strutting the stage of his own
imagination
by Douglas Messerli
Sidney Gillat and Joan Harrison (screenplay, based on
the novel by Daphne Du Maurier, with dialogue and continuity by Sidney Gillat,
J. P. Priestley and Alma Reville), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Jamaica Inn / 1939
Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn is
a movie that displays a great deal of potential for proving itself an excellent
period piece, with plenty of moody Cornish waves lapping upon the shore, ship
wrecks, pirates, a haunting inn within which is trapped a poor abused housewife,
and a young beauty, Mary Yellen (Maureen O’Hara) who has innocently stumbled
into this brutal landscape. If only the local wealthy landowner, Sir Humphrey
Pengallen (Charles Laughton) had been tethered and kept under the director’s
lock and key, Hitchcock’s last English-made film might have turned out quite
wonderfully—although it’s clear from the start that Hitchcock was not one
little bit comfortable with creating such a period piece.
If only we, the audience,
had had a few moments to assimilate the fact that the lovely colleen, Mary, has
suddenly been swept up into the activities of this pirate’s gathering place;
and if only Hitchcock might have been allowed the opportunity for a bit of
purposeful obfuscation so that we might wonder whether or not the gentle
Patience’s (Marie Ney) husband, Joss Merlyn (Leslie Banks) was as evil as he
first appears, we might have been surprised, and accordingly entertained, by
the obvious turn of events. But Laughton keeps insisting on showing up, again
and again, stumbling through every possible dramatic encounter so that it’s
hard for the others to even to keep up. Within a few seconds the pirates,
suspecting someone of plundering their own plunder, pick upon the newest member
of their group, Jem Traherne (Robert Newton), and, given that they find actual
money on his body, determine to hang him on the gallows of the place.
By this time, of course, we
realize that all those things that Hitchcock does so well—sweeping up his audience
in a confusion regarding innocence and evil, the characters’ inevitable being
caught up in the events that are larger than they can comprehend—have been
rendered inconsequential. When Traherne and Mary Yellen show up on Pengallen’s
doorstep demanding justice, we absolutely know their hopes will soon be dashed.
Indeed, events have so quickly whipped up that hardly has Traherne presented
his credentials to the corrupt local authority, than Mary is forced to speed
off once again to Jamaica Inn to warn her aunt (so quickly in my Netflix tape,
that the incidence was, let us hope accidently, cut). It’s hardly surprising
and thoroughly unexciting that Pengallen pretends to have himself tied up with
Traherne by his the landowner’s unwitting cohorts, only to easily break his
binds, and speed off (with the beautiful Mary as his potential “princess”) to a
new life in France.
Los Angeles, June 26, 2015
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