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"One man's drama is another's melodrama," says Alfred Hitchcock. The bracketing rugby scenes seem to have left their mark on Lindsay Anderson, as have the arched hallways and ecclesiastical windows of the boys-only boarding school, "the World of Youth." The fatuous student prince (Ivor Novello) is introduced heroically on the field and given a literal dressing down, glimpsed by a female visitor as the locker-room door swings open. (He frantically reaches for a towel, she wanders off mildly bothered.) A visit to the shopgirl (Annette Benson) triggers the scandal, visualized as a dalliance silhouetted behind beaded curtains while the register rings up a piece of candy. He takes the fall for his chum (Robin Irvine) and gets expelled, a dissolve from the university to a cityscape inflamed with neon registers London at night. "The World of Make-Believe": The camera dollies back to reveal the protagonist's snazzy tuxedo to be a waiter's uniform, then pans sideways to expose the restaurant he's "working" at as a set before a theatrical audience. The descending motif (a rejected son's escalator ride, a betrayed husband in a plunging elevator, a Dantean banner reading "underground to anywhere") lays the groundwork for Vertigo's procession of implacable spirals, at the bottom is "the World of Lost Illusions" where the shame-faced gigolo recounts his tale to a hapless dowager. Astutely keyed to Murnau, Hitchcock finds visual invention everywhere, from the flirtatious actress (Isabel Jeans) who leans back on her vanity table for an upside-down POV shot, to the kaleidoscopic, micro-city symphony that receives the fever-racked pariah back from Marseilles. Losey in Accident has the middle-aged rejoinder. With Ian Hunter, Norman McKinnel, and Sybil Rhoda. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |