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Pirandello and the cadaver, "what the critics described as a highbrow shocker." Sound is already a fundamental part of Alfred Hitchcock's style, clock chimes and a shriek guide the opening montage until the crime is discovered and expressive movements take over: The camera tilts down from a police officer's aghast expression to the flashlight in his hand, then pans right to the catatonic young actress (Norah Baring) and down to the discarded poker on the ground, and finally left to the bludgeoned corpse. The maiden sits in her cell like Dreyer's Joan, cross-shaped shadow and all, it's up to the jury to decide in a pulsing little set-piece that compresses 12 Angry Men in ten minutes. Life and art are overlapping techniques, that "poorest of poor players" Sir John (Herbert Marshall) incorporates his stagecraft into his investigation. Acting very aware of its artifice, a camera very aware of its presence, the essentials of a splendidly self-reflexive mystery. The screen is a proscenium stretched this way and that: An inquiry takes place while thespians rush in and out of costumes for an unseen audience, the lenses turn side to side as busybodies rush from kitchen to dining room and back. The inquisitive epiphany is an internal soliloquy, Sir John shaving before a mirror as the words in his mind wrestle with the Wagner overture played by a full orchestra just beyond the frame, a droll Hitchcock experiment among dozens. Hamlet figures strikingly in the trap for the "half-caste" trapezist (Esme Percy), an audition stopped cold by a blank page in the script. "There's a melodrama for you." The Lubitsch compliment of the curtain drop is returned in To Be or Not to Be. With Phyllis Konstam, Edward Chapman, Miles Mander, Donald Calthrop, Amy Brandon-Thomas, and Una O'Connor. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |