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A spinning wheel—Fate, Law, reel of celluloid—kicks off the overture, shot silent as a severe police procedural. The capture, interrogation and booking of a suspect display "the entire machinery of the Scotland Yard" at work, a sense of parallel worlds continuously intruding upon one another. Sound trickles in as the drama is sketched, the neglected coquette (Anny Ondra) who meets the painter (Cyril Ritchard) following a quarrel with the complacent detective (John Longden). "Ever been to an artist's studio?" The atelier's curtains and dividers make for a screen ominously split, the loaded dance of flirtation and assault passes from roving paintbrush to Degas frock to gleaming blade. The sponger with incriminating info (Donald Calthrop) completes the equation, "one's got to live, you know." A Teutonic investigation of ambiguity and an astringent comedy of straying relationships, Alfred Hitchcock's first talkie intensifies his experimental congruence of camera and meaning. When Ondra stumbles out of the studio, every light and noise of nocturnal London seem to drill into her psyche; when Calthrop is chased through the British Museum, Mesopotamian stone visages are linked via montage to the heroine's own mask of guilt. Langian hands outstretched accusingly, predator and prey as society's shifting roles, the arrival of sound as the stabbing of silence. The landlady's shriek from The 39 Steps is visible, so is The Wrong Man's spectral superimposition and the macabre Hitchcock jest. ("Knives is not right," argues the neighbor who prefers a brick to the skull, "something British about that.") Un Chien Andalou is concurrent with the cocktail-shaker metamorphosis and the paralyzed couple at the close, the pagliacci canvas is recalled to contrasting effect by Renoir (La Chienne) and De Palma (The Black Dahlia). With Sara Allgood, Charles Paton, Hannah Jones, Harvey Braban, and Phyllis Konstam. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |