Playing hooky: A mélange of Hitchcock

 

I played hooky from my day job this week - yes, even when you  work for yourself you can feel a twinge of guilt taking the day off – because TCM’s Summer Under the Stars (it’s still summer, folks) featured an entire day of Alfred Hitchcock. The five movies I caught were early and mid-Hitchcock of which I’d only seen snippets or not seen at all. The first was The Lady Vanishes (1938). This is a classic “train” whodunit – like Murder on the Orient Express – and from the same era. A group of tourists are in the fictional European country of Bandrika (think Lichtenstein) with even an apparently made up language! One, Iris (Margaret Lockwood), is taking the train home. Across from her is Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), a governess. Iris falls asleep and when she awakes Froy is gone. And no one on the train knows her whereabouts or even doubt she was on the train in the first place. The real theme of the movie is, like George Cukor’s 1944 Gaslight, whether the central character believes her own mind or thinks she's losing it. The second movie was Foreign Correspondent (1940). The title is a joke and a poke at journalism. Joel McCrae plays John Jones, a bored New York reporter summoned by his publisher to be a “foreign correspondent” – a haughty term that Jones makes fun of. But he’s chosen because he has no pretenses and doesn’t even know a lot about international politics. But one thing he’s good at, he’s got a reporter’s nose for news and knows how to break a story. Merriment, drama – and of course romance - ensue as Jones attends galas in various European capitals and meets the corrupt grandees colluding with the enemy, fomenting a soon to be dastardly war.   The next film was Suspicion (1941), a psychological drama where a wallflower, Lina (Joan Fontaine) marries a playboy and bon vivant, Johnnie (Cary Grant). All starts well until Lina has, uh, suspicions, about where the money is coming from to finance their high-flying life. Here, Hitchcock probes the complexities of the mind and human behavior in tracing Johnnie’s amorality and sociopathology. The fourth film was Stage Fright (1950), with a complex plot starring Marlene Dietrich and Jane Wyman that plays on guile, manipulation and identity.  It’s a type of whodunit where the central character Eve (Wyman) is as fooled as we are trying to flush out the real murderer. The fifth film was The Wrong Man (1956), which had the strongest impact on me. Based on a true story, Henry Fonda is Chris Balestrero, a jazz musician. One day he’s picked up by the police because he looks like the same person who has been pulling a series of neighborhood holdups. Of course, in real life, there are countless of these cases, where someone – and it could be you or me – is arrested because of mistaken identity. Some are even convicted and spend decades in jail.  What’s powerful in the film is the realism generated by a superb supporting cast (the police detectives) and Fonda as Balestrero who finds himself in the Kafkaesque throes of the criminal justice system.