Yesterday morning I ran Young and Innocent, the 1937 Hitchcock British film I’d already had on Beta, but which I’d just got on VHS in the same package as Rich and Strange. Young and Innocent is a masterpiece, though I can well imagine why it threw audiences in 1937 — there’s no espionage, no international intrigue and only one murder, which takes place at the beginning of the film (and, true to form, Hitchcock reveals the killer at the very outset of the plot, including a giveaway characteristic — an uncontrollably twitching eye — a clue that, in typical Hitchcock fashion, is revealed to the audience from the beginning but is unknown to the characters until about three-fourths of the way through the film’s plot) and is not even shown on screen. This film was based, very loosely, on Josephine Tey’s A Shilling for Candles, though Hitch took little from the book but the character names, a vivid montage of newspaper headlines announcing the murder of the famous film star Christine Clay, and the idea of the innocent man and the police chief’s daughter locked together (metaphorically this time, not literally as in The 39 Steps) in a chase for the real killer while the police chase them. (Tey’s novel is too rambling and diffuse to have been filmable as written, but later she wrote a masterpiece, Brat Farrar, that would have made a wonderful Hitchcock movie; with its theme of imposture, its hidden murder and its vertiginous climax on the clifftops of Dover, it practically reads like a Hitchcock script — and Cary Grant would have been ideal casting for the dual role of the male leads.) What Hitchcock did film faithfully was the chase of man, woman and car (an old Morris Minor which is so endearing it practically becomes another character in both book and film, though Hitch and his screenwriters — Charles Bennett, Edwin Greenwood and Anthony Armstrong — should have kept the car’s nickname, “Tinny,” by which the girl who owns it — and is the only person who knows how to drive it — calls it in the novel).
It’s an oddly pastoral film, full of the subtle beauties of
the English countryside (photographed, in one of those great black-and-white
jobs from the 1930’s that questions the whole idea that anyone would want to make a film in color, by Bernard Knowles) and a
slowly and beautifully developing relationship between the leads — including an
overbearing performance by Derrick De Marney as the innocent man on the run and
the remarkable Nova Pilbeam as the police chief’s daughter who helps him.
Pilbeam’s performance has the same kind of edginess and forthrightness of Bette
Davis’ work of the period, and one wonders what happened to her after this
(she’d played the daughter in the 1934 version of The Man Who Knew
Too Much, and Young and Innocent was her first adult role — and she was among the
actresses considered for Rebecca,
though for that film Hitchcock insisted she was all wrong as a type; which she
would have been — if she had been
in the position of the second Mrs. Max de Winter, she would have grabbed her
husband by the scruff of the neck and burned all that crap that reminded both
of them of Rebecca!). Donald Spoto’s book has a long and loving analysis of Young
and Innocent, pointing out the motifs of
vision (the hero steals his lawyer’s glasses to escape, the murderer has a
twitch in both eyes, the children at the party where hero and heroine are
socially trapped play blind man’s bluff and the heroine’s younger brothers
fantasize the murderer lying dead on a beach with birds pecking out his eyes —
a vision Hitchcock would later realize on screen in The Birds — and Hitchcock’s cameo appearance shows him
wrestling with a small snapshot camera, trying to get a picture of the fleeing
fugitive: an ironic reflection of his actual role in staging this entire story
and using much more sophisticated cameras to record it as a film!) and of
disguise (the murder victim is an actress, and the murderer is her secret
husband; the murderer performs in blackface as a band drummer; and the hero,
who knew Christine Clay and had an affair with her after selling her a story
for one of her films, disguises himself to escape; “Everyone deals in creating
illusion,” Spoto notes). He also points out at least two shots Hitch repeated
in later films: the vertiginous rescue of Pilbeam by De Marney after the
abandoned mine they’re hiding out in caves in and he has to pull her to safety
from a gaping pit (repeated with Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and Mount Rushmore
in North by Northwest) and the
seagulls who circle the dead body of Christine Clay as she floats to shore on
the beach below the house where she was killed (another forerunner of The
Birds). — 3/13/95
=====
Afterwards we went back to Charles’ place and ran Young
and Innocent (which I had on tape as part
of the two-pack that also contained Rich and Strange), which remains a marvelous movie — oddly pastoral and
bucolic through much of its length, even though it contains a murder plot, and
while Hitchcock may only have used about one-third of his source novel
(Josephine Tey’s A Shilling for Candles) he preserved Tey’s style,
notably her emphasis on character development rather than the mystery itself. —
12/10/95
•••••
Young and Innocent,
the film I chose for us to watch last night, turned out to be one of Alfred
Hitchcock’s best British movies. I’d seen it several times before (the first
time was in the mid-1970’s at the Cento Cedar Cinema in San Francisco) but it
came across as better now than it has before. It’s ostensibly based on the 1936
novel A Shilling for Candles by
Josephine Tey (her real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh but she wrote plays under
the pen name “Gordon Daviot” — continuing the tradition of women authors using
male aliases begun by George Eliot and George Sand — and mysteries as
“Josephine Tey,” including The Daughter of Time — her marvelous re-examination of Richard III, whom
she’d already tried to rehabilitate in the “Gordon Daviot” play Dickon, in the guise of a mystery novel; as well as Brat
Farrar, an impersonation tale that
Hitchcock should have filmed with
Cary Grant in the lead[s]), but in fact Hitchcock and his writers (Charles
Bennett — who was to Hitch what Robert Riskin was to Frank Capra and Dudley
Nichols to John Ford — Edwin Greenwood and Anthony Armstrong, “screen play”;
Gerald Savory, “dialogue”; and Alma Reville, a.k.a. Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock,
“continuity”) only used about one-third of what Tey had written and changed the
identity of the murderer as revealed at the end. Both book and film start off
with the murder by strangling of international film star Christine Clay (Pamela
Carme), a British woman who achieved success in Hollywood and then returned
home after having secured a Nevada divorce from her British husband, who in the
opening scene of the movie is shown berating her for her affairs with “boys” —
i.e., much younger men. He also says that since the British courts don’t
recognize a Nevada divorce, he still considers himself her husband — he says he
raised her out of a chorus line and boosted her to stardom, only to be thrown
aside — and we get an extreme close-up of his face to show that he has an
uncontrollable twitch in his eyes that manifests itself at times of high stress.
The next thing we see is a scene at a beach in which Christine Clay’s body
washes up on shore, and one of her young boyfriends, Robert Tisdall (Derrick de
Marney), finds her body. Then he goes for help, thinking she’s merely drowned
instead of having been thrown into the water after she’s already been killed,
and in the meantime the body is found again by two young women out for a dip in the beach. They
report to the police and Robert instantly becomes suspect number one, done in
not only by the police looking for the most obvious culprit (Christine was
strangled with the belt of a raincoat Tisdall formerly owned; he says it was
stolen while he was at a countryside truck stop but of course the cops don’t
believe him) but also by the wretchedly incompetent attorney the court appoints
to represent him. Robert escapes from the courthouse during his arraignment —
there’s a marvelously ironic Hitchcock cameo appearance showing him outside the
courthouse, fumbling with a cheap box camera trying to take a picture of the
fugitive (the irony, of course, is that Hitchcock in real life was staging this
entire story in order to photograph it and turn it into a commercial movie that
audiences would pay to see) — and, ironically, the only person willing to help
him prove his innocence is Erica Burgoyne (Nova Pilbeam, top-billed — the Brits
were really trying to make a star
out of her; this was her second Hitchcock film, after playing the teenage
daughter who’s kidnapped in the original version of The Man Who Knew
Too Much, and when Hitchcock came to the
U.S. in 1939 to make Rebecca he
tested her for the female lead but decided she was too self-assured, not
vulnerable enough, for that role), daughter of the police chief (Percy Marmont,
in his third Hitchcock film after
Rich and Strange and The
Secret Agent) whose department arrested him
in the first place. Erica drives an old, decrepit Morris car called “Tinny”
— in Tey’s novel the car practically becomes a character on its own — so
old it needs to be hand-cranked to get it to start, and so decrepit the choke
is controlled by a string she loops over the steering wheel when it isn’t
needed — and she and Robert do a surprisingly beautiful and pastoral journey
through the British countryside during which she matures as a woman, she and
Robert fall in love, and they ultimately trace the missing raincoat to Will
(Edward Rigby), a homeless china-mender who was given the coat, sans belt, by Christine’s actual killer. Robert is ready
to give up and turn himself in when Erica, going through the pockets of the
coat after they’ve recovered it from Will, finds a matchbook from the Grand
Hotel, a beachside resort, and deduces that the murderer is someone who’s
either staying or working at the Grand Hotel.
The Gaumont-British studio, where
Hitchcock filmed Young and Innocent,
had just gone through a major reorganization before the movie was produced —
Hitchcock’s original producer, Michael Balcon, had just jumped from the company
to head a British subsidiary MGM had launched (mainly to sign Robert Donat, the
international star who refused to work anywhere but his native England, so MGM
set up a British operation to be able to put him under contract and use him at
home), and Hitchcock found himself working in a smaller studio than he was used
to and with a significantly lower production budget. Instead of scrimping on
the entire movie, he decided to shoot the works on two openly spectacular
scenes and really hold down costs
on the remainder — which accounts for the wretchedly obvious model work on the
two shots of passing trains and the painted backdrops we see in several scenes.
One of the big scenes is when Will tells Robert and Erica they can hide out
from the police by driving into the cave of an old, disused mine — only the
mine’s floor caves in under the weight of Erica’s car as soon as they drive in,
and Robert has to rescue her from certain death in a scene Hitchcock duplicated
almost exactly, setup for setup, 22 years later with Cary Grant and Eva Marie
Saint in North by Northwest. The other
is towards the end, in which Erica has bought a dress outfit for Will (who’s
complaining that the new boots are pinching his feet because he hasn’t had a
chance to cut holes in them to accommodate his corns the way he had with his
old ones) so the two of them can enter the Grand Hotel and search for the
killer. In a scene that required Hitchcock to use two soundstages and build an
extensive Grand Hotel interior set that extended between them, he does a long
camera track from Will and Erica walking through the hotel lobby onto the dance
floor of the hotel’s nightclub, then keeps the camera moving towards the
bandstand — where a white singer is holding forth in front of a band performing
in blackface — and, as the singer belts out a song singing the praises of his
band’s drummer (“No One Can Like the Drummer Man”), the camera keeps traveling
until we get an extreme close-up of the drummer’s face, and we see his eyes
start to twitch. It’s typical of Hitchcock that we get the information that the drummer, Guy (George
Curzon), is the killer well before the characters do — and that he has Guy
recognize Will before Will recognizes Guy. The sight of Will (“outed” by a lap
dissolve that penetrates the evening dress he has on to the appearance of the
tramp we saw in the previous scenes) freaks Guy out; he tries turning away from
the stage and playing a xylophone (a frequent double for drummers who also
wanted to play a melody instrument) in the middle of a number (for which he’s
upbraided by the bandleader: “I pay someone else to make the arrangements”),
then during an intermission he belts down a large number of pills (explaining
to one of his bandmates they’re a prescription to control his eye twitch), and
when the show starts again he freaks out completely, becomes nonfunctional,
collapses on the bandstand and, when he comes to, blurts out a confession to
Erica, Will, Robert (who’s just come on the scene) and the cops in the audience
who’d come there looking to arrest Robert. It’s not clear whether Guy lives to stand
trial or dies on the spot, but Robert is exonerated and the police chief asks
his daughter to invite her new young man to dinner.
Young and
Innocent is a fascinating movie, partly
because so much of it is quiet and pastoral in mood (it’s hard to remember that
both these “young and innocent” people are fleeing the police because he’s
accused of a murder he didn’t commit), partly because there are scenes that
anticipate later Hitchcock works (like the seagulls that cluster around
Christine Clay’s body on the beach — Hitchcock wanted to include the scene Tey
described of the gulls pecking out the dead Christine Clay’s eyes, which would
have brought this film even closer to The Birds, but the British Board of Film Censors nixed it),
and partly because of the intense acting of Nova Pilbeam. It’s typical of
Hitchcock’s subtlety that Derrick de Marney’s character comes off as an
obnoxious little pill (he received money from Christine Clay, though he says it
was payment for a film story he sold her, and he was left 1,200 pounds in her
will, which the cops think was his motive for killing her) and it is Pilbeam’s
character who takes command of the investigation. Wearing the blonde hair bob
that was the hallmark of Hitchcock’s later “cool blondes,” Pilbeam turns in a
quite daring performance for 1937, a convincing feminist heroine who takes
command of her boyfriend’s exoneration and bucks up his spirits when he’s ready
to give up and turn himself in. She’s a quite remarkable actress and it’s a
real pity she didn’t become more of a major star (her next project was, of all
things, an experimental TV-movie for the BBC called Prison Without
Bars). The U.S. distributor of Young
and Innocent changed the title to The
Girl Was Young (which makes no sense at
all) and cut one of Hitchcock’s most audacious scenes — in which Robert’s and
Erica’s escape is delayed by a courtesy call she puts in to her aunt (Mary
Clare) and she gets roped into a game of blind man’s bluff at the birthday
party of her nephew; it doesn’t really add to the plot but it screws up the
tension in the way Hitchcock was so fond of doing, and it helps to have it
there. Young and Innocent was
considered a minor Hitchcock at the time (and certainly the course of the de
Marney-Pilbeam relationship mirrors that between Robert Donat and Madeleine
Carroll in The 39 Steps two years
earlier in his canon), and when David O. Selznick’s British representative saw
it he thought it was a bad movie and sent a memo to Selznick saying he wondered
if Selznick would really want to
hire its director — to which Selznick didn’t reply until he’d seen the film
himself, after which he cabled, “Regret to say I do not agree with you.” —
5/30/14
