THE HITCHCOCK PROJECT: #6 - The Ring

In a sense, this is a horror story.

It began innocently enough. Watch every movie Alfred Hitchcock ever directed, in order, in concert with reading a biography of the man. Then write about it.

It's the last one that seems to have tripped me up. The last entry in The Hitchcock Project went live in January 2010. Yeesh.

Believe me, I've got excuses. Had a kid. Lost a job. Occasional family tragedies. A lot of things will throw you off your game. (Case in point: Do NOT ask me how my novel's coming.)

But here's the thing, the key element that wrecks all my protests about how hard it's been.

I kept watching the movies.

As I write this, I've just completed the 40th film from Sir Alfred's list of 52. My blog list goes up to #7. (And that's with three films skipped over.) I'm watching. I'm reading. I'm just not writing.

Boo.

No, really. When my wife discovered that I hadn't blogged for so long about the Hitchcock experience, I thought she was going to brain me with the DVD player. Which would be just desserts for making her sit through Under Capricorn.

The catching up begins now. This will not be easy, as I've honestly forgotten a lot about some of the earlier films. (Particularly the ones I didn't like so much.) But I'll do my best. Because I started this. And by god, I am going to finish it. I just hope I can catch up to myself with the writing before I actually finish all the movies.

We're resuming our catalog in a strange place. Wasn't the last one I posted #7? Yes. Yes, I did. And a funny thing about that. I went on at length in that piece about how I had to skip the sixth entry, Downhill, because I couldn't find it. Which is weird, because that's the exact same thing I said when explaining why I skipped #4. The hell?

Let's clarify: Downhill was #4. The real #6? This flick right here, a movie which can be summarized with the extremely unusual tagline, "Alfred Hitchcock's boxing picture."

Let's embellish that a little though. The Ring is the tale of a boxer known as "One-Round" Jack. Jack (portrayed by the lady-lipped Carl Brisson) works in a circus, where he can knock out any yahoo who challenges him within three minutes. This has earned him the respect of his fellow carnies. You know, like the Negro in the dunking booth. Seriously. (Also, the n-word shows up about halfway through the film. For the love of god, ancestors. Isn't it enough to be racist? Must you be STUPIDLY racist?) It's also won Jack the love of the Mabel, the ticket-taker. The credits identify Lillian Hall-Davis as "Mabel, the Girl." Yes, THE Girl. Because there can only be one.

Complications ensue when Bob Corby, the Australian champ, shows up at the fair incognito, takes the challenge, and survives the round. It's a sad day for Jack, but fate twists early on, when Bob -- so impressed by Jack's stamina and power -- hires him on as a sparring partner. What luck! Jack and Mabel have been saving up to get married, so this is a wonderful turn of events.

Or is it. Turns out the Thunder from Down Under has a yen for Mabel (she is THE Girl, after all), and once she and Jack move into Bob's circle of champagne riches and caviar dreams, it's only a matter of time before Jack's jealousy pushes her into the arms of his rival, leaving Jack desolate. There's only one way to exact revenge and win his girl back. He'll have to go toe-to-toe, in...THE RING.

Does my tone seem overly dismissive? It should. Think about the last movie you saw where the plot seemed contrived, the characters were clichés, and you just weren't impressed. Well, look, they haven't even invented sound yet, and already they're making movies that are hopelessly predictable. Think you know the movie's going to turn out? You're right. The plot's turns are loudly telegraphed, and to make matters worse, this is a silent film, so nothing is played for subtlety. Every emotion is spelled out in capital letters on the actors' faces. Think Bob is a stand-up guy who just can't help himself around the pretty Mabel? Not if you've been watching the movie, you don't. Actor Ian Hunter (decades before fronting Mott the Hoople) broadcasts evil with every raised eyebrow.

A secret joy of the movie, then, is to watch the lead actors trumpet their thoughts like mimes. Hall-Davis is the very picture of dread from the moment Bob Corby begins to put the moves on her. It's kind of weird, because to look at her, you get the sense that Mabel doesn't want to cheat on Jack, doesn't feel especially turned on by Bob, but just feels completely helpless to do anything about it. Like being faithful is completely out of her hands. (It's in the script, after all.) Meanwhile, Brisson is more of an innocent than Oliver Twist. At every turn, he is shocked, SHOCKED by life's twists and turns. He stands proudly his philandering wife, not a clue in the world that she's straying. Then, when he learns the truth, oh, the deep, deep hurt. She could have kicked his dog and not made matters worse.

That leaves Hitchcock, and he's obviously still trying stuff out. He's particularly having fun with multiple exposures. A drunk challenger at the circus sees several Jacks at once. During a wild party, Jack is unable to pay attention to his manager because the image of Mabel and Bob is superimposed. Hitchcock learned a lot from German expressionist filmmakers, and their techniques are definitely being tested out here.

Of course, the real setpiece is the big fight, where Jack and Bob face off at the Albert Hall. In a way, this is Hitchcock's very first Climax at a Famous Location, and he does play it to the hilt. According to my buddy Patrick McGilligan, Hitchcock deliberately shot from above, often at a distance, with only a single light hanging above the boxing ring. He got a relatively big budget, and he decided to make sure the money was all on the screen. No closeups of fight fans to make you think it's a crowded arena. It's a crowded arena.

And it looks like a real fight, too. We get straight-on shots of Jack punching madly at the camera. When he's knocked down, Hitchcock provides an interesting quick montage of lights and ropes. Even if the outcome seems assured, there's real craftsmanship at work trying to convince you otherwise. The path to Rocky and Raging Bull starts here.

I don't know if The Ring is all that good. It's not very surprising. But it is an assured piece of moviemaking, particularly for the time. Clichés aside, it holds up, especially that last reel. Hitchcock's a real director at this point, that's for sure. Now he just needs the right material.

Side note: there's a long and sporadically-funny wedding scene. But may favorite moment comes when the priest recites the vows, and the font on the titles goes from a standard serif to an elaborate calligraphy. Like Garamond just wasn't good enough for anything that important. We don't have that kind of reverence anymore.

THE HITCHCOCK PROJECT: #7 - The Farmer's Wife

Well, this is embarassing. I just finished watching #28 from the Hitchcock oeuvre, and since I haven't updated the project for ages, I wanted to check quickly to see how far I was backed up. And I look to see...5??? I haven't posted an entry since #5? Holy crap.

So anyway, these might get a little shorter for a while.

My endeavors on The Hitchcock Project are unavoidably doomed. We've already had to skip The Mountain Eagle on account of it not existing anymore. Now I've had to bypass #6 on the list, Downhill, because I can't find a copy of the thing anywhere. The closest I've come is a 5-minute clip on YouTube, and that clip doesn't make me very optimistic about the quality of the film as a whole. So I won't see them all. But that's okay. And you know why it's okay? Because I DO get to see movies like The Farmer's Wife, and that's more than enough punishment to make up for what I've missed.

The Farmer's Wife is ostensibly a comedy. It's a very Hitchcock kind of comedy in that it opens with someone on their deathbed. This somebody is the wife of farmer Samuel Sweetland, who urges him, before breathing her last, urges him to remarry. Sweetland, being a taciturn and very country-English sort of fellow, doesn't even want to be in the room, let alone contemplate taking a new bride. But anyway, she dies, and once Sweetland realizes that his wife is really gone, he resigns himself to making the rounds of his small village and hunting up a new wife.

Now, remember that this is supposed to be a comedy. Well, naturally, a sad widower isn't going to do the trick. So in order for this to work, our farmer is going to have to make a complete ass of himself. Well, goal achieved. After a rather charming little piece of filmwork in which Sweetland imagines each of his potential suit-ees sitting in his wife's chair, he rushes off to each of them, pretty much demanding that they marry him on the spot. This, needless to say, does not go the way he anticipates.

So Hitchcock's got a real uphill battle going here. We can't sit around feeling bad for the hero, because then we won't laugh. The flipside, though, is that he turns into a domineering bonehead, which means we end up feeling more sympathy for his dead wife because she doesn't have to deal with him anymore.

There is someone else we feel sympathy for, and that's Sweetland's housekeeper, Minta. It's pretty obvious to anyone watching that these two are meant to be together, but Sweetland can't know this, or else there's no movie. So we have to watch him consistently overlooking what's right in front of him, and once more, it's hard to find it funny.

This is best exemplified by the film's climax, when Sweetland has been rejected by all the women in town, and he finally figures out his maid should be his wife (since she's cooking his food anyway), and he's forced to go to her hat-in-hand, saying that if he he rejects her too, he'll understand. This is our arc: our protagonist starts emotionally-stunted, quickly develops into a big jerk, and finishes pathetic. Comedy, ladies, and gentlemen. Comedy.

The past couple movies serve as a harbinger for things to come in The Hitchcock Project. British cinema of the 1920s and early 30s is obsessed with class, and cheerfully sexist. These are the movies people wanted to make, and evidently that people wanted to see. So it's wrong for me to judge these movies too much on this basis. But I'm going to anyway, because it's an attitude that really makes them -- well, not unwatchable, per see, but definitely tiresome. And if The Farmer's Wife has anything going for it, it's that the movie is trying to have a laugh at attitudes which will soon become outdated. But I still didn't like it, and McGilligan can call it "charming" in his book as many times as he pleases, but he's not changing my mind.

THE HITCHCOCK PROJECT: #5 - Easy Virtue

(Holy crap. I didn't post this, already? Damn. Okay then, I'll just fall further behind. So be it.)

Yes, I can count. The Project has sailed into some choppy seas.

The next film on the list is supposed to be a little thing called Downhill, which reunited Hitchcock with the star of his huge success, The Lodger. That reunion did not turn out great. As much as critics loved The Lodger, that's how much they hated Downhill.

Still, the purpose of this project is not to watch only the good Hitchcock movies. It's to see all of them. So I hunted high and low for a copy of Downhill...to no avail.

Damn.

Ideally, I intended to watch these movies in chronological order, beginning to end. To skip Downhill would destroy that order. It would also mean that, four films into the Project, I'd be batting .500. Embarrassing. On the other hand, to wait for a copy of Downhill to fall into my hands would mean more delays, and we've reached the point where even I have had it with the big, empty, blog-free gaps.

So I made a choice. Get on with it. Go to the next one on the list. Grab Downhill somewhere down the road. It's not ideal, but there's a project to get through.

Fortunately, I still got to see a bad movie.

Easy Virtue is the tale of Larita (played by another fantastically-named actress, Isabel Jeans), who finds herself in a bit of a pickle. You see, her husband is kind of a drunken jerk who bruises her wrist, and meanwhile there's this painter who is supposed to be painting her portrait but actually tries to seduce her. Well, before you know it, the drunk husband has a gun, the painter ends up dead, and our Larita ends up divorced, with the whole world thinking she's a dirty little slut.

This sounds promising, but you have to look at this through the prism of 1927, when the mere act of being divorced was an unforgivable sin. I suppose at the time, the story's central conceit of making the evil harlot into a sympathetic heroine was quite daring. But today, the whole thing just falls flat. The deck is ridiculously stacked, so instead of Larita's ultimate end being tragic, it just seems silly. Even Hitchcock found the last line of dialogue (in which Larita tells a group of hungry paparazzi, "Shoot! There's nothing left to kill!) to be overly melodramatic.

Speaking of dialogue, want to know what else is wrong with Easy Virtue? How about this credit, which appears on the title screen:

Adapted from the play by Noel Coward

Now, if you're at all familiar with Noel Coward, you know him as a paragon of wicked wit and sophisticated wordplay. So what's the ideal format for his brand of panache? Of course: silent film.

I'm pretty sure we saw more title cards in the first 15 minutes than we saw in The Pleasure Garden and The Lodger combined. The film opens with that perfect action sequence, the courtroom scene. I have to believe Hitchcock was shaking his head in disbelief at his situation.

I'm ripping into this movie, and I have to rise to its defense, mainly because my wife actually kind of liked it, and she has some good points. For one thing, Hitchcock is starting to work symbolism into his story. As Clair noted, Larita spends much of the movie trailing behind some long piece of fabric: a scarf, or a flourish on a hat, or a long train on a dress. This is appropriate, as she is continuing to drag behind her sordid past. This sounds heavy-handed, but it plays in the film as a nicely subconscious effect. Hitchcock will be using more of this kind of character detail as he goes along, so it's nice to see him putting it to use this early in his career.

An even more characteristic shot is the one that opens the film. A bored judge lifts his monocle to his eye, and we see his courtroom become clear. For 1927, the shot is incredibly complex; evidently, Hitchcock had to shoot through a giant magnifying glass to get the effect. What I find remarkable about this is that it's totally a throwaway shot. It's just something he felt like doing, and it leads off the movie. I like to think that Hitchcock knew he didn't have much of a film to work with, so he decided to have a little fun.

In the end, though, Easy Virtue doesn't amount to very much. A woman is unfairly maligned, everybody treats her badly, and she has no hope for the future. The end. It's not much of a movie, and Hitchcock seems to know it. He's probably already looking ahead to the next movie.

I'm just hoping I can find the next movie.

THE HITCHCOCK PROJECT: #3 - The Lodger

Weissman: It's a detective story... everyone's a suspect. You know, that sort of thing.
Constance: How horrid. And who turns out to have done it?
Weissman: Oh, I couldn't tell you that. It would spoil it for you.
Constance: Oh, but none of us will see it.
- Gosford Park
screenplay by Julian Fellowes


You are wondering, perhaps, what the heck happened to Alfred.

The answer, of course, is that I happened, and the result was none too good for either of us. You see, I'm just coming off an exciting month-long project to convert a steamer trunk full of videocassettes into DVDs. For those who are interested, the project was mostly successful; I'm down to a banker's box of videocassettes, and very soon, we should have regained several cubic feet of closet space. On the minus side, however, is that this took up a significant portion of my free time, and made me extremely uninterested in watching more movies with what little time I had. My Netflix friends will have noted that I've had Hard Boiled an awfully long time.

But now that this particular endeavor has shuttered for the summer, I find that there's a portly Englishman who has been waiting upon me patiently. Best not to keep him waiting, then. Especially when he's turned out the first film that critics are willing to label "a masterpiece": The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog.

I suppose another thing that might have kept me from jumping right into this film was the lousy quality of the print Netflix had available. The Lodger is actually an extra feature on the DVD of a later Hitchcock film, Sabotage (which we'll get to in it's time). As the disc's ugly stepchild, The Lodger clearly didn't get a lot of love from Laserlight or Vintage Films. The print skips, brightness changes wildly from shot to shot, titles vary so much that it's impossible to tell which ones comes from the original and which ones are more recent substitutes, and most criminally, the opening credits are so butchered that Hitchcock's own credit is cut off before it ever gets the chance to appear. I know it's an 80-year old movie, but this is the best we could do? I've got a project in mind for the film archivists out there.

Get past that, and we're in pretty familiar territory. A serial killer called "The Avenger" is murdering the curly-haired blonde women of London, and a creepy houseguest may be the culprit – or he might just be wrongfully accused. It even has the first Hitchcock MacGuffin, in the form of the hunt for The Avenger. It's almost like a parody of a typical Hitchcock plot. Although if you think about it, for Hitchcock to have found so many variations on this basic story over his career, it makes sense that he would start right at the source.

Hitchcock gets a lot of mileage out of his star. The mysterious tenant is played by Ivor Novello, who was a popular songwriter (Jeremy Northam plays him as the only real-life character in the abovementioned Gosford Park) and actually something of a heartthrob of the era (despite being homosexual; marketing gay men as sex symbols has always been the way of the entertainment industry). According to our old friend Patrick McGilligan, Hitchcock was a little concerned about the casting
of Novello, as the star was renowned for striking over-the-top romantic poses in his stage performances. Whatever his method, Hitchcock clearly found a solution. From the moment he first walks through the door, the mood is not romantic enchantment but extreme unease. Deathly pale, nervous, barely able to carry on a conversation, Novello's Lodger is a remarkable creation, especially knowing that an audience would completely assume he was the hero.

Whether it's Novello's performance or Hitchcock's directing, the character of the Lodger certainly comes out better than his prospective love interest, Daisy, who -- in another ahead-of-its-time gesture -- is played by a woman calling herself June. June doesn't do much in the way of acting. She laughs a lot. I mean a lot. Like a strangely uncomfortable scene wherein her father has fallen off a chair and she continues to laugh and laugh. Mmm, awkward. Every now and then, she's called upon to look vaguely uncertain. That's usually just a segue to a laugh, though. I wasn't a big fan of June's.

I wonder if audiences of the day identified more with Joe, the useless cop portrayed by Malcolm Keen. Quite frankly, Clair and I found him at least as creepy as Novello. With irises so pale as to make his eyes look hollow, a hilariously inept sense of romance (he slaps a pair of handcuffs on Daisy as an expression of interest), and a terrible crime-solving technique, he's just as unsettling as the guy being set up as the potential villain. In a way, the movie puts us in an unusual position from the get-go, with two possible bad guys and a heroine with no range. With no one to necessarily like, this is not a recipe for a great thriller.

This is where Hitchcock really asserts himself. With no vested interest in any of our leads, he still builds the suspense. It's never daytime in The Lodger's London. The populace is following news of the murders with rabid interest. Someone we suspect is actually innocent. Hitch knows how to play to the crowd. Sometimes I got bored during the movie, but I never lost interest in the outcome.

Did I say bored? Yeah, that's the real problem. Perhaps one of the greatest tricks as a viewer today is to get into the mindset of a viewer back then. Because even to an open-minded fellow like myself, The Lodger moves at a positively glacial pace.
There's very little dialogue (and for a silent film, that's saying something) and almost no action, so we're left with a great many static shots of people looking, waiting, building up a sense of importance that doesn't always pay off.

This is what kind of makes me think I enjoyed The Pleasure Garden a little bit more. This story is less melodramatic. The acting -- June aside -- is better. But The Lodger doesn't move. When the climactic chase scene finally comes, it ought to be the culmination. Instead, it's a relief.

Still, he's learning. Hitchcock told the famed director and journalist François Truffaut that he considered The Lodger to be his first movie. If so, it's a very assured debut. And it bodes well for things to come.

Of course, I don't want to give anything away.

THE HITCHCOCK PROJECT: #2 - The Mountain Eagle... Sort Of

Two movies in, and the project is already in trouble.

1926 was a big year for Alfred Hitchcock. The Pleasure Garden had been a bit of an ordeal. On the advice of his cinematographer, in order to save money, he hadn't declared the motion picture film upon entering Italy. The customs agents weren't fooled; they confiscated the film, and it cost more money to have new film sent from Germany. He had the aforementioned incident with the actress who refused to go into the water while having her period; Hitchcock was so naive, he didn't know what a period was. He didn't care for the actor playing the villain.

Still, he had already proven to be a resourceful director. He convinced a waitress at a hotel to step in for the reluctant swimmer. He saved time and money by shooting extra material on the boat trip to the location. He finished the movie on time, and got pretty strong reviews. All in all, it was a superb first outing. So the studio was more than happy to hand him the reins for another film. The Mountain Eagle.

I haven't watched The Mountain Eagle. Why not? Well... why don't I let my friends at Wikipedia explain.

This is the only Hitchcock directed feature that is considered lost. No prints have been known to survive.

And boy, is it lost. How lost is it? Okay, you see that dog up there, in the movie poster? To this day, nobody knows what role (if any) the dog plays in the film. (He is clearly neither mountain nor eagle.) As far as I know, no one alive today has seen it. Certainly not our biographer, Patrick McGilligan. Nobody at all. And definitely not me.

So, that's just swell. My quest is stopped in its tracks before it has barely begun.

Except.

Look, it's not as though I was going to abandon the project. I mean, you can't really hold it against me that a movie doesn't exist anymore. And there's 51 movies to go. Besides, Hitchcock himself hated the movie. But it just killed me that I wouldn't be able to truly complete the entire Hitchcock oeuvre.

Cue Dan Aulier.

Stuck in my progress in the biography, I was doing some outside research, thumbing through a copy of Aulier's Hitchcock's Notebooks, when I made the surprising discovery of his surprising discovery. It seems that, although the film is lost, Hitchcock himself had a complete set of production stills. And Aulier was kind enough to reprint them in his book, along with a brief synopsis. So I couldn't watch The Mountain Eagle. But I could do the next best thing.

The story alone would classify this as a weird film. In the snowy mountains of Kentucky (?), we meet our main character: a nasty fellow named Pettigrew, who evidently hates everyone. Pettigrew's wife dies giving birth to a crippled boy. Pettigrew directs most of his anger at this mountain-dwelling hermit named John, who most people call "Fear o' God".

Cut to twenty-some-odd years later, when the son is now putting the moves on the local schoolmarm named Beatrice (played by movie beauty Nita Naldi, who Hitchcock had to browbeat into dressing down). Pettigrew goes to confront her about this, and ends up making advances on her himself. She turns him down, and the son disappears, probably out of embarrassment.

So now, Pettigrew is really angry. He tries to get Beatrice arrested as, and I turn to Wikipedia again for this description, "a wanton harlot." That's Fear o' God's cue to show up, marry Beatrice, take her back to his cabin in the woods, and get her pregnant. Facing these new developments, Pettigrew takes a new tack: he has Fear o' God arrested for murdering his missing son. Yes, this is a guy who loves to hate.

Fear o' God escapes the law, but not for long. He becomes ill, and Beatrice has to drag him into town for treatment. There Pettigrew is about to claim his victory... until his long-lost son suddenly shows up! Yes, the whole murder thing is out the window, and to top it off, somehow (the how is not made at all clear), Pettigrew is accidentally shot. So, truly a happy ending for everyone.

It would be strange enough that Hitchcock & company shot a film set in Kentucky in the mountains of Germany. (The snow was so heavy at one location that Hitch paid the local fire department to hose it away.) But this plot... it's just beyond bizarre. Why does Pettigrew hate so much? Why does Fear o' God rescue Beatrice? Why is everyone in the movie trying to get up her skirts? What is the heck is going on?

Want to see how weird this movie is? Here's your chance to see more of The Mountain Eagle than almost anyone alive. This was the only still I could find in Google Images, but I think it tells the tale.



Who is that handsome fellow? Who knows? Seems like he must be Fear o' God, but who can be sure? The important thing is, whoever that's supposed to be, it's a character in this film. Someone decided that the Cryptkeeper look was ideal for this movie. To which I can merely say, Wow.

I can't assess Hitchcock on this one, not without seeing the movie. But he didn't like the movie, and you kind of have to defer to his judgment on this. But I do know that, no matter how bad the movie may have been, things weren't all bad. It was around this time that he proposed marriage to Alma. And she said yes. (They were on a ship, and she was sick. Hitchcock said it was the only way he could trick her into it.) So he had a steady career, and now he was a newlywed. Good times.

Oh, and he was about to make his first great movie. That one, Netflix has.

THE HITCHCOCK PROJECT: #1 - The Pleasure Garden

ME: Hey, Lauren, could I ask you for a favor?
MY NEIGHBOR ACROSS THE HALL: Sure. What do you need?
ME: Could I borrow your home?
MY NEIGHBOR: Uh...

The Wilsons haven't had a videocassette player for almost four years. Frankly, we haven't needed one. Once we went DVD, we never looked back. And other than needing to find a way to transfer some of these old VHS tapes I've got in a steamer trunk, it's worked out just fine. Of course, it figures that when I finally got my hands on a copy of Alfred Hitchcock's directorial debut, it would arrive in tape form. Thanks, Chicago Public Library.

Still, if you can't use your neighbors for things you need, what the heck are they good for? Fortunately, Lauren was game, and I've cat-sat for her enough times that I still have a slight advantage in the getcha-back department. So it was Movie Night at the neighbor's.

The Pleasure Garden is the story of a country girl named Patsy (the lovely Virginia Valli) who comes to the big city to join a chorus line. Of course, she's never set foot on a stage before, but her ability to Charleston on command wows the theater impresario, and a fellow chorus girl named Jill (played by the wonderfully-named Carmelita Geraghty) takes her in as a roommate. So life is pretty good for Patsy.

Naturally, men come along and ruin everything. It seems Jill has a fiancé named Hugh (John Stuart, who looks like Joseph Goebbels). Sadly, Hugh is going off to work on a plantation for the next two years (!?), but Jill has promised to wait for him. Yeah, right. Jill is barely waiting for Hugh to leave, since she's now taking gifts from the producer of the show and soliciting the affections of a German prince and generally acting like a brazen hussy. Poor Patsy can hardly understand what's going on, especially since she's conveniently falling for the affections of Hugh's nasty co-worker, Levett (an appropriately slimy Miles Mander). Is it possible that Levett is also carrying on with some native plantation girl? Oh, this can't go well.

Does this plot sound like a soap opera? It sure is. The Pleasure Garden is pure melodrama. Lauren kept commenting that Patsy was aptly named. True enough: she believes everyone, falls in love out of pure plot contrivance, is just plain nice at every turn, and makes atrocious decisions every step of the way. She's the original insufferable heroine. Most of the characters are straight types, right down to the homosexual costume designer. (I'm not trying to cast aspersions, but it's a silent film, and you could still hear him swish. Gay stereotypes are clearly not a new thing.) In fact, the most likeable character in the movie is Patsy's dog, Cuddles. Believe me, if you ever see this movie -- and I'm reasonably confident that you never will -- remember to trust the dog. He knows all.

Still, I'm not watching this to get a realistic depiction of the lives of chorus girls in the 1920s. No, I'm here for Hitchcock, and I'm happy to report that, despite the thin plot, despite the lack of sound, despite everything, there are touches of the master in place, even at this early stage. The very first scene of the movie, establishing the theater where the chorus girls dance (or, more accurately, do this strange sort of dance-strut-bouncing thing), is an unexpectedly complex shot for 1926. After an amusing setup of a torrent of chorus girls hurrying down a spiral staircase, we get the full stage, shot from way up high, at an angle to capture the adoring audience. I have to think that few directors of the period were attempting anything so advanced. That Hitchcock chose to lead off his first picture with it definitely singles him out as someone looking to get noticed.

I suspect that Hitch had a particular affection for the character of Levett. After all, Levett is completely and utterly amoral. He marries Patsy even though he clearly has no interest in her beyond getting into her bloomers. He goes off to the plantation and immediately becomes a womanizer, a drunk, and unpredictably violent. Also, he has a sinister mustache. Hitchcock also has a special place in his heart for villains, and even though this one has no redeeming quality at all, he gets enough screen time being evil to make you think that Levett is just as beloved.

Levett features in the most Hitchcockian scene of all: our first Hitchcock murder. It's not especially well-filmed. It's an underwater murder, and was evidently very difficult to film. (The actress originally hired refused to go into the water because she was menstruating; medical science has advanced somewhat in 80 years.) But the aftermath, in which the victim's ghost haunts Levett, feels like classic Hitch.

So, Alfred Hitchcock's career is off and rolling. His first film...it's not great. It's hackneyed. It's clichéd. But despite all that, it's not boring. The director has a smart eye, and we're going to see it put to good use.

And if not, I foresee a big future for Cuddles.

THE HITCHCOCK PROJECT: Up Through the Ranks

Sorry. We've kind of left Alfred hanging, haven't we? But don't feel too bad for him. He's doing very well for himself. He's gonna be a director, you know. Very soon.

Perhaps the most interesting observation our biographer has made so far is that most directors come up through the ranks of editors or cinematographers. There are a fair number of actors and writers who also take up the megaphone. And these days, special effects wizards also take a turn fairly often. But directors are almost never former art directors. And yet, that is the path that one of the most acclaimed directors in film history took.

Hitchcock's first jobs are supposed to be strictly art direction and titles, but he knows enough to make himself indispensable. The studio that hired him, Famous Players-Lasky, quickly loses money and starts laying people off. But Hitchcock willingly takes on any task that comes his way. Who will write the script? I will, says Hitch. Can anyone direct these extra scenes? I'm your man, says Hitch. When the film company finaally did fold, new producers swept in to pick up the pieces, and this eager young man was ready and willing to work.

(I had a lot of empathy for Hitch at this point. I did sort of the same thing at Jellyvision. "What do you need me to do? I'm your guy." Being indispensable is the best thing to be.)

Hitchcock starts to make a lot of key contacts at this point. He meets producers who will make some of his first movies. He meets the man who will become his agent. Most importantly, he meets the most important collaborator in his life.

Technically, he met Alma Reville in the last chapter. She was a writer with Famous Players-Lasky, and he was evidently smitten with her at first sight. Of course, being a proper turn-of-the-century English gentleman, he would never make a move above his station. So he doesn't even speak to her. While he's hanging on at the studio, she's let go, and still not a word. In fact, she doesn't even know who he is, until years later, when he's at a new studio and he's permitted to hire a staff, and suddenly she gets a call.

He doesn't just do this for girls he likes, mind you. Hitchock proves to be quite loyal, an unusual trait in the film industry. An actress named Betty Compson was working on a film on which Hitchcock was assistant directing. The film had a cash shortfall, and Compson invested money to keep it going. Years later, when she needed to qualify for benefits, he arranged to get her a small part in one of his movies. One director who Hitchcock worked with extensively even badmouthed him. But when he fell on hard times, Hitch secretly arranged for him to get work.

This kind of hard work and good behavior pays off in spades when Hitchcock goes to work for a new studio called Gainsborough. This studio had just made a deal with a film company in Germany, so Alfred heads to Berlin, where he learns the basics of expressionistic cinema. And then the studio's lead director gets himself in a bit of immigration trouble, and who's standing by to take the reins? That's right. In less than five years, Alfred Hitchcock has risen to the role of director.

And here's where we have to stop. Because you see, one of my rules is that I can't read about the making of one of Hitchcock's movies until I've seen it. So many secrets to give away, you know. So my next posting will be about the movie itself. Just a brief pause in the action.

It's 1925. For the first time, the director's chair will read "Alfred Hitchcock". The movie is called The Pleasure Garden. And the Chicago Public Library is sending it over. 53 movies, and this is Number 1.

Now the project really gets going.

THE HITCHCOCK PROJECT: The Man He Will Become

Chapter 2 takes us up to Alfred Hitchcock's 21st year, the point at whichwe traditionally think that a person's life really gets going. Our boy Alfred, however, has no intention of sitting around waiting for that to happen.

Aftera several months of higher education, 14-year old Hitch decides he's had just about enough of school life, and lands a job with the W. T. Henley Telegraph Works, where his job is to measure the size and voltage of cables. For those of you considering going to USC Film School to break into the movie business, you may want to consider an alternate route.

Of course, he doesn't stay with this drudgery. He soon moves up through the ranks, and he does three crucial things that will pave the way for his future.

1. He moves into the design department. He ends up working on industrial publications and advertising material, and learns a great deal about how to use layout and imagery to capture people's attention. One of his noteworthy products was an elaborate brochure advertising lighting for churches, which he illustrated with -- in a nice bit of career foreshadowing -- a coffin.
2. He gets along great with everybody. Hitch was very popular at Henley, and people would go to great lengths for him (which will become relevant in a moment). He led many of the company's intramural activities, including sports teams. Most crucially, however, was his role as founder and editor of the Henley Telegraph, the in-house magazine. It was a very popular publication, and for it...
3. He wrote several short stories. This is perhaps the most noteworthy part of this chapter, because McGilligan reprints several of Hitchcock's first published writings. It's our first look at Hitchcock the Storyteller, and as our biographer goes to great pains to point out, these early tales give us a sneal peek at popular Hitchcockian themes. Confinement, voyeurism, twist endings, they're all in here.

This is fascinating, because unlike, say, an M. Night Shyamalan, Hitchcock never wrote his own movies. So it's tempting to say that he was skilled at setting a mood more than telling a story. However, these short stories prove that Hitchcock was quite capable of acting as writer. He clearly just didn't feel the need to spend time writing specific plots and dialogue. Someone else could do that; Hitch would then do the real writing on film.

Speaking of film, the movie business also makes its first appearance here. The Famous Players-Lasky Company announces plans to open up a studio in London, and begins hiring for all positions. Meanwhile, young Alfred Hitchcock, after seven years in the electrical business, has been reading screen trade magazines and writing stories. The next step is obvious.

Hitchcock's actions show a great deal of confidence and chutzpah. Applying for a job as a title card designer (the movies were still silent, you see), Hitch gets word that Famous-Lasky is going to make a certain book into a film. So he buys a copy, reads it cover-to-cover, and proceeds to turn the whole book into a title card script. The movie people admire his spunk, but do not hire him. Undeterred, he does it again for another book. This time, he even convinces several of his co-workers to help him assemble his portfolio. So respected is Alfred Hitchcock among his co-workers that not only do they help him, but management blithely looks the other way. I can hardly imagine a similar scenario today. It definitely pays to be nice.

This second effort persuades Famous-Lasky that they've got a real dedicated fellow on their hands, and this takes us to 1921. Alfred Hitchcock has a new job in the movies. He's going to write title cards. He's only 21. I predict big things for this guy. We may very well be watching a film soon.

Oh, and he might even have his eye on a girl. Stick around.

THE HITCHCOCK PROJECT: The Boy Who Would Be King of Scaring the Crap Out of You

And so it begins.

Starting off a biography is a tricky business. The very beginning of a person's life is usually the least interesting part. There's the being born and the growing up and stuff, but a lot of that is passive, and rarely has anything to do with the reason that this person got a biography written about them. Unless you're someone like Wayne Gretzky, I guess. He pretty much came out of the womb shooting goals.

So, what to do? You could just skip the whole thing entirely, and start out at the cool part. Your quickie biographies, like your Scholastic Books bio of Justin Timberlake, is like this. If your family is famous enough, like a John F. Kennedy, you can let them handle the narrative for a while, until you're grown up enough to start doing things on your own. Or you can always go for the long view. A biography of Neil Armstrong I thumbed through began hundreds of years ago, with some ancestor slogging through France or something.

Patrick McGilligan opts for this approach: everything matters. After a brief introduction, we start in on the very origin of Alfred Hitchcock's name (Hich was a corruption of Rich, as in King Richard the Lionheart), and then get right into the settling of his family on the outskirts of London. Fortunately, Hitchcock himself never strays far from the narrative. No matter how far removed from the man the story goes, he's still very present. Consider the tale McGilligan relates about how Hitchcock would introduce himself. "It's Hitch," the director would drawl, hesitating for the maximum shock value, "without the cock." This punctuates the etymology lesson.

This can get a little extreme. When a favorite aunt travels to Africa, the basket she is carried in is compared to one in Torn Curtain. A favorite author of young Alfred's later turns up as the reading material for a character in Shadow of a Doubt. Hitchcock's home had a staircase, and staircases figure prominently in his movies. It's a little heavy-handed. "Get it? Do you get it? It all started here! It all makes sense now!"

But hey, we all like to play armchair psychiatrist, and is the author didn't make connections, we would. Nowhere is this more evident than in the legendary tale of little Alfred Hitchcock in prison. Alfred's father, so the story goes, caught him doing something bad, and promptly took him down to the police station. There, he made a little arrangement with the local constable, who locked the boy in a bare cell, saying, "This is what we do to boys who've been naughty." After a few minutes, they came and got him out, and his dad told him to learn a lesson from this.

It's an interesting story, because so many of Hitchcock's narratives revolve around a man wrongfully accused of a crime. So he was thrown in jail, you think, and he knew he was innocent, and horror and despair overcame him, and then he turned his childhood terrors into movies. It all makes sense now!

But is it true? Hitchcock himself told the story, and yet his knack for storytelling makes him somewhat unreliable. His sister also confirmed it, but several key facts don't match up. If there's any definitive proof that it's true, it lies in the fact the Hitchcock was petrified of the police all his life. McGilligan hints that this fear stayed with Hitchcock all his life. If you're going to develop a lifelong phobia, this seems like the kind of childhood trauma that would do it.

A reader is probably strongly inclined to believe this story, if only because we need the drama. Alfred's early life is pretty happy. His father, first a greengrocer and then a fishmonger, is reasonably successful, and the family lives well. A devout Catholic family in Protestant England, Alfred goes to several very good private schools. (He was punished once for a minor infraction, and regretted it so deeply, he seems to have gone on the straight-and-narrow ever since. It all makes sense now!) The only dark stories are the ones he reads in Grimm's Fairy Tales, a favorite early book, and the ones he hears in the news, like the Crippen murder. All in all, it's a very happy childhood, and you'd be hard-pressed to find the dark side. Well, actually, Hitchcock could find the dark side. For example, he said, "The Bible can't be bettered for gruesome stories." So maybe this is just a guy who's born to like scary stories.

This last point is very important, because it relates to something McGilligan brings up for the first time (and I'm sure he's not done). An earlier biography about Hitchcock written by a man named Donald Spoto was called The Dark Side of Genius, and apparently portrays the master filmmaker as a monstrous individual, manipulative and cruel. McGilligan is clearly going to spend a lot of time debunking this portrait. The picture we've got so far is of a dutiful and earnest little boy, eager to please, troubled by little, kind of quiet...but with an early taste for things with a hint of the macabre.

Alfred Hitchcock was born in 1899. As we end Chapter 1, it is 1913. Still more education awaits us, as well as early attempts at gainful employment. The movies do not yet beckon...

THE HITCHCOCK PROJECT: Good Evening

Over a year ago, back when this enterprise was still being spawned, I wrote a foolishly hopeful post about my plans for future writings. Oh, I was gonna become my very own New Yorker, from the looks of things. In particular, I made a bold promise about future projects:

...including two that I'm particularly looking forward to starting, but can't just yet. I'm going to be a tease and save a discussion of them for later. When they're ready to go.

Unlike our president, I'm haunted by the stupid things I've said in the past. There's something about your word being your bond that resonates with me. Plus, that comment led to responses like, "Consider me teased," which means that in addition to just failing to keep promises, I'm letting people down. Blogging is great for self-esteem.

I'm not entirely sure, but I think one of the two secret ideas was my much-ballyhooed, now-horribly-embarrassing mystery serial. I'm not embarrassed by the story, mind you. I'm embarrassed by the fact that it just sits there, unfinished, unremembered, unloved. Even worse, I've said more than once that I would be returning to it, and that hasn't happened. So that fits in with the overall blog track record.

But the other one -- and it's taking me way too long to get to this -- I'm sure about, and that's a little something called "The Hitchcock Project". Welcome to it.

The genesis for this idea came in Christmas of 2004. That's when my mother gave me, as a present, a copy of Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light by Patrick McGilligan. It is, as you might imagine, a biography of the great film director, and it's huge. It's something like 800 pages, so if you choose to read it, you definitely want to settle in to the notion that it's gonna take you a while to get to the end.

So I put it off for a while, but eventually, I got started, and I soon found there was a much bigger obstacle than the length of the book. What was far more interesting was that, as I was reading, I found that I wanted to see the films I was reading about. I own about 10 Hitchcock movies, and I've seen probably a dozen more. But Alfred Hitchcock made 53 feature films, so I haven't even seen half of his career. So as McGilligan was talking about all these films I haven't seen, the urge to see them just got stronger and stronger.

It was just as Hitchcock was preparing to make his first sound movie that I fully committed to The Hitchcock Project. I set the book aside and loaded up my Netflix queue with every one of his films. Of course, that proved to be an early sticking point, since one of them -- The Mountain Eagle -- is apparently lost to history. And several of his early silent films are hard to come by. Particularly his very first movie, The Pleasure Garden. So I bided my time, figuring it would eventually come out. Everything comes out on DVD eventually. I own Krull, for crying out loud.

That was at least two years ago.

By gum, I am going to finish some of the things I set out to do before I leave this earth. And The Hitchcock Project is going to be one of them. Between March 1, 2007 and March 1, 2008, I will read this Alfred Hitchcock biography, and I will watch the available 52 movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock (and I will look at the surviving still frames from the 53rd). I may even watch a couple of the TV episodes he directed. And I will tell you all about it. This can be done; I've checked, and the Chicago Public Library has a copy of The Pleasure Garden. No more excuses; this can be done. I'm staking my dubious honor on this.

And if nothing else, you can be sure I'll be quoting this a year from now to show what a liar I am.

LATER THIS WEEK: Young Alfred's father throws him in jail to prove a point, and the seeds of his affinity for the wrongfully accused take root.