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The pricked cocoon of English normalcy, a pivotal Alfred Hitchcock joke, out of the frying pan and into the fire. Kafka and Clair suffuse the opening tour de force, the camera swivels 180° on choreographed bustle as row after row of clerks scramble out of the office. Amid the pencil-pushers is the boring husband (Henry Kendall) heading home for the usual dinner of kidney pudding, even newspaper ads mock him: "Are you satisfied with your present circumstances?" (McCarey keenly fine-tunes the subway ride in Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!) His grousing is answered by a surprise inheritance and a quotation from Shakespeare, soon he and the missus (Joan Barry) are gawking at the wonders of Paris in jump-cuts that oddly anticipate Tippi Hedren's suspended terror in The Birds. Embarrassment at the Folies Bergère gives way to seasickness aboard the ocean liner heading east, the handsome commander (Percy Marmont) and the sultry princess (Betty Amann) wait for the right time to pounce. "A gorgeous night, perfect for lovers!" The sterility of convention or the manifold risks of life, which is scarier to the would-be adventurers? A marriage tested all the way to the edge of the world, where the constant sway of the ship's deck (strewn with ropes and chains) posits a screen perpetually on the verge of slipping out of control. Keaton's great relationship metaphor (The Navigator) is mined by Hitchcock on a half-sunken steamer with clear consequences for Lifeboat, the seaman drowned upside-down is contrasted with a new life born on the Chinese junk (cf. Buñuel's Subida al Cielo). The return home is a sigh and a shudder, "don't you dare say 'I told you so'!" An absolutely bleak comedy, with a punchline treated rather differently by Cassavetes in Faces. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |