Stage Fright (1950) – Alfred Hitchcock

“After all, there must be a lot that doesn’t appear on the surface. I mean, like wheels within wheels.”

While not nearly at his best, Hitchcock still manages to craft an interesting, if not particularly suspenseful, exploration of artifice and deception. Jane Wyman is charming as an actress-turned-gumshoe looking to prove her former love’s innocence in a murder case, employing her thespian skills to gather evidence against the suspected killer, a celebrated stage figure played deliciously by Marlene Dietrich.

The material is all there, and the actors all turn in top-notch performances—particularly Alastair Sim as Wyman’s playful codger of a father and Dietrich, who manages to inject some humanity into her cold-as-ice prima donna—but unfortunately it never completely clicks. The film is lighthearted to a fault, and there are moments when it feels more akin to a Nancy Drew mystery than to a genuine thriller. While the direction is expectedly fine, there are surprisingly few of the creative flourishes and exciting set-pieces for which Hitchcock is known.

The film goes a long way to redeem itself in the final reel by delivering a plot twist that shocks on multiple levels. CAUTION: SPOILAGE FROM HERE ON OUT: Narratively speaking, the revelation of Jonathan Cooper, Wyman’s supposedly innocent former love, as the actual killer is surprising but not unbelievable, particularly because Richard Todd smartly plays Cooper with an undercurrent of menace throughout the preceding scenes. It completes the arc of his character within the audience’s perception from possible protagonist, to possible love-interest, to burdensome sod and finally to psychotic murderer, as well as playing deftly with one of Hitchcock’s favorite themes by presenting a case in which the wrong man turns out to be the right man after all.

The twist also serves a second, and much more revolutionary, function within the film by entirely subverting its opening scenes. The audience assumes Cooper’s innocence along with Wyman’s protagonist because Hitchcock shows us his side of the story acted out in flashback, a convention typically accepted as a narrative truth and necessity. By undermining such a convention, Hitchcock introduces the unreliable narrator into cinema and forces us to question the camera’s omniscience. Audiences back in 1950 were understandably not-so-pleased with having the rug pulled out from under them like that, and were furious at such “manipulative” tactics. Even Hitchcock himself later called the false flashback one of his biggest regrets.

I hate to say he’s wrong, but the move is a masterstroke in an otherwise rather unremarkable suspense-mystery, fitting in perfectly with the story’s themes of performance and staged deception. The film even opens with a Renoir-esque curtain rise that leads directly into the flashback, warning us overtly not to believe what we are seeing and exposing cinema as just another type of artifice. The Usual Suspects later took this device to its logical extreme, although one could argue that such an extension was irrelevant. Hitch already did it forty-five years prior, and he didn’t even think it was that good.

~ by cahiersdumovies on July 31, 2008.