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"Queer things" at the Cornish coast, with a swift preamble couched in pure Germanic gothic—the sea storm and shipwreck are from Murnau, aboard the stagecoach the heroine notices another passenger cradling a goose (Lang's Der Müde Tod). Bogus beacons on rocky shores give way to plunder and slaughter, the business of "deliberate, organized wrecking," the eponymous inn as labyrinthine hideout. Behind it all is the plummily deranged squire (Charles Laughton), whose love of beauty has him mildly annoyed at the blood on ransacked linens. "Smugglers, eh? Have you got any good brandies through?" Daphne Du Maurier's narrative puts the Irish orphan (Maureen O'Hara) between the dandified monster and the undercover seaman (Robert Newton), on the sidelines is the harrowing bond between the aunt (Marie Ney) and her brutish buccaneer of a husband (Leslie Banks), recognized by Alfred Hitchcock as a dilation of the conjugal shackles in The 39 Steps. The family abode that turns out to be a den of cutthroats, the horse posed amid marble and finery for a tip of the hat to Un Chien Andalou. A few frames of a rope pulled taut (an overhead view from a breach in the attic) are enough to state a lynching, the fugitive couple hides in a cavern until a book of hymns is lowered in by the villains above. (Emlyn Williams recommends the one about fear and trembling, "it makes dying a pleasure.") Laughton's gourmet ghoulishness makes it clear that he's playing Hitchcock, just as he would play Renoir in This Land Is Mine: His final flourish atop the ship's mast echoes the culprit's swan dive in Murder!, the camera leaves the protagonists to contemplate the bewildered servant in the audience. With Basil Radford, George Curzon, Wylie Watson, Morland Graham, Edwin Greenwood, Horace Hodges, Mervyn Johns, and Stephen Haggard. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |