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Overseas turmoil recreated in a Hollywood laboratory, the expatriate artist's urgency for Alfred Hitchcock as later for Renoir (This Land Is Mine). Europe on the verge of war calls for reportage from "a fresh, unused mind," the New York newspaper sends the neutral lug (Joel McCrea) to get the scoop, "the biggest story in the world today." Luncheon in London, the guest (Albert Bassermann) is nowhere to be seen but the daughter (Laraine Day) of the head of the Peace Party (Herbert Marshall) duly makes an impression. (Fellini in E la Nave Va recollects the romantic declaration aboard the ship: "Well, that cuts our love scene down quite a bit.") The Eisensteinian shock of assassination, a foreglimpse of North by Northwest on a flat Dutch road with airplane circling in the distance. The windmill sequence, with its groaning gears and sinister spirals, splendidly illustrates Hitchcock's interest in the machinery of cinema and the limits of control, the sails spinning the wrong way stress the need for a sharp gaze. Out of the bathroom and onto a ledge, "Hot Europe" is the joke as the protagonist burns his hand on the hotel's neon sign. "Nice bit of architecture, sir, innit?" The slow build-up in the cathedral tower yields to swift, forceful frames—avuncular hitman (Edmund Gwenn) pushing toward the camera, shrieking onlooker, plunging figure, Vertigo nuns. Blasting lights and jazz records for the interrogation scene, the diplomat's fervor meets the traitor's shame before the Welsh adventurer (George Sanders) makes a hasty exit, cf. Le Petit Soldat. Umbrellas are flimsy shields against the gathering storm, inevitably water smashes through the glass and the characters find themselves in the middle of a choppy ocean, political awakening is fierce like that. "Writing history from beside the cannon's mouth," The Thing from Another World has the broadcast in the dark. Cinematography by Rudolph Maté. With Robert Benchley, Eduardo Ciannelli, Harry Davenport, Frances Carson, Martin Kosleck, and Eddie Conrad. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |