds) hill anymore, while the slight,
thin-as-a-pretzel Thirza Tapper (Maud Gill) is hosting a tasteful tea party,
but when Sweetland corners her, she swoons from the mere thought of the idea,
where they have to fan her with air as if she is suffering from heatstroke,
while the smilingly obese Mary Hearn (Olga Slade) goes apoplectic after having
to endure a series of insults in response to her outright rejection, winding up
in a fit of uncontrollable hysterics that can’t be stopped. The last on the list is a saloon bartender
Mary Bassett (Ruth Maitland), who’d prefer being one of the boys in the bar to
a wife, where the barroom conversation takes place during a full blown fox
hunt. Silent film plays best to visual
sight gags and slapstick comedy, where here Sweetland and Minta play it straight
while everyone else around them exaggerates into somewhat buffoonish
caricatures, giving over-the-top performances often resulting in utter
chaos. It was only later in sound films
that Hitchcock would drop this style in favor of the witty banter of his better
known, stylishly sophisticated comedies, where no one was more suave and
debonaire than Cary Grant in Suspicion
(1941) or NOTORIOUS (1946). After the
proposal debacle, when Sweetland’s spirits are at their lowest ebb, it’s Minta
who attempts to keep his spirits up, once more using the empty chair device, where
in his head each of the list of brides appears in the chair, and finally he
sees Minta, who is seen standing around the chair nervously fidgeting with the
buttons on her dress, where only then, like a moment of enlightenment, does the
farmer realize what’s been standing right in front of him all along, as she is
the perfect choice to fill the empty spot.
A film without any tension or suspense, where the end comes as no
surprise, where it’s a conventionally made movie, but the performances are
superb, as are the memorable characters and comic wit displayed throughout,
making this one of Hitchcock’s happier films.
A note on Lilian Hall-Davis who provides such remarkable
warmth and appeal as Minta, who for a time was considered Hitchcock’s “favorite
actress,” having earlier worked with Hitchcock in THE RING (1927), her career
stalled with the transition to sound and she never recovered, suffering from
severe depression until tragically in 1933, at the age of 35, she committed
suicide by turning on a gas oven and cutting her own throat.
