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Hitchcock in Jamaica Inn remembers the opening scene vividly, carriage at night, burial in the middle of the road, two baleful eyeballs in overlapping dissolves. "Well, there's a cheerful introduction for you to our West Indies." An exotic wedding for the sweethearts (Madge Bellamy, John Harron), the host is a plantation owner (Robert Frazer) who desires the bride for himself. Monsieur Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi with caterpillar eyebrows) has a way: The doll he's carved out of a candle is wrapped in the maiden's scarf and held to a lantern's flame, at the ceremonial toast the light goes out of her eyes. "Lifeless sleep," the necromancer's trade, zombiedom as spiritual possession. "Before we get through this thing, we may uncover sins that even the Devil himself would be ashamed of." An immemorial incantation from the Halperin Brothers (Victor directing, Edward producing), blunt and scratchy and extraordinarily uncanny. Dancing shadows for lost loves, briefly reunited later by a diagonal split-screen. The tacit revival of colonial slavery lingers alongside a tale of marital jitters (the synchronicity with Dreyer's Vampyr has been noted), Bellamy's hollow gaze at the piano in the mountain castle points up Mayo's Svengali. Mussorgsky and Liszt are among the soundtrack's borrowed notes, though the most unforgettable sounds are sui generis: A shrieking buzzard, a scream that drowns out the cacophony of frogs in the graveyard, above all the horrible moaning of the mill machinery that devours sugar cane and undead laborers with equal indifference. "Wherever you find a superstition, you will find there is also a practice" (cf. Deren's Divine Horsemen), a plunge into the abyss breaks the spell. Tourneur and Romero expand the mythos, but not before Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. With Joseph Cawthorn, Brandon Hurst, and Clarence Muse. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |