Tag: Alfred Hitchcock

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

Rating 4/4

Foreign Correspondent was an extremely timely film. Released on August 16, 1940, Alfred Hitchcock’s film predicted the German aerial raids of London three days before they happened. When it was released in the UK they had already had.

The film had its beginning as a loose adaptation of journalist Vincent Sheean’s memoirs, but became something much more. After nearly five years of development by producer Walter Wanger and tons of rewrites the project was finally handed over to Hitchcock.

Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea) is a New York crime reporter who is assigned duties as a foreign correspondent to London. He’s to report on the conditions of Europe that will eventually lead up to World War II. His boss, Mr. Powers (Harry Davenport) is disillusioned with the correspondents previously sent over and he figures that perhaps sending a crime reporter would be best. War after all is the worst sort of organized crime. Like mafia men ordering a hit, war is often arranged by cleancut men in suits cheerfully distant from the misery and the mess they create. Much of these sort of men – become old and cynical – show a remarkable ambivalence toward war throughout the film.

His assignment is to interview a Dutch diplomat named Van Meer (Albert Basserman) who is to speak at a luncheon hosted by a Universal Peace Party. The party’s leader is one Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall) who has treasonous and very unpeacelike motivations of his own.
After Van Meer is seemingly assassinated Jones soon discovers that the diplomat had been kidnapped in secret by Fisher’s men and the assassination target was a decoy. Van Meer is one of only a few men alive who knows the truth about a secret clause in a treaty that would benefit the Nazi regime should it end up in their hands. The clause is never explicitly revealed in the film because it is not important. It is a macguffin. What is important is that Van Meer is rescued safe and sound at all costs.

Involved in the mess is Mr. Fisher’s daughter Carol (Laraine Day) who has fallen in love with Johnny and agrees to marry him. The complications that arise when she discovers her father is a traitor are obvious.

Before its climax Foreign Correspondent moves along with the same mastery of suspense that would color Hitchcock’s later films in Hollywood. One of its most famous scenes is when Johnny gets his coat caught in the gears of an old windmill and struggles to take it off before the machinery kills him. And in, what I believe, is an even more effective moment of suspense is when Carol unwittingly upsets Johnny and another agent’s plans. Johnny takes her on a trip while his colleague Scott ffolliott (George Sanders) tells Mr. Fisher she had been abducted and he needs to disclose the location of Van Meer to get her back. Carol who had not been made aware of the plan comes home early while ffolliot (the F’s are intentionally lower case) is still there threatening her father. Everything had been going so well up until then and the tension created is immediate. It left me hooked to see the outcome.

Foreign Correspondent ends with Johnny reporting over the radio that the Germans had begun bombing London. The lights and power go out, the explosions can be heard outside shaking the studio; but he goes on for the American listeners to hear. The scene was written by screenwriter Ben Hecht and it was added during post-production when all the other footage had been completed. Reports that the Germans would be bombing London soon convinced the filmmakers to replace the film’s original ending with this one.

The extreme timeliness of Foreign Correspondent’s ending made the film more than just one of the greatest political thrillers of all time. It also crafted an extremely well made and effective propaganda piece for both British and American audiences alike. Even the Nazis’ own chief of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, recognized it as such calling the movie “a masterpiece of propaganda, a first-class production which no doubt will make a certain impression upon the broad masses of the people in enemy countries.” Goebbels is now deservedly dead and so is his Third Reich. As a classic this movie and the nations that created it outlasted him so I suppose he must have been right.

The movie is also technically ahead of its time with an extremely riveting sequence depicting a plane crash. Using actual footage of a plane descending toward water, Hitchcock had it rear projected onto a screen made of rice paper with large water tanks behind it. With a push of a button the water crashes through the screen filling the cockpit set. Highly convincing and innovative for 1940. It was a technical achievement that Hitchcock remained very proud of for the rest of his life.
He was less proud of the casting, wanting Gary Cooper and Joan Fontaine for the main roles of Johnny and Carol. Producer David O. Selznick refused to loan Fontaine out and he had to settle with Laraine Day who is passable in the role.
Gary Cooper turned down the part of Johnny, but he came to regret it and later admitted he made a mistake. I am not sure he had. I really enjoy Joel McCrea’s performance in this as the good-natured and amiably sardonic Mr. Jones. Cooper is a great actor, but this role wasn’t for him.

Vertigo (1958)

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There are certain kinds of movies where not a single shot is wasted. Vertigo is one of these sorts of films. Every frame, every movement, every camera trick finely crafts together a perfect film and a fantastic work of art. Visually the film presents us with a number of memorable moments such as the famous “dolly zoom” effect when Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) is having acrophobic episodes as well as the abstract and uncanny animated nightmare sequence when his sanity finally begins to unravel. There are so many beautiful shots in this movie that I believe equally showcase the mastery of direction the cinematography uses to tell its story. When Ferguson is trying to reach out to Madeleine (Kim Novak) sitting in the carriage we see her silhouetted against the daylight outside of the stable creating an effect perfectly emphasizing, not in dialogue; but in images, Ferguson’s growing sense of isolation and impending loss regarding this woman he loves. And this is not the only example of Vertigo’s power of visual storytelling outweighing the need for dialogue. One of the best scenes in Vertigo is when Ferguson is tracking Madeleine on the behest of her husband (Tom Helmore) and throughout this sequence he silently watches her behavior without any inner monologue being needed to tell us what he is thinking.
Everything from the angle of the camera, to where the action is centered in view, to the lighting, and to the camera’s movements effectively convey all of the emotions and turmoil of Vertigo’s characters without needing to resort to dialogue to do the job for us.
Hitchcock has always had a unique skill for having the cinematography combined with his actors’ body language and expressions do the communicating. In other Hitchcock films like Rope there are scenes where we can tangibly see Rupert Cadell (also played by Jimmy Stewart) starting to piece together his suspicions without once uttering a word.
There is no better example of a successful practitioner of the “show; don’t tell” rule of filmmaking than Alfred Hitchcock.

Thematically Vertigo is commonly cited as a story of obsession and the vagaries of male aggression. This, of course, could be taken as a reflection of Hitchcock’s general possessive attitude toward women that permeated, not only his films, but also his personal life. Madeleine is a figure of feminine mystique. An alluring and sensual archetype of that other half of humanity that the masculine cannot grasp or comprehend. The feelings and personality and thoughts of Madeleine are not treated in Vertigo as a subject of much importance to the narrative and the only moments where they come to play is when they are needed to create an emotional conflict for Ferguson. But Madeleine is hardly felt to be a real live person throughout this film. She is merely the object for which the film’s subject of male possessiveness and fatal obsession is focused. Hitchcock is a master filmmaker and a fine artist, but one cannot ever accuse him of being a feminist and this attitude toward women is not an uncommon sight in his movies as I pointed out above.
The only female character in the film who seems to have any true personality and character of her own is Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) and her role is sadly wasted in the last act of the movie. Midge is a funny, charming, intelligent, and companionable woman whose affection for Ferguson is shown through a lot of bumbling, cautious approaches, and awkward mistakes. She is extremely likable and as a viewer I wanted her to win. It was my hope to see Midge succeed and win the affection of the man she adored. It was clear from the beginning that Ferguson’s feelings for Madeleine were fated for tragedy and so as a viewer I could not ever feel like I was rooting for him. His obsessive behavior is repellent and disturbing and Madeleine’s inconsistent and chaotic reactions are infuriating and frightening. Midge is the sole character in this movie who was on a path I could support. Unfortunately her character is tossed aside shortly before Ferguson is released from the hospital never to be seen again. Which I guess one cannot blame the screenplay too much for considering she was a last minute addition created by the third man hired to pen the script. But, to me, she was the most delightful character in the entire movie.

Vertigo is a tragic story. Madeleine’s intrusion into Ferguson’s life could only go in a variety of destructive paths and while the film ends in the best possible outcome (for Ferguson) it is still a painful event that he won’t recover from for a long time. Obsession and possessiveness is never a good thing, but obsession and possessiveness over a person who is toxic is how lives are destroyed and people are left feeling broken. Madeleine is probably the ultimate example of the Hitchcockian femme fatale. The aforementioned figure of feminine mystique that can break or even kill the unwary masculine other half. Are these sort of themes PC? No. But they are Hitchcock.

4 Stars