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Don't mind me, I sometimes sit like this for hours
In which despite rumors to the contrary—I owe a lot of e-mails—I am not actually dead. As evidence, I've written a movie review. Everyone knows that ghosts love the movies, but they don't think about them a lot afterward.
Foreign Correspondent (1940) is the film by Alfred Hitchcock that came out the same year as Rebecca and in consequence sort of vanished from the historical record. It's a much smaller, funnier, at once more expressionistic and less stylized film than its four-month predecessor and I liked it immensely. Its everyman hero is Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea), a New York newspaperman whose editor has lost patience with the rehashes of European headlines his foreign correspondents keep phoning in—it's August of 1939 and he can't get a straight answer on whether war starts at midnight or not. Jones will be his canary in the mine, an apolitical crime reporter currently in disgrace for punching a policeman in pursuit of a crook; newly rechristened "Huntley Haverstock" in hopes of dashing a little diplomatic polish over his rough edges1 and dispatched with no more instructions than to keep his eyes open and follow the story, Jones arrives in Amsterdam just in time to bump into the sad-eyed statesman Van Meer (Albert Bassermann, holding the line against Fascism) and then watch him die in a crowd of umbrellas, shot point-blank by a smiling photographer. Or perhaps not. Pursuing the assassin into the placid countryside, Jones finds a brisk gang of thugs and a drugged Van Meer in a windmill straight out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, its sails turning to the tune of international conspiracy. Unfortunately, he is in a Hitchcock film; by the time he gets back with the police, there's no one home but a sleeping tramp and nobody believes Jones, not his fellow-reporter ffolliott, not the pacifist Carol Fisher (Laraine Day), not her father Stephen (Herbert Marshall), whose Universal Peace Party had invited Van Meer to speak on the day he was seen to die.2 Plot ensues!
But it's faster and loopier than any of Hitchcock's other wrong-man movies, The 39 Steps (1935) or The Lady Vanishes (1938) included; it's a thriller, but the universe in which it takes place belongs to the screwball comedy. The deadbeat correspondent Jones is sent to replace is Robert Benchley, dolefully sober and even more glum when sloshed, hooking up with bottle blondes instead of interviewing diplomats and tying up the office lines playing phone tag with his bookie. Day's Carol Fisher looks like the kind of romantic lead whose challenge will be conquered by chemistry in the final frames, but less than halfway through the film she about-faces both the audience and Jones by knowing exactly what she wants and not bothering to play shy.3 ("You see," Jones begins diffidently, "I love you and I want to marry you." Carol's matter-of-fact response almost cuts him off: "I love you and I want to marry you." He blinks, taken aback: "Well, that cuts down our love scene quite a bit, doesn't it?") Edmund Gwenn pops up as a cheery little Cockney assassin, shoving Jones into traffic and then rescuing him with profuse apologies the next moment, leading him round the tower of Westminster Cathedral in hopes of knocking him out a window, if only an infernal gaggle of tourists and bored schoolboys would clear out of the way. Nothing in the plot can explain the Latvian with eyes like Marty Feldman, but he leers endearingly and eventually the audience is as unsurprised as Jones to find him everywhere from embassy lunches to the ladies' washroom. And suddenly a moment of deadly seriousness slews up out of the narrative and you blink through the fine shattered glass at danger, pain that is ugly and undisguised, loyalties that are not as clear-cut as the headlines or the words being said.
This split, startling quality is mostly the reason (aside from the fact that he's played by George Sanders) that ffolliott, not Jones, feels to me like one of the two presiding spirits of the film. He's a chronic smartass. His good sport's manners and the gentlemanly wryness with which he deploys his one-liners keep him from getting on anyone's nerves, but from his first few entrances it's hard to tell whether he regards this whole looming web of fifth-column espionage as anything more than a lark, a boy's own game of imagination. Then he reappears with information that even Jones hasn't been able to lay hands on and the new, though no less ironic seriousness with which he applies himself to their investigations both heartens the viewer and raises the disturbing question of just how innocent of this whole business he is, especially when we watch him initiate a bit of counterterrorism—convincing a father that his daughter has been kidnapped—without turning a hair more than when a strange American barged into his car and told him to follow that taxi. (Fans of Hitchcock wouldn't be surprised: Rebecca saw him as a handsome heel of a cousin, seducing and utterly selfish.) And when at last he finds himself in a situation even his devil-may-care motormouth can't spirit him out of and his brave face begins to crumple, it's the kind of sinking jolt that not even Joel McCrea almost electrocuting himself on a neon sign as he edges his way out the fifth-floor window of a hotel can provide. Under the zip and shadow-lit crackle of Foreign Correspondent is something urgent and genuinely uncertain, because Hitchcock wrote and directed the film in expectation of the bombing of London (which began the week after it opened) and its final scene is a plea to end American neutrality (which would take more than another year). McCrea has the last words; though they are not quite as good as Leslie Howard's in Pimpernel Smith (1941), they still have some of the same charge of calling on the future, hoping that time will turn fiction into prophecy. But whatever the monogram on his luggage, Johnny Jones remains what he seemed when we met him, a straightforward, slightly single-track man whose sense of justice will get him into a fight with authority every time. The chiaroscuro world is sardonic, scareable, ambivalent ffolliott's.
The other presiding spirit is Stephen Fisher, who is revealed around the sixty-minute mark as the man behind Van Meer's kidnapping and the attempts on Jones' life. He seems then a relatively standard Hitchcock villain, like Professor Jordan from The 39 Steps or North by Northwest's Phillip Vandamm—well-mannered, well-respected, never at a loss for words, the kind of man who will employ violence but rarely practice it himself, whose never-stated motives, however shadily connected and destructive in their aims, are unlikely to involve anything so sordid as personal feeling. He loves his daughter enough to be dismayed when he realizes what Jones' death will cost her, but he doesn't cancel the hit. He lies to her as effortlessly as to Jones or ffolliott, the constituents of the Universal Peace Party or the editor of the New York Globe. He's not going to leave his only child behind in London on the eve of war, but it's only when he realizes that there's no safety in America that he begins to talk to her. What he says is extraordinary:
"Carol, I've got to talk to you. I don't want to, but I've got to. It's the hardest part of the whole thing, talking to you now. I don't mind about the rest, really . . . I'm to be arrested when we land. As a spy. Shipped back to London. That's quite all right, except—just the one phase of it. You. That's why I've got to talk to you [. . .] It might help you, afterwards. First, about yourself. My deceiving you. I had to, you know—I didn't want you involved in any part of it, because you're English—half English, anyway—I'm not, I'm just coated with an English accent. It's a very thin coat. I fought for my country in my heart in a very difficult way, because sometimes it's harder to fight dishonorably than nobly, in the open. And I've used my country's methods, because I was born with them. I don't intend on making this sort of plea to the court-martial. I'm making it only to my daughter whom I've loved, dearly, and before whom I feel a little ashamed."
Which is on the one hand the kind of plot reveal that can't have improved the lives of many perfectly nice British citizens who hadn't yet gotten around to changing their last names or relocating their roots to Sussex—and between his participation in the torture of Van Meer and our greater knowledge of Nazism, it is difficult to root for Fisher's success—and yet the way his sure-footed public speaker's voice suddenly stutters, stumbles as if in spite of itself into lines like a very thin coat draws for us in that moment an entire history of assimilation, alienation, and troubled allegiance that is not in the character type and there's no going back: from that point on, Fisher is a more problematic and more human character than the hero, Jones. In the end, the reporter is an allegorical figure: good-hearted, two-fisted America if it can be shocked out of its ignorance and isolationism. The same goes for the few other Americans in the script, like the infuriating ship's captain who adheres so strictly to his country's neutrality that he puts a radio blackout on the survivors he's rescued from a plane downed by enemy action. With Fisher, there may be no political argument to draw from his mix of shadows and odd flickering integrity, except perhaps that being a traitor to the country your child was brought up in is not a particularly good legacy to leave her.4 He's standing in for no one but himself.
So it's a propaganda piece, but the way Powell and Pressburger made them, with generous doses of weird; it is capable of holding both nightmare images like the assassination (a wall of wet black slate beetle-shells and all the people in a strange crowd have no faces) and dialogue with the wry seltzer snap of the best comedies ("It's really very exciting, being present at the christening of an American newspaper correspondent. Shouldn't we break a bottle of champagne or something over him?") and I have not even mentioned the action sequence that not only holds up against the special effects of today, but which I found more arbitrary and more convincing than any number of shaky-cam CGI fireballs I've seen of late. I hadn't even heard of the movie before two days ago. I love these strange, lesser-light stories, with so much more room for different tones and dimensions and moments taken for their own sake. It's not the style I associate with Hitchcock's most famous films. When I get to it, I fear I will be disappointed by Psycho.
1. One of the film's running gags is that the name never sticks and he's promptly out-pretensioned anyway by the second lead, Scott ffolliott (George Sanders), who introduces himself during a car chase with the clarification, "With a double f . . . And they're both small f's. One of my ancestors had his head chopped off by Henry VIII and his wife dropped the capital letter to commemorate the occasion."
2. A tweak that meant nothing to me until I read a review of Jeremy Lewis' Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family in the Economist this afternoon: "Relief work with the Quakers in Russia and Germany and activity on the left wing of the Labour Party were followed by a switch to the right when he signed up to the British People's Party and the Peace Pledge Union."
3. Both my mother and I formed the independent impression that she had previously been romantically attached to ffolliott, thus lending some of the later scenes a certain OT3.
4. I know it's based on a short story, but I still think it is possible to view Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) as a revisiting and elaboration on this theme.
Foreign Correspondent (1940) is the film by Alfred Hitchcock that came out the same year as Rebecca and in consequence sort of vanished from the historical record. It's a much smaller, funnier, at once more expressionistic and less stylized film than its four-month predecessor and I liked it immensely. Its everyman hero is Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea), a New York newspaperman whose editor has lost patience with the rehashes of European headlines his foreign correspondents keep phoning in—it's August of 1939 and he can't get a straight answer on whether war starts at midnight or not. Jones will be his canary in the mine, an apolitical crime reporter currently in disgrace for punching a policeman in pursuit of a crook; newly rechristened "Huntley Haverstock" in hopes of dashing a little diplomatic polish over his rough edges1 and dispatched with no more instructions than to keep his eyes open and follow the story, Jones arrives in Amsterdam just in time to bump into the sad-eyed statesman Van Meer (Albert Bassermann, holding the line against Fascism) and then watch him die in a crowd of umbrellas, shot point-blank by a smiling photographer. Or perhaps not. Pursuing the assassin into the placid countryside, Jones finds a brisk gang of thugs and a drugged Van Meer in a windmill straight out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, its sails turning to the tune of international conspiracy. Unfortunately, he is in a Hitchcock film; by the time he gets back with the police, there's no one home but a sleeping tramp and nobody believes Jones, not his fellow-reporter ffolliott, not the pacifist Carol Fisher (Laraine Day), not her father Stephen (Herbert Marshall), whose Universal Peace Party had invited Van Meer to speak on the day he was seen to die.2 Plot ensues!
But it's faster and loopier than any of Hitchcock's other wrong-man movies, The 39 Steps (1935) or The Lady Vanishes (1938) included; it's a thriller, but the universe in which it takes place belongs to the screwball comedy. The deadbeat correspondent Jones is sent to replace is Robert Benchley, dolefully sober and even more glum when sloshed, hooking up with bottle blondes instead of interviewing diplomats and tying up the office lines playing phone tag with his bookie. Day's Carol Fisher looks like the kind of romantic lead whose challenge will be conquered by chemistry in the final frames, but less than halfway through the film she about-faces both the audience and Jones by knowing exactly what she wants and not bothering to play shy.3 ("You see," Jones begins diffidently, "I love you and I want to marry you." Carol's matter-of-fact response almost cuts him off: "I love you and I want to marry you." He blinks, taken aback: "Well, that cuts down our love scene quite a bit, doesn't it?") Edmund Gwenn pops up as a cheery little Cockney assassin, shoving Jones into traffic and then rescuing him with profuse apologies the next moment, leading him round the tower of Westminster Cathedral in hopes of knocking him out a window, if only an infernal gaggle of tourists and bored schoolboys would clear out of the way. Nothing in the plot can explain the Latvian with eyes like Marty Feldman, but he leers endearingly and eventually the audience is as unsurprised as Jones to find him everywhere from embassy lunches to the ladies' washroom. And suddenly a moment of deadly seriousness slews up out of the narrative and you blink through the fine shattered glass at danger, pain that is ugly and undisguised, loyalties that are not as clear-cut as the headlines or the words being said.
This split, startling quality is mostly the reason (aside from the fact that he's played by George Sanders) that ffolliott, not Jones, feels to me like one of the two presiding spirits of the film. He's a chronic smartass. His good sport's manners and the gentlemanly wryness with which he deploys his one-liners keep him from getting on anyone's nerves, but from his first few entrances it's hard to tell whether he regards this whole looming web of fifth-column espionage as anything more than a lark, a boy's own game of imagination. Then he reappears with information that even Jones hasn't been able to lay hands on and the new, though no less ironic seriousness with which he applies himself to their investigations both heartens the viewer and raises the disturbing question of just how innocent of this whole business he is, especially when we watch him initiate a bit of counterterrorism—convincing a father that his daughter has been kidnapped—without turning a hair more than when a strange American barged into his car and told him to follow that taxi. (Fans of Hitchcock wouldn't be surprised: Rebecca saw him as a handsome heel of a cousin, seducing and utterly selfish.) And when at last he finds himself in a situation even his devil-may-care motormouth can't spirit him out of and his brave face begins to crumple, it's the kind of sinking jolt that not even Joel McCrea almost electrocuting himself on a neon sign as he edges his way out the fifth-floor window of a hotel can provide. Under the zip and shadow-lit crackle of Foreign Correspondent is something urgent and genuinely uncertain, because Hitchcock wrote and directed the film in expectation of the bombing of London (which began the week after it opened) and its final scene is a plea to end American neutrality (which would take more than another year). McCrea has the last words; though they are not quite as good as Leslie Howard's in Pimpernel Smith (1941), they still have some of the same charge of calling on the future, hoping that time will turn fiction into prophecy. But whatever the monogram on his luggage, Johnny Jones remains what he seemed when we met him, a straightforward, slightly single-track man whose sense of justice will get him into a fight with authority every time. The chiaroscuro world is sardonic, scareable, ambivalent ffolliott's.
The other presiding spirit is Stephen Fisher, who is revealed around the sixty-minute mark as the man behind Van Meer's kidnapping and the attempts on Jones' life. He seems then a relatively standard Hitchcock villain, like Professor Jordan from The 39 Steps or North by Northwest's Phillip Vandamm—well-mannered, well-respected, never at a loss for words, the kind of man who will employ violence but rarely practice it himself, whose never-stated motives, however shadily connected and destructive in their aims, are unlikely to involve anything so sordid as personal feeling. He loves his daughter enough to be dismayed when he realizes what Jones' death will cost her, but he doesn't cancel the hit. He lies to her as effortlessly as to Jones or ffolliott, the constituents of the Universal Peace Party or the editor of the New York Globe. He's not going to leave his only child behind in London on the eve of war, but it's only when he realizes that there's no safety in America that he begins to talk to her. What he says is extraordinary:
"Carol, I've got to talk to you. I don't want to, but I've got to. It's the hardest part of the whole thing, talking to you now. I don't mind about the rest, really . . . I'm to be arrested when we land. As a spy. Shipped back to London. That's quite all right, except—just the one phase of it. You. That's why I've got to talk to you [. . .] It might help you, afterwards. First, about yourself. My deceiving you. I had to, you know—I didn't want you involved in any part of it, because you're English—half English, anyway—I'm not, I'm just coated with an English accent. It's a very thin coat. I fought for my country in my heart in a very difficult way, because sometimes it's harder to fight dishonorably than nobly, in the open. And I've used my country's methods, because I was born with them. I don't intend on making this sort of plea to the court-martial. I'm making it only to my daughter whom I've loved, dearly, and before whom I feel a little ashamed."
Which is on the one hand the kind of plot reveal that can't have improved the lives of many perfectly nice British citizens who hadn't yet gotten around to changing their last names or relocating their roots to Sussex—and between his participation in the torture of Van Meer and our greater knowledge of Nazism, it is difficult to root for Fisher's success—and yet the way his sure-footed public speaker's voice suddenly stutters, stumbles as if in spite of itself into lines like a very thin coat draws for us in that moment an entire history of assimilation, alienation, and troubled allegiance that is not in the character type and there's no going back: from that point on, Fisher is a more problematic and more human character than the hero, Jones. In the end, the reporter is an allegorical figure: good-hearted, two-fisted America if it can be shocked out of its ignorance and isolationism. The same goes for the few other Americans in the script, like the infuriating ship's captain who adheres so strictly to his country's neutrality that he puts a radio blackout on the survivors he's rescued from a plane downed by enemy action. With Fisher, there may be no political argument to draw from his mix of shadows and odd flickering integrity, except perhaps that being a traitor to the country your child was brought up in is not a particularly good legacy to leave her.4 He's standing in for no one but himself.
So it's a propaganda piece, but the way Powell and Pressburger made them, with generous doses of weird; it is capable of holding both nightmare images like the assassination (a wall of wet black slate beetle-shells and all the people in a strange crowd have no faces) and dialogue with the wry seltzer snap of the best comedies ("It's really very exciting, being present at the christening of an American newspaper correspondent. Shouldn't we break a bottle of champagne or something over him?") and I have not even mentioned the action sequence that not only holds up against the special effects of today, but which I found more arbitrary and more convincing than any number of shaky-cam CGI fireballs I've seen of late. I hadn't even heard of the movie before two days ago. I love these strange, lesser-light stories, with so much more room for different tones and dimensions and moments taken for their own sake. It's not the style I associate with Hitchcock's most famous films. When I get to it, I fear I will be disappointed by Psycho.
1. One of the film's running gags is that the name never sticks and he's promptly out-pretensioned anyway by the second lead, Scott ffolliott (George Sanders), who introduces himself during a car chase with the clarification, "With a double f . . . And they're both small f's. One of my ancestors had his head chopped off by Henry VIII and his wife dropped the capital letter to commemorate the occasion."
2. A tweak that meant nothing to me until I read a review of Jeremy Lewis' Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family in the Economist this afternoon: "Relief work with the Quakers in Russia and Germany and activity on the left wing of the Labour Party were followed by a switch to the right when he signed up to the British People's Party and the Peace Pledge Union."
3. Both my mother and I formed the independent impression that she had previously been romantically attached to ffolliott, thus lending some of the later scenes a certain OT3.
4. I know it's based on a short story, but I still think it is possible to view Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) as a revisiting and elaboration on this theme.
no subject
Fascinating--this sounds truly worth watching.
no subject
It is not a perfect film, but it certainly deserves to be better known than it seems to be. And streamable from Netflix, in case that's of use to you.
no subject