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The leisurely overture introduces the pastoral setting, the farmer (Jameson Thomas) gazes out the window while his wife expires—his white trousers are aired out (her final order) like flags at half-mast, a dissolve finds the bed now painfully vacant. Alone after their daughter's wedding, he goes looking for a new bride only to have his own male pride handed back to him. The widowed huntress (Louie Pounds) is "too independent" and laughs at his presumptuous proposal, the desiccated fusspot (Maud Gill) is agitated to tears, and the "pillowy" bachelorette (Olga Slade) has a goosey giggle that turns into a shriek. At the end of this Goldilocks setup is the vivacious housekeeper (Lillian Hall-Davis), who's just right as a good wife and, as such, "the next best thing to no wife." "Something magical about the married state," she sighs, though Alfred Hitchcock agrees more with the grumbling handyman (Gordon Harker) who describes it as "the proper steamroller for flattening the hope out of a man and the joy out of a woman." (Like other social rituals it's a game of power, at one point compared to foxes hunting hens and a lamb led to slaughter.) The only ordeal bigger than contemplating an empty household is trying to fill it in this fond comedy of humiliation, founded on a relaxed technique of facial expressions and body language, on the smile that slowly drops one person's face and emerges on another's. The horse that peeks into the living room and the crotch patch that needs sewing are crucial Hitchcock jokes, Buñuel in Illusion Travels by Streetcar remembers the hanging meat carcasses. The Inspector at home with the missus in Frenzy has the filmmaker's last word on holy matrimony. With Gibb McLaughlin, Ruth Maitland, and Antonia Brough. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |