The Lady Vanishes (1938)

The Lady Vanishes (1938) was released a little less than a year before the outbreak of World War II, but about a month after the signing of the Munich Agreement. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared that with this document, he had secured “peace for our time.” This will forever be despised as an act of appeasement, although I can’t say that I share that sentiment. Though Alfred Hitchcock, who directed this movie, is primarily concerned with entertaining us, yet one suspects that the movie is also being presented as a cautionary tale against such appeasement, against pacifism and complacency.

The movie begins in the fictitious, Germanic-sounding country of Bandrika, which is ruled by a dictator. A bunch of people planning on traveling by train are waiting in a hotel lobby, two of whom are Charters and Caldicott, portrayed by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, a comedy team that began life with this movie. As they wait, they express their concerns about the last report they heard, “England on the brink.” From their conversation, we wonder if England is on the verge of going to war. Eventually, we find out that they are worried about a cricket match. Pace the British, cricket is a sport the rest of the world thinks is ludicrous. And the obsession with cricket on the part of the characters that Radford and Wayne subsequently played in other movies became a trademark gag. From time to time, we see them reading about that cricket match on the back pages of the newspaper, while the serious political news on the front page is ignored. They represent the dangerous complacency of the British people.

On account of an avalanche, the train cannot continue on its way, so everyone has to seek accommodations at the hotel. Charters and Caldicott are forced to occupy the maid’s quarters, consisting of a narrow bed intended for just one person. The maid, Anna, is an attractive woman, though slightly bigger than either of the two men, whom she looks at flirtatiously when she finds out they will be sleeping in her room, much to their discomfiture. Apparently, one of the two men sleeps in pajamas and the other does not. For the sake of modesty, presumably, they share the pajamas, Charters wearing the tops; Caldicott, the bottoms. At one point, when the two men are squeezed into the bed, Anna barges right in to put her hat back under the bed and to retrieve some other articles of clothing. Charters moves his body in front of Caldicott so that Anna can’t see his nipples.

Earlier, when three young American women seem to be getting the royal treatment by the hotel manager, Caldicott dryly remarks, “the almighty dollar.” One of the women, Iris (Margaret Lockwood), is soon to be married. A friend proposes a toast, “To Iris, and the happy days she’s leaving behind, and the blue-blooded cheque chaser she’s dashing to London to marry.”

It’s an old story, a rich American woman marrying an impecunious British aristocrat for the sake of a title and a coat of arms, which apparently is more important to her father than it is to her. She refers to herself as being an “offering on an altar.” Love is not involved, but that doesn’t bother her, saying that she’s been everywhere and done everything, so she might as well get married. Once happiness has lost its charm, you might as well slam the door on it forever.

There is one bright spot about being married, however. That way you can have an affair. Adultery is fun, at least in the beginning, as we learn from another couple, Mr. Todhunter (Cecil Parker) and Margaret (Linden Travers). They are both cheating on their spouses. Todhunter had no qualms in the beginning about openly carrying on with her, but now he insists on separate rooms for the two of them. His passions having cooled somewhat, he is worried that a divorce would spoil his chances of becoming a judge.

Anyway, after Iris’s friends leave, she finds it impossible to sleep because of the noise being made by Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), the guest in the room above her. You know the type, someone that thinks it’s his God-given right to make as much noise as he wants, and who cares nothing about how much it disturbs his neighbors. And like most inconsiderate neighbors, he believes that anyone who complains about the noise he is making is the one who is in the wrong.

When he refuses to quit making so much noise, she bribes the manager to have him removed from his room, so Gilbert barges into her room and acts as if he will have to sleep in her bed, threatening to tell people she invited him to sleep with her if she complains. This forces her to call the manager and get him his room back. We know we are supposed to smile at this obnoxious behavior of his, regarding it as charming and endearing, because he is tall and good looking.

Charters and Caldicott end up at a table with Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), an elderly governess, returning to England now that her charges have grown up. She comes across as whimsical and sentimental, boring the two men with her talk about the beautiful mountains and the lovely people of Bandrika, saying, “Everyone sings here. The people are just like happy children, with laughter on their lips and music in their hearts.”

“lt’s not reflected in their politics,” Charters replies dryly, but as Miss Froy parts from them, she says that we should not judge a country by its politics, noting that the English are quite honest by nature. The implication is that the British government is not honest (and that means the government presided over by Neville Chamberlain). The idea is that the people of a country can be betrayed by their government, but that the goodness of ordinary folks will ultimately prevail, clearly a populist sentiment. This is ironic coming from her, since she turns out to be a part of the British government herself, a spy, to be exact.

She returns to her room, and just below her balcony, which is on the second floor, a man is serenading with a guitar. She drops a coin out the window for him, not realizing he has just been strangled. As we later find out, the melody being played is a coded message consisting of the vital clause of a secret pact between two European countries.

It must be a rather sophisticated code, for the simple melody is about sixteen bars long, all in one octave. If each note corresponds to a word, there is a vocabulary of about twelve words to work with. Of course, we can expand that vocabulary by taking into account the length of each note. I estimate we could increase the vocabulary to thirty-six words, given the melody we hear in the movie.

On the other hand, the notes might represent letters and numerals, and thirty-six different notes and their lengths would be just enough for every letter and numeral there is. But then, it would have to be a mighty short clause.

In either event, the code is limited by the requirements of euphony. A disagreeable combination of notes could not be serenaded on the sly, as a way of passing on the information to Miss Froy, so the number of possible combinations is constrained. And like most melodies, much of it is repetitive anyway. Notwithstanding all these limitations, the secret clause has somehow been thus encoded.

The person that strangled the man with the guitar knows that Miss Froy has the coded message, so he tries to kill her by pushing a flower pot out of a second-story window to land on her head while she is looking for her bag at the station prior to boarding the train. But Iris was bringing Miss Froy her glasses, which she dropped, and the pot lands on her head instead, giving her a concussion. Miss Froy ends up taking care of her on the train, but after Iris takes a nap, she wakes up to find her gone.

Charters and Caldicott saw Miss Froy on the train, but they pretend not to have seen her, because they figure nothing really bad could have happened to her, and they do not want the train delayed, lest it cause them to miss the cricket match they hope to see when they get back to England. Todhunter pretends not to have seen her because he fears getting involved in an inquiry that might expose his infidelity. The only one who takes her seriously is Gilbert, the noisy neighbor.

All those that are neither British nor American on that train act suspicious and untrustworthy, being either German or Italian. Whereas Charters, Caldicott, and Todhunter merely deny having seen Miss Froy, the Germans and Italians deny she ever existed. For example, when Iris asks the Italian magician and the German baroness in her compartment what happened to the lady that was sitting opposite her, they say there was no such woman. Admittedly, this lets us know immediately that they are part of a conspiracy to deny Miss Froy’s existence, but in real life, such a tactic would be both unnecessary and unwise. How much easier and less suspicious it would have been for them to say, “Oh, she got up and left the compartment a little while ago.”

Furthermore, it is inconsistent with phase two of their conspiracy, which had already been planned. When the train stops, a patient with bandages around her head is brought onto the train. Dr. Hartz (Paul Lukas) is a brain surgeon, and he says he will be operating on her when they get off the train at the next stop. But in reality, the supposed patient is a woman who dresses up like Miss Froy, while the real Miss Froy is then wrapped up in the bandages and put under guard by a fake nun.

But this woman substitute contradicts the story that Miss Froy does not exist. The Italian that claimed that Miss Froy never existed now tells Iris and Gilbert that she came back. They go to see her, but it’s a different woman. As a result, whereas before, Iris was told that the bump on her head made her hallucinate the woman sitting across from her in the compartment, now she is told that there is such a woman as she described, only she’s German, not British, and her name isn’t Miss Froy.

Needless to say, if all the conspirators wanted to do was stop Miss Froy from taking the musically coded message to England, they should have strangled her and unceremoniously thrown her off the train.

Eventually, Gilbert finds evidence that Iris is right. They pull a reverse switcheroo, removing the bandages from Miss Froy and putting them on her imposter, and that woman is taken off the train at the next station. They are assisted by the fake nun, who is British, once she realizes Miss Froy is British too. In fact, as it becomes clear that Miss Froy is in danger, most of the British passengers on the train begin pulling together. Thus, the movie is optimistically saying that once the British people are shaken from their complacency, they will rally together and defeat the foreign aggressors.

The one exception is Todhunter. Though he is British, yet he wants to surrender to the soldiers trying to get control of the train, saying, “I don’t believe in fighting.” He is derided as being a pacifist and compared to Christians who got thrown to the lions. When he insists on surrendering on his own, getting off the train waving a white handkerchief, he is contemptuously shot, falling to the ground and muttering that he doesn’t understand. So much for pacifism. Of course, we all knew he was doomed the minute we found out he was cheating on his wife. Margaret is spared, however, probably because she was already separated from her husband, saying at one point that he knew he would not be seeing her again.

Miss Froy admits she’s a spy and gives the melody code to Gilbert, in case she doesn’t make it. Before she leaves the train, she says, “I hope we shall meet again under quieter circumstances.” At first, I thought this was an allusion to Vera Lynn’s song, but that apparently was not published until the following year. Because she is the last person you would expect to be a spy, her example implies that the rest of us have no excuse for not doing our part. If a little old lady can risk her life in the fight against evil enemies, dodging bullets as she runs across the countryside of a hostile nation, then we all are capable of making at least some small contribution ourselves.

When they all get back to England, Charters and Caldicott find out that the cricket match has been canceled. Iris sees her fiancé and hides from him, deciding to elope with Gilbert instead, because he is tall and good looking. Just wait until the honeymoon is over, and he returns to being the inconsiderate jerk he was when she first met him. In any event, the idea of marriage puts the “Wedding March” in Gilbert’s head, and when they get to the Foreign Office to pass on the code, he can’t remember the tune. But then we hear the tune being played on a piano, and it turns out to be Miss Froy playing it, having made it back to England after all. Apparently, she didn’t know how to decipher the code herself, or else she would have just walked in and stated the secret clause in words.

Of course, as has often been observed, she could have called the Foreign Office from Bandrika and hummed the tune over the phone.

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

There must have been a lot of suspicion concerning secret clauses in pacts between European governments in the years leading up to World War II, because there were two Hitchcock movies based on such a clause: The first was The Lady Vanishes (1938); the second, Foreign Correspondent (1940). Whereas The Lady Vanishes was made before the outbreak of World War II, Foreign Correspondent was released about a year after it had started. And whereas the former had a British orientation, the latter was made from an American perspective. What both movies have in common, however, other than a secret clause between two nations, is a contempt for complacency and a distrust of pacifists.

Regarding the complacency, the movie begins with the following prologue, which praises foreign correspondents in contrast to all those Americans who thought everything was just fine.

To those intrepid ones who went across the seas to be the eyes and ears of America…. To those forthright ones who early saw the clouds of war while many of us at home were seeing rainbows…. To those clear-headed ones who now stand like recording angels among the dead and dying…. To the Foreign Correspondents—this motion picture is dedicated.

Oddly enough, all this florid prose regarding foreign correspondents is immediately contradicted by the opening scene and several other scenes thereafter. Mr. Powers, editor of the New York Globe, has nothing but contempt for those foreign correspondents. He is handed a cablegram from London, which is what he has been waiting for. It is dated August 19, 1939, less than two weeks away from Germany’s invasion of Poland, which started World War II. The cable says that according to a high official, there is absolutely no chance of war this year, on account of late crops. I guess the idea is that everyone will be too busy with the harvest to fight a war.

Powers throws the cable down. “Foreign correspondent,” he says with disgust. “I could get more news out of Europe looking in the crystal ball…. They all make me sick.”

The foreign correspondent that sent the cable is Stebbins (Robert Benchley), who, we later learn, makes no pretense of being of any value, just passing on government handouts back to the states, and then spending the rest of his time drinking, fooling around with women, playing cards late into the night, and then betting on the horses the next morning. Later in the movie, a woman says that most foreign correspondents are “greasy.”

But as far as Powers is concerned, the main problem with foreign correspondents is that they are all intellectuals. Powers continues with his rant:

I don’t want any more economists, sages, or oracles bombinating over our cable. I want a reporter. Someone who doesn’t know the difference between an ism and a kangaroo. A good, honest crime reporter. That’s what the Globe needs. That’s what Europe needs. There’s a crime hatching on that bedeviled continent.

That line of thought leads Powers to think of Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea), the crime reporter that beat up a policeman. He sends for Jones, who thinks he’s about to be fired for that reason, and thus has an insolent manner. But Powers believes that beating up policemen is a virtue, so Jones is just the sort of man he needs.

Powers asks him about the crisis in Europe. “What crisis?” Jones asks. Powers smiles. He answers that he is referring to the impending war. Jones says he hasn’t been giving it much thought. That’s just what the anti-intellectual Powers is looking for, someone blithely ignorant of what is going on in the world. He offers Jones the job of going to Europe to cover “the biggest story in the world today.” Jones admits he is not equipped to cover that story, but says he could read up on it. But Powers forbids it: “No reading up. I like you just as you are. What Europe needs is a fresh, unused mind.” In the background are two massive bookshelves filled with books. In other words, Powers has undoubtedly read all those books, and he knows better than anyone that they are of no value.

“Foreign correspondent, huh?” Jones asks. “No,” Powers replies, “reporter.”

So, foreign correspondents are a generally worthless lot, mostly because they read books and think. Of course, this movie is condescending. It presumes that the audience consists of people who don’t read books and think, and the movie is flattering them for their mindless ignorance.

In light of all this, one must suppose that after the movie was filmed, someone started worrying about the newspapers that employ foreign correspondents. Those newspapers might retaliate by publishing reviews unfavorable to the movie, resulting in bad box office. As a result, the prologue was added as a way of making amends. And inasmuch as the working titles of this movie while scripts were being written were Personal History and Imposter, it may be that it was also thought wise to make the title of this movie be Foreign Correspondent, as another way of preemptively atoning for all those disparaging comments.

While Powers wants crime reporter Johnny Jones to go to Europe to get the facts, he realizes that the newspaper must keep up appearances. He tells Jones that he will be writing under the name of Huntley Haverstock. You see, people that read newspapers need to believe that their foreign correspondents do read books and think, something they would never believe of a “Johnny Jones.”

Powers says the man of the moment over in Europe is Van Meer, a Dutch diplomat, whom he refers to as “Holland’s strongman.” According to Powers, “If Van Meer stays at the helm of his country’s affairs for the next three months, it may mean peace in Europe. If we knew what he was thinking we’d know where Europe stands.”

A diplomat in Holland is essential to preventing war? Jones was thinking that maybe Hitler was more important, but Powers gives him a dismissive look. Anyway, Van Meer has signed a treaty with a diplomat in Belgium, and Jones is assigned to find out what is in that treaty. So, some agreement between Holland and Belgium is the key to determining whether Europe will remain at peace or go to war.

This sounds like a joke. The Rome-Berlin Axis; the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact; the Agreement of Mutual Assistance between the United Kingdom and Poland—these were not the treaties that mattered. It was some Dutch-Belgium treaty on which depended the peace of Europe.

While Jones is still in Powers’ office, he is introduced to Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall), leader of the Universal Peace Party. It turns out that Fisher has an attractive daughter, Carol (Laraine Day), with whom Jones eventually becomes romantically involved.

After Jones arrives in England, he meets Van Meer while both are on their way to the luncheon being held by the Universal Peace Party at a hotel. Van Meer wishes there were more men like Fisher, promoting peace. Jones tries to get Van Meer to talk about the possibility of war, but all Van Meer seems to want to talk about is birds:

Look at those birds. No matter how big the city, there must always be parks and places for the birds to live. I was walking through the park this morning, and I saw several people feeding the birds. It’s a good sign at a time like this.

Jones rolls his eyes in exasperation. They arrive at the hotel, where we hear an orchestra playing a Viennese waltz, perhaps as a way of inducing a little doubt in our minds as to the nature of this Universal Peace Party. Soon thereafter, Van Meer disappears. Later, Jones gets a cable telling him to go to Amsterdam, where Van Meer will be giving an important speech. When Jones greets Van Meer in Holland, the diplomat appears not to recognize him. Moments later, he is assassinated. Jones, Carol, and another reporter, Scott ffolliott (George Sanders), team up to chase the assassin and try to find out what is going on.

What makes the Dutch-Belgian treaty really special is that it has a secret clause, known as Clause 27, so secret in fact that it is only known to the two people who signed the treaty, because it was never written down. This raises the question as to how anyone, other than the two signatories, knows of the existence of Clause 27.

To find out what is in Clause 27, the spies kidnapped Van Meer with the idea of torturing him until he talked. But to keep the world from knowing that Van Meer had been kidnapped, they got a man who looked like Van Meer to take his place and then had him assassinated. Presumably, the impostor did not know about that part of the plan.

This was not making full use of a valuable resource. Having secured an imposter, the spies could have attacked their problem from two angles. While torturing the real Van Meer to find out what was in the clause, the imposter could have engaged the Belgian diplomat in a conversation about Clause 27, expressing doubts and asking for reassurances. Alternatively, he could have told the Belgian diplomat that he changed his mind and would no longer honor that clause.

In any event, this is another parallel with The Lady Vanishes. Just as Miss Froy, who knows the vital clause of a secret treaty between two countries, disappears and is replaced by a woman that looks like her in that movie; so too in this movie does Van Meer know of a secret clause in a treaty between two countries, and he disappears and is replaced by a substitute. In each movie, the protagonist knows that a real person had been replaced by a substitute, but has trouble convincing others of this. In each movie, someone who says he believes the protagonist turns out to be an enemy spy, in whom the protagonist puts his or her trust, thereby putting him or her in danger of being killed by the spy.

Back to the movie at hand. If the world thinks Van Meer has been assassinated, then that means that as far as everyone else is concerned, only the Belgian diplomat knows what is in Clause 27. Van Meer might have trusted this other fellow, but can we expect the country he represented to honor a secret clause whose content is known only to the diplomat of the other country and take his word for it? So, with Van Meer’s faked assassination, it would seem that the clause has just become worthless.

Moving right along, if I had been Van Meer and the spies started torturing me to tell what was in Clause 27, I would have just made up something. After all, it’s a secret, so how would the spies have known the difference?

But enough of this. Clause 27 is obviously what Hitchcock called a “MacGuffin,” something the spies are after, but the audience doesn’t care. But a MacGuffin should meet some minimum standard of believability. Personally, I found the whole business about Clause 27 to be palpably absurd, to the point that I found it distracting. While I was supposed to be enjoying all the danger and intrigue—Jones sneaking around in the windmill, someone falling from a cathedral, the spies torturing Van Meer—I kept being bothered by the nagging thought that there is no way Van Meer and his secret clause could have prevented war. We had no trouble believing that the vital clause in The Lady Vanishes was important, and for three reasons: World War II had not yet begun; it was left to our imagination which two countries had agreed to that clause; and the clause was not supposed to prevent war, but merely be an important piece of intelligence as war became more likely. Foreign Correspondent was released after the war had already begun, which means after Germany had already invaded Poland. What possible agreement between the Netherlands and Belgium could have prevented that?

When Jones discovers Van Meer in the windmill, the diplomat has been drugged and can hardly think. But he manages to tell Jones, “All that I can tell you is that they are going to take me away by plane like a bird. Always there are places in the city where birds can get crumbs.” Once again, Jones is frustrated by all this talk of birds. In any event, Jones cannot rescue Van Meer while the spies are still in the windmill, and soon after, Van Meer disappears again.

Fisher, the leader of that pacifist organization, actually turns out to be a spy, and is the one that arranged the kidnapping. You just can’t trust those peaceniks. This makes things difficult for Jones and Carol. When they first meet, he makes a derogatory remark about “well-meaning amateurs” that think a pacifist organization can prevent war. She bristles, noting that these well-meaning amateurs will be doing the fighting if there is war. This gets them off to a bad start. Later, when Jones realizes that Fisher is a spy, he doesn’t want to believe Carol is part the spy ring, and she is reluctant to believe anything bad about her father.

A day arrives in which both ffolliott and Jones say that war is going to break out “tomorrow,” and we learn from Fisher that England has already started with the blackouts. Earlier, we were supposed to believe that if Van Meer remained alive with his knowledge of Clause 27, war might be prevented. But now that war is inevitable, the significance of Clause 27 has changed. Now we are supposed to believe that knowledge of this clause will help Germany win that war, if the spies can find out what it is.

The spies take Van Meer to a room above a restaurant where they start torturing him. Fisher arrives and pretends to be his friend, trying to get him to tell about the clause. When Van Meer finds out that Fisher is a spy as well, he says to all of them:

You can do what you want with me. That’s not important. But you’ll never conquer them, Fisher. Little people everywhere, who give crumbs to birds. Lie to them. Drive them, whip them, force them into war. When the beasts like you will devour each other, then the world will belong to the little people.

The little people that feed the birds! What is this, a Frank Capra movie? But this was the implication of Miss Froy’s remark in The Lady Vanishes, when she said you can’t judge a country by its government, that it’s the ordinary people that are important. This praise of the little people, taken in conjunction with Powers’ anti-intellectual attitude and his approval of the way Jones beat up a policeman, shows that both movies share a populist ideology, although it’s more pronounced in this one.

A few minutes earlier, ffolliott was caught snooping around and brought into the room at gunpoint. He watches as the spies finally inflict some method of torture on Van Meer so gruesome that we are not allowed to see what it is, but only see the faces of ffolliott and the woman holding a gun on him as they react in horror. Van Meer agrees to talk. He says, “In the event of invasion by an enemy….” At that point, ffolliott starts scuffling with the spies, and then jumps out the window. Figuring the jig is up, the spies take off. Van Meer is rescued, but falls into a coma.

War does break out the next day. Fisher decides to leave England and fly to America, taking Carol with him. Jones and ffolliott also get themselves a seat on that plane. However, the plane is damaged when it is fired on by a German destroyer. Immediately, the captain of she ship sends a message to the radioman, who tells the pilot, “It’s the Germans. They’re sorry. They thought we were a bomber. She’ll rescue us straight-away.”

That certainly is sporting of them. You can tell that this is early in the war. In a later Hitchcock movie, Lifeboat (1944), after a U-boat torpedoes a merchant ship, the captain orders the lifeboats to be fired on before the submarine itself is sunk in return. I guess by that time the hatred of the Germans had reached the point where an audience was not ready to accept decent behavior on the part of a German captain, and would be willing to believe nothing but the worst about him.

The plane crashes into the ocean. Many scramble onto a wing of the plane, but when it proves unable to support everybody, Fisher redeems himself by getting off and drowning. Maybe. While Fisher was on the plane, Van Meer had recovered, telling Stebbins that Fisher was a spy. Fisher had intercepted a telegram, intended for ffolliott, saying that Fisher was to be arrested when he arrives in America. Knowing that he probably would be executed for espionage, he may have just been looking for an easy way out.

This is another parallel with The Lady Vanishes. In neither movie is the pacifist an upright, moral character who just happens to be misguided in his beliefs. Rather, he is depicted in both movies as unsavory. Not content to portray pacifism as merely naïve or imprudent, these movies vilify it. In The Lady Vanishes, the pacifist is a cad, an adulterer who promised the woman he was having an affair with that they would get married, but changed his mind when he realized a divorce would hurt his career. In Foreign Correspondent, the pacifist is not really interested in peace, but working with the enemy to help them win the upcoming war. And as punishment, both pacifists die in the end.

Jones manages to get his story back to the states. Unfortunately, Jones is never able to file a report on what Clause 27 said, or explain why it mattered. Perhaps it was an agreement as to how the Dutch and the Belgians planned to divide up Europe after the war.

Anyway, he returns to England, continuing to be a great foreign correspondent, sending important stories back to his newspaper, under the name of Huntley Haverstock. In the final scene, he is making a live broadcast over the radio when the bombs start falling all around them, causing the lights to go out. Instead of taking shelter, he continues to broadcast fearlessly, Carol remaining by his side, as he refers to the lights literally as well as metaphorically:

I can’t read the rest of my speech because the lights went out. So I’ll have to talk off the cuff. That noise you hear isn’t static. It’s death coming to London. You can hear the bombs falling on the streets and the homes. Don’t tune me out. Hang on. This is a big story. You’re part of it. It’s too late to do anything here except stand in the dark, let them come. It’s as if the lights were out everywhere except in America. Keep those lights burning. Cover them with steel, ring them with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them. Hello, America, hang onto your lights. They’re the only lights left in the world.

The speech, of course, is intended to rouse America from its complacency and pacifism as we hear “The Star Spangled Banner” being played in the background. But I would have given anything for ffolliott to walk in at that point, saying, “You realize, of course, that without electricity, the microphone stopped working when the lights went out.”

Suspicion (1941)

Murder is a dreadful thing. In real life, that is. But in a movie, a murder can save us from something dreadful.

For example, in the movie Kalifornia (1993), a couple, played by David Duchovny and Michelle Forbes, decide go to California, but they are a little short on funds, so they advertise for a couple to ride with them and share the expenses. Answering the ad is a low-class couple, played by Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis. The trip becomes a most unpleasant experience, and Forbes especially can’t wait for it to end. But then Lewis tells her that she and Duchovny are their best friends, threatening to be a part of their lives forever.

Fortunately, the movie provides a way out from this dreadful situation. Brad Pitt turns out to be a serial killer, resulting in a succession of purgative murders, the last of which is Lewis herself, before Duchovny finally kills him. Now Duchovny and Forbes will never have to socialize with Pitt and Lewis again.

In Play Misty for Me (1971), Clint Eastwood play a disc jockey that thinks he is going to have an uncomplicated fling with a fan played by Jessica Walter. She says she understands that he already has someone else and does not want to complicate his life, but that is no reason they can’t sleep together if they feel like it. But sex does strange things to people, and the next thing you know, Walter is madly in love with Eastwood. Worse, she assumes that he feels the same way about her, completely forgetting about the assurances she gave him on the first night. When he protests that he never told her that he loved her, she responds that there are ways of saying things that don’t involve words. When he tries to break off with her, she becomes suicidal. It looks as though he will never be free of her.

Fortunately for Eastwood, Walter becomes a knife-wielding psycho, who kills a police detective and threatens to kill Eastwood’s actual girlfriend. In the nick of time, Eastwood shows up at his girlfriend’s house where he is attacked by Walter. In self-defense, he punches her, knocking her through a glass door, over a balcony railing, and down a cliff to her death. Now he is finally free of her.

Think how unbearable these two movies would have been without murder to save the day!

In Suspicion, which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1941, Lina (Joan Fontaine), a woman on the verge of being an old maid, falls in love with Johnnie (Cary Grant) and marries him without knowing anything about him. That she did not know he was a congenital liar, a compulsive gambler, and a thief until after she married him might be understandable, although there were rumors that he cheated at cards and was the corespondent in a divorce case; but that she did not even know that he had no job nor any intention of getting one is ludicrous. Soon she begins to suspect that he murdered his friend Beaky (Nigel Bruce) to get his money and that he will try to murder her for the same reason, especially when he brings her a glass of milk right after an author of detective novels has told him of a poison that is in every home and is undetectable. In the last reel, we have one of those unbelievable character changes for which Hollywood movies are notorious, in which Johnnie realizes how bad he has been and is prepared to go to prison for his financial misdeeds, after having given up on the idea of committing suicide. And when Lina realizes that Johnnie is not a murderer, the way is open to them to live happily ever after.

This might have been three different movies besides the one actually produced. In what could have been a great movie, Johnnie does murder Beaky, and he does give Lina a glass of milk with poison in it. She suspects as much, but she drinks it anyway because, if it does have poison in it, then that means Johnnie does not love her, so she does not want to live anymore. But before she does, she gives Johnnie a letter to mail for her, in which she includes incriminating evidence that Johnnie is a murderer. After Lina dies from the poison, Johnnie smugly drops the letter in a mailbox and walks away whistling, not realizing that he has sealed his doom. There is some debate as to whether this is the ending Hitchcock wanted, but that the studio imposed a happy ending instead, or Hitchcock intended all along to make the movie be about a neurotic woman’s overwrought imagination. It doesn’t matter who wanted what. This would have been a much better movie, because there would have been actual murders instead of just the possibility of murder.

The second movie that might have been would have had the same ending as the novel on which it is based, Before the Fact by Francis Iles. In this version, similar to the previous one, Lina knows the milk is poisoned, but she drinks it anyway because she does not want to live, once she realizes that Johnnie would want to kill her, making her an accomplice before the fact to her own murder. But there is no incriminating letter. She loves Johnnie so much that she hopes he will get away with it, and even imagines that he will miss her when she’s gone.

I can’t help but think that the novel is an expression of misogyny arising out of resentment. It is not uncommon for a plain, ordinary man to find himself longing for the love a woman who has given herself completely to some jerk that is unworthy of her affection. It exasperates him that he would be so nice to her, but she would rather be mistreated by this other guy just because he is charming, good-looking, and tall. In reading this novel, this forlorn fellow will have no doubt that if Lina is in danger of being an old maid, it is only because it would never even occur to her to accept the love of someone like him. In fact, in the movie that was actually produced, there is just such a character. At a ball that Lina attends, only because she expects to see Johnnie there, a homely, bald-headed man named Reggie, who is just barely an inch taller than Lina, reminds her of the dance she promised him, presumably having filled in his name on her dance card just a short time ago. She apologizes for having forgotten, saying, “Why, of course. Poor Reggie.” As she dances with him, she is clearly distracted, looking around the room, wondering where Johnnie is. When Johnnie does arrive, just as the dance has ended, Lina sees him and rushes away from Reggie without saying a word, leaving him standing there with a bewildered look on his face. As Lina comes up to Johnnie, who has just crashed the party, he takes her in his arms and starts dancing with her. As they swirl away to a Viennese waltz, a rejected Reggie sees the glow on Lina’s face and the excitement in her eyes, something he certainly never saw when she was dancing with him. In short, Lina would rather be murdered by the man she loves than be loved by someone like Reggie that she can’t be bothered with. In reading this novel, a man of that sort may get an imaginary revenge against that girl he loved when he was young, but who never knew (or cared) that he existed.

The third movie that might have been would have been one in which there is neither a murder nor suspicion of murder (requiring a different title, of course). It is a movie that would have been unendurable. There would have been no relief from the fact that Johnnie has married Lina for her money and is annoyed to find out it does not amount to as much as he thought it would, especially when her father dies and does not leave her anything more than her usual allowance. We would have been left with Lina’s being married to a compulsive liar, who hocks her beloved chairs so he can bet on the horses; who believes he was not meant to have to work for a living, and when forced to take a job managing an estate, soon gets caught embezzling funds; and who cons Beaky into investing in a real estate venture that we know will only result in losing money as Johnnie squanders the investment on loose living. And there would have been no relief from the fact that Lina will continue to put up with this because she loves Johnnie.

In other words, we need at least the possibility of murder to be introduced halfway into the movie as a way of making us forget about what a horrible marriage this is. That Johnnie is a despicable human being even if he is not a murderer goes without saying. But there is something irritating about Lina as well, what with all her mewing about love as she puts up with Johnnie’s abuse. Finally, Beaky’s attitude toward Johnnie, that we must all forgive everything that Johnnie does, because, well, that’s just the way Johnnie is, is also annoying. They all deserve to die.

Therefore, we have four versions of this movie, one actual, three possible. The one in which there are two murders, the one that should have been made, would have been a great movie; the one in which there is only one murder, as in the novel, might have provided for the venting of some misogynistic spleen; the one in which there is only the suspicion of murder, the movie that was actually produced, is only fair; but the one in which there is not even the possibility of murder, just a miserable marriage, would have been dreadful.

Vertigo (1958)

Unless a movie is a fantasy, like The Wizard of Oz (1939), people tend to feel they have been deceived if they find out that most of a movie has just been a dream. To keep the audience from feeling cheated in this way, some movies will be ambiguous as to whether what we are seeing is reality or a dream, and this is the case with Vertigo.

The movie begins with a close-up of a woman’s face. The camera moves in even closer on her eye, in which we begin to see swirling animation along with the opening credits. Moving into her eye suggests that we have moved into her subjective state, allowing us to see what she is imagining or remembering. And the animation is a further indication that what we are seeing is not real. One might be justified, even at this early stage, in wondering if the movie that follows is a woman’s dream.

After the credits, the movie jumps right into a chase sequence on the rooftops of tall buildings, when police detective John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) slips and finds himself hanging from the gutter above the city street below, which causes him to have vertigo. A uniformed policeman tries to pull him to safety, but slips and falls to his death. When the scene ends, Ferguson is still hanging there, and we do not see him being rescued, nor is there any reference to his being rescued afterward, leading some critics to argue that the rest of the movie is his hallucinatory dream while he remains suspended. However, my preferred point at which this movie becomes a dream is in neither of these two scenes, but comes somewhat later.

Presumably, then, Ferguson is rescued, but he is forced to retire on account of the acrophobia resulting from the incident on the rooftop. In a subsequent scene, we meet Midge. In her conversation with Ferguson, whom she calls “Johnny” or “Johnny O,” we find out that they were engaged for three weeks while they were in college, but that she broke off the engagement, even though she says that she never married because he is the only man for her. From the surreptitious glances she gives him as they talk, we suspect there is more to the story than Ferguson is aware of. Barbara Bel Geddes, who plays Midge, is a nice looking woman, but she has no sex appeal. We can easily believe that she broke off the engagement when she realized that he had no passion for her. Platonic relationships are often characterized by saying that the man and woman are like brother and sister, but several remarks suggest that she is more like a mother to him. This implies that there is something naïve and inexperienced about Ferguson, as when they talk about braziers, and she says, “You know about those things. You’re a big boy now.” Ferguson is a middle-aged bachelor. Today, a man who has been a lifelong bachelor would be assumed to have had sexual relationships along the way. But in 1958, when this movie was made, it was not uncommon for bachelors to be virgins, and that is probably the case with Ferguson. This makes it easy to believe that he might become madly and obsessively in love with Madeleine (Kim Novak) later on in the movie.

This Madeleine with whom he eventually falls in love is the wife of an old friend, Gavin Elster, who asks Ferguson to follow her around. He is worried about her because she goes into dream-like trances, which he believes have something to do with her obsession with her great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdes, who committed suicide. Ferguson reluctantly agrees to follow her. When Madeleine tries to drown herself in the bay, he rescues her. Eventually, however, she manages to kill herself by leaping from a bell tower. Ferguson was unable to stop her because his vertigo prevented him from keeping up with her as she ascended the stairs. He feels responsible, and he ends up having nightmares, in which he sees himself falling the way Madeleine did. As a result, he winds up in a mental institution, in a catatonic state.

Supposedly, he gets out of the mental institution, discovers a woman named Judy, who looks like Madeleine, and begins trying to make the resemblance even greater by getting her to dye her hair and wear it like Madeleine, to dress like Madeleine, until he eventually discovers she really is Madeleine. Or rather, that the real Madeleine was murdered by her husband, and that Judy helped him do it by pretending to be Madeleine. When Judy got to the top of the bell tower, Elster was already there with his dead wife, whom he threw off the tower. In the process of discovering that this is what really happened, Ferguson forces Judy to go back to the mission with him and once again ascend the stairs of the bell tower. This leads to a climactic scene in which Judy accidentally falls to her death, which apparently cures Ferguson of his vertigo.

Though the movie can be understood realistically in this way, there is a good reason to suspect that the second half is just a dream. In any movie you have ever seen in which someone is in a hospital, there is almost always a getting-out-of-the-hospital scene, as in The Glass Key (1942), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and The Godfather (1972). But there is no such scene in this movie. And considering that Ferguson was in a psychotic state, the need for a getting-out-of-the-hospital scene would be even greater than in the examples just given, where only physical conditions were involved.

Instead, we get a discontinuous transition. We see Midge in Ferguson’s hospital room, where he is staring off into space, oblivious to her presence. She leaves the room and stops by the psychiatrist’s office, where she tells him that she does not think Ferguson is ever coming back. Then she walks away, down the hall, where darkness slowly closes in around her, almost as if this were the end of the movie. Suddenly, we see Ferguson outside the building where Madeleine once lived, and the fact that he had once been under the care of psychiatrists is never even referred to during the rest of the movie.

Alfred Hitchcock, who directed this movie, could have made it explicit that what follows is a dream by the well-known method of closing in on James Stewart’s eyes, allowing the image of his eyes to be slowly replaced by an overlapping image of Stewart standing outside Madeleine’s apartment. But, as noted above, the audience would have lost its patience having to watch the entire second half of the movie while knowing it was just a dream. Instead, Hitchcock allows us to watch the movie under the assumption that the entire movie depicts events that are actually happening, while at the same time giving us hints that at least some of the movie is a dream: the closeup on the eye of a woman (Madeleine? Judy?) during the opening credits; Ferguson’s hanging from the gutter without being rescued; Madeleine’s dream-like trances; Ferguson’s nightmares; and the absence of any scene showing us that he has recovered from his catatonic trance and is being released from the hospital.

Other than Vertigo, there is one other movie in which there is no getting-out-of-the-hospital scene. In the movie Four Daughters (1938), John Garfield plays a character who dies in a hospital. But in the remake, Young at Heart (1954), Frank Sinatra, who played the corresponding character, Barney Sloan, did not like the unhappy ending, and so he insisted that Barney live instead. The result is a tacked-on happy ending, in which Barney goes from dying in the hospital to suddenly being home and in great health. Whether intended or not, one cannot help but interpret this final scene as Barney’s wishful dream in the hospital in the last moments of his life. And considering that Barney had been gloomy and miserable throughout the movie, the fact that the final scene shows him playing the piano, happy and content, even further invites the dream interpretation.

In any event, by regarding the second half of Vertigo as a dream, the movie as a whole becomes more realistic. The murder plot revealed in the second half is far-fetched and would have been extremely difficult to arrange. Elster would have had to get his wife to wear the same clothes that Judy was wearing that night, find some reason to get her up to the bell tower, break her neck, and then wait for Judy to arrive before throwing the real Madeleine out of the tower. And then he would have to hope that Ferguson would not look at the body and discover that it was a different woman. There are easier ways for a man to get rid of his wife than that. The idea that Madeleine was mentally unbalanced, had found out about her great-grandmother and become obsessed with her story, leading her to commit suicide, is much easier to believe.

Furthermore, the Judy of the second half of the movie appears to be lower class, whereas the Madeleine of the first half strikes us as middle class. We would have to believe that Elster was like Professor Higgins to Judy’s Eliza Doolittle of My Fair Lady (1964), but that once the murder was accomplished and Judy was abandoned by him, she lapsed back into her lower-class mannerisms.

Finally, Midge is not seen in the second half of the movie. She represents rationality and common sense, as well as being the woman Ferguson should have married. Her absence in the second half of the movie is an indication that only irrational forces are at work in his wish-fulfilling dream. By dreaming that the woman he loved really did not die that night, that she was involved in a murder plot to kill the real Madeleine, he absolves himself of any responsibility for her death.

North by Northwest (1959)

Icebox Scenes in North by Northwest

Alfred Hitchcock is said to have formulated the principle of “fridge logic” when discussing the movie Vertigo (1958). When asked about something in the movie that did not make sense, when Madeleine (Kim Novak) disappears from a hotel, he referred to it as an “icebox scene.” The idea is that if there is an inconsistency or absurdity in a movie, but the viewer does not realize it until he gets home and starts pulling a piece of cold chicken out of the icebox for a snack, then the inconsistency or absurdity does not matter, because he has already enjoyed the movie. Although as a historical matter, it is the movie Vertigo that is associated with this principle, North by Northwest exemplifies it like no other movie he ever made.

The first time we watch this movie, we experience it from the point of view of a man that gets mistaken for a government agent. Although there are a few scenes that we see where the protagonist is not present, giving us a little extra information, we are pretty much in the dark about things as he is. But once we have seen the entire movie, it becomes possible to look at his situation objectively, or rather, from the point of view of the spies and the actual government agents. It is then that we notice things that seem inexplicable.

When Hitchcock made that remark about fridge logic, people mostly watched a movie once and that was it. There was no cable television, no video cassettes, no DVDs, and no streaming. An old movie might show up on television, on the Late Show, and a really good movie might be brought back to the theaters after several years, but that was something of an exception. Today, it is not at all uncommon for people to watch movies several times, and this makes icebox scenes more problematic than previously. I have a friend who says he just can’t watch North by Northwest anymore because of all the stuff that doesn’t make any sense, and I confess that I have felt the same way at times. And that’s a shame, for in other respects, this is one of the best movies Hitchcock ever made.

As a result, I set about the task of trying to rationalize the icebox scenes in this movie, and while I cannot say that I have been completely successful, I did manage to make it possible for me to watch the movie again and thoroughly enjoy it one more time. The results of my efforts are presented here. That being my purpose, I have decided that rather than start when the protagonist is introduced to us at the beginning of the movie, we should consider the relevant events in the order in which they occurred.

In addition to what is explicitly shown to us, it will be necessary during this analysis to provide information not depicted in the movie, but clearly implied by it, if we are to assume that there are rational explanations for any apprehensions we might have had while reaching for that piece of cold chicken. This additional information will be contained in footnotes interpolated in the main text.

The Movie Rationalized

Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) is the head of a spy organization that smuggles government secrets out of the United States and delivers them to a foreign government overseas, presumably the Soviet Union.

Footnote 1: The operation begins with an American traitor, who has access to classified information. He photographs top-secret documents and puts them on microfilm. This traitor then turns these rolls of microfilm over a sculptor, who conceals them in small sculptures he has designed for just that purpose. They are counterfeit items, the latest being made to look like a Tarascan Warrior. The sculptor then passes these fake pieces of Pre-Columbian art on to an art dealer, who puts them up for auction. Posing as an art collector, Vandamm buys the sculptures at these auctions, which take place in various parts of the Northeast and the Midwest: Pittsburg, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. Then Vandamm takes the sculptures with him on flights to Europe from his private airport in South Dakota.

Footnote 2: Vandamm’s personal secretary, Leonard (Martin Landau), thinks that all this business about buying counterfeit sculptures at art auctions is unnecessarily elaborate. He says that the rolls of microfilm should be deposited in a drop, where he can then pick them up. That way it can all be done in just one city, and fewer people will be involved. Vandamm says that’s just what the government agents would expect them to do. So, while the government agents are busy trying to figure out where the drop is, Vandamm is free to buy the sculptures at auctions without arousing suspicion.

“The Professor” (Leo G. Carroll) works for the United States Intelligence Agency. He is in charge of finding out how Vandamm obtains the secrets he is smuggling out of the country. He has several subordinates working for him, including Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who is an undercover agent, working as Vandamm’s mistress.

Footnote 3: It has never occurred to Eve or to the Professor that the secrets are on microfilm planted inside the sculptures that Vandamm routinely bids for at auctions. They figure the microfilm is just left at a drop somewhere.

The Professor is worried that Vandamm may suspect Eve of being a government agent, so to mislead him on this matter, he decides to create a nonexistent decoy named George Kaplan. He will be registered at various hotel rooms wherever Vandamm travels in order to participate in one of those auctions. Clothes and sundries will be moved from hotel to hotel so that it will appear that there really is such an agent.

Footnote 4: At the meeting when the Professor announces his scheme involving a nonexistent George Kaplan, one of his subordinates, a Miss Gleason, asks who will be responsible for registering in hotels and moving stuff from room to room.

“I thought I’d let that new guy, Clarence, take care of all that,” the Professor answers.

“In that case,” Miss Gleason asks, “why not just let Clarence pretend to be Kaplan? That would certainly be simpler. As long as he is going to have to register at the hotels, see to it that clothes and sundries are moved from one room to another, and book flights on trains and planes whenever Vandamm goes from one auction to another, we might just as well have Clarence stay in those hotel rooms as Kaplan. Furthermore,” Miss Gleason continues, “the whole point of this business of creating a fake agent named George Kaplan will be lost if the spies don’t know he supposedly exists. What better way to make sure the spies believe there is such an agent than to have Clarence be seen at those hotels, traveling on those trains and planes, and attending the various auctions that Vandamm goes to?”

The Professor points out that Clarence would then be entitled to some overtime pay if he did all that, and there just aren’t the funds available for that in this year’s budget.

Footnote 5: Vandamm worries that he is suspected of being a spy. He tells Leonard to find out if they are being followed around. “Whenever we arrive in a city,” Vandamm tells Leonard, “check all the hotels in that city and see who registers in them around the same time. Then, when we travel to a new city, check all the hotels in that city to see who registers there. Then compare the names on the first list with those on the second, and see if you can find a match. If there is a match, then we’ll know he is a government agent assigned to my case.”

Leonard is appalled. “Do you realize what that would entail?” he asks. “Besides,” Leonard points out, “even if there is a match, the man could just be a genuine art collector, going to the same auctions you do.”

But Vandamm is adamant. After much effort on Leonard’s part, he reports back that there is a George Kaplan that seems to be following them around, and he is presently registered at the Plaza Hotel.

A couple of Vandamm’s henchmen, Valerian (Adam Williams) and Licht (Robert Ellenstein), go to the Plaza Hotel. They have Kaplan paged. By coincidence, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), a Madison Avenue advertising executive, calls the pageboy to his table in order to send a telegram to his mother. The spies think he is Kaplan responding to the page for Kaplan, and they force him into a car and take him to the magnificent estate of Lester Townsend, a United Nations diplomat.

Footnote 6: At the Townsend estate, Valerian is the gardener, and his wife Anna is the housekeeper. Whenever the United Nations is in session, Townsend stays in the city, and Valerian lets Vandamm know that Townsend will be gone for a while. It’s at times like these that Vandamm likes to throw parties at Townsend’s house, where he pretends to be Townsend. That way he can impress all the girls, who will then have sex with him because they think he is a big shot. He even has his sister pretend to be his wife, although the real Mrs. Townsend died years ago. Now, it was at one of those parties where Eve met Vandamm, and being suitably impressed by his apparent wealth and influence, she had sex with him. She thought he was Townsend and was married, but you know how it is. It often happens that a woman would rather have an affair with a married man who is rich and powerful, than have an unmarried man of modest means and position all to herself. It was subsequent to this that the Professor approached her, and told her that her lover was not the enormously wealthy and highly respected Lester Townsend, president of UNIPO, but only Phillip Vandamm, who was just a spy. So, when the Professor said he needed her help to find out more about Vandamm’s operation, she agreed, partly out of a sense of patriotic duty, but mostly out of pique.

When Thornhill is brought inside Townsend’s house, they put him in the library. When Vandamm enters, Thornhill naturally assumes that Vandamm is Townsend and refers to him as such. In turn, Vandamm refers to Thornhill as Kaplan, even though Thornhill is taller than he expected. Thornhill insists that he is not Kaplan.

Footnote 7: Vandamm knows that if Thornhill really is Kaplan, then he, Kaplan, would know that Vandamm is not Townsend. In that case, there would be no point in his pretending to be Townsend while they are alone in the library. One might expect him to say, “Come off it, Kaplan. You know I’m Phillip Vandamm.” But deep down in Vandamm’s subconscious mind, he suspects that Thornhill is not Kaplan, and the whole thing is a mistake. After all, Valerian and Licht had gained entry into what was supposedly Kaplan’s hotel room, where they had a look at his clothes, which were for a much shorter man. That’s why Vandamm wasn’t expecting someone tall like Thornhill. And so, owing to these subliminal misgivings, he continues to pretend to be Townsend.

When Thornhill apparently refuses to talk about how much he supposedly knows about Vandamm’s operation, the spies force him to drink a lot of bourbon, put him in a Mercedes that belongs to one of the guests, and try to make it looks as though he was so drunk that he drove off a cliff. The plan does not work. There is an automobile accident involving a police car, and Thornhill is arrested.

Footnote 8: Anna points out that they need to clean the couch where some of the liquor spilled. Otherwise, when Townsend returns, he will know that there have been shenanigans going on in his house while he was away. Vandamm agrees, but he is worried about something else. If the man they tried to kill really is Kaplan, he will report to his superiors what happened. Knowing that he has been identified, the Intelligence Agency will take him off the case and put someone else on it. Fine. But deep down in his subconscious mind, Vandamm still suspects that Thornhill is not really Kaplan. In that case, Thornhill will return the next day with the police. So, they’d better have a cover story ready, just in case.

Thornhill does return the next day, not only with the local police, but also with his lawyer and his mother. The fake Mrs. Townsend pretends that they have all been worried about “Roger,” especially since he was so drunk that he “borrowed” Laura’s Mercedes.

Footnote 9: Since Thornhill did return with the police, his lawyer, and his mother, something a real intelligence agent would not do, this confirms Vandamm’s subconscious suspicions that he is not Kaplan. But Vandamm has something else on his mind instead. What if Thornhill goes to the United Nations and tells Townsend about the party? They will be so busted! So, he sends Valerian and Licht to apprehend Thornhill again. If he goes to the United Nations, they are to kill Townsend so that no one will ever know about all the parties they’ve been throwing at his house.

The fake Mrs. Townsend mentioned that her husband would be addressing the General Assembly that afternoon. Thornhill decides to go to the United Nations, hoping to resolve the issue with Townsend in a public place. When he gets there, he discovers that the real Lester Townsend is not the man that he met the previous evening. When he asks Townsend who all those people were having a big party in his house, there was nothing for Valerian to do but throw his switchblade stiletto into Townsend’s back. Of course, that’s the last party Vandamm and his friends will be able to throw at the Townsend estate, so they pack up and leave for Chicago.

Because Thornhill is photographed holding the knife he removed from Townsend’s back, he now has the police looking for him, thinking he is guilty of murder. He finds out from the Plaza Hotel that Kaplan is supposedly going to the Ambassador East, a hotel in Chicago. Hoping to make contact with this George Kaplan so he can be cleared of this murder charge, he gets on a train heading for Chicago. On that train, he meets Eve. When a couple of police detectives board the train later on, she hides him in her compartment. While he is in the lavatory, she gives the porter a note to give to Vandamm, who is also on the train, asking what to do with Kaplan/Thornhill in the morning. In the meantime, she and Thornhill have sex.

After leaving the train, Thornhill, believing there really is a Kaplan, accepts Eve’s offer to call Kaplan for him at the Ambassador East. She goes to a phone booth and starts talking to someone. In another phone booth, we see Leonard, to whom she is apparently speaking. We do not hear what they are saying. When she comes out of the phone booth, she tells Thornhill where he can meet Kaplan.

There is commentary for this movie on the DVD, provided by the screenwriter, Ernest Lehman. He says that Hitchcock shut down production for a whole day just prior to filming the phone booth scene. He had a problem with that scene, but he couldn’t ask Lehman about it because Lehman was in Europe at the time. Lehman said that Hitchcock was bothered by the fact that Leonard would not have known the phone number of the booth Eve was in. But since he didn’t have Lehman on the set to ask him about it, Hitchcock decided to let it go.

That was not the reason, although I have no doubt that Hitchcock pretended it was, while keeping the real reason to himself. What undoubtedly bothered Hitchcock was that a seemingly impossible conversation takes place in the phone booths. But since no one else on the set seemed to have realized this, he figured he could get away with it as greatest piece of fridge logic ever. To see this, we have to keep in mind that Thornhill does not know Eve is Vandamm’s mistress working undercover as a government agent. Furthermore, he believes Kaplan exists and wants to meet him. Leonard, on the other hand, thinks Thornhill is Kaplan. And Eve knows that there is no Kaplan.

Footnote 10: Now, to be revealed for the first time ever, here is the conversation that took place in the phone booths:

Eve: He says he wants me to call Kaplan and arrange a meeting.

Leonard: What are you talking about? He is Kaplan.

Eve: But that’s what he says.

Leonard: He must be on to you. After all, a government agent like Kaplan, who has been following us for months, would know that you are Phillip’s mistress.

Eve: So, what shall I do?

Leonard: Oh, what the heck! Tell Kaplan you talked to Kaplan, and that Kaplan wants to meet him. [He then gives Eve instructions as to where the meeting will take place.]

Eve gets off the phone and tells Thornhill where he can supposedly meet Kaplan. Then follows the famous crop-dusting scene.

Footnote 11: It has been said that there are easier ways to kill someone than getting him out into the middle of an open prairie so that he can be shot with a sub-machine gun from a crop-dusting plane flying overhead. But more to the point is the fact that Kaplan, if he really existed, would not want to meet himself. And if he did want to meet someone other than himself, he would not agree to meet him alone, unarmed, and in the middle of nowhere. Only if Thornhill is who he says he is, would he believe that Eve talked to Kaplan, and that Kaplan wants to meet him in this isolated place. In other words, when Thornhill gets off the bus at Prairie Stop, that confirms the subliminal suspicions in Vandamm’s subconscious mind that Thornhill is not Kaplan, and the whole thing has been a big mistake. But Vandamm is distracted. He is worried that when Eve and Thornhill had sex, it was so good that she wants more. As a result, he is too jealous to worry about whether Thornhill really is Kaplan or not.

Well, you know what happens after that. There is a climactic scene at Mount Rushmore, where the spies are killed or captured. Thornhill and Eve end up getting married, and they live happily ever after.

Footnote 12: The American traitor who has been using Vandamm as a courier ends up having to find someone else to transport the rolls of microfilm out of the country. Fortunately for him, Vandamm’s replacement is content to pick the microfilm up at a drop, thus obviating the need for all that convoluted nonsense about sculptures and auctions.

Hopefully, the information I provided in the footnotes has cleared up any fridge-logic concerns you may have had.

“I Confess” (1953)

Alfred Hitchcock and Religion Don’t Mix

Critics often comment on the influence that a Catholic upbringing had on Alfred Hitchcock. Something to do with fear and guilt. Granted that this is correct, it seems that this influence resulted in many good movies being produced. Paradoxically, however, this applies only to the movies that had nothing to do with religion. Of the two movies where religion was involved, the results were inferior. In the case of
The Wrong Man (1956), a miracle occurs which saves the protagonist at the expense of the movie.

In the other religious movie by Hitchcock, “I Confess” (1953), no miracle occurs, but the story is about a priest. As we watch this movie, we cannot help but wonder if Hitchcock’s Catholic upbringing constrained his treatment of this protagonist. Of course, we cannot be sure about this, for Warner Bros. and the Hays Office also put limits on Hitchcock’s treatment of a man of the cloth.

The original source for this movie was Nos Deux Consciences, a French play produced in 1902, in which a priest hears a confession about the murder of another priest. Then he is accused of committing the murder himself, but cannot tell who the real killer is on account of the sacramental seal of the confessional. He is convicted and sentenced to die by guillotine. After he gets his head chopped off, they discover that he was innocent.

According to commentary on the DVD, Hitchcock wanted the priest to be executed in the end, just as in the play, but Joseph Breen of the Hays Office would not allow it. But even in small ways, the story as presented in the movie comes across as inhibited. For one thing, it is lacking in humor. In a lot of Hitchcock’s movies, there is some comic relief, often provided by the protagonist. But the priest in this movie is mirthless. The only thing that counts for humor is weak: another priest keeps bringing his bicycle into the rectory, leaning it up against a wall, after which it falls over. This is so not-funny that it would have been better to leave it out completely.

There Is No Sex in This Movie

The movie involves a flashback, but an analysis of the film might proceed more smoothly if we consider the events as they occurred chronologically. The setting is Québec just before the outbreak of World War II. Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift) and Ruth (Anne Baxter) are a young couple. As told by Ruth in the flashback, she is very much in love with with Michael, who she says loves her. But we never actually hear Michael tell Ruth that he loves her. On the DVD commentary, this flashback is compared to the one in Stage Fright (1950), a Hitchcock film in which the story told in a flashback turns out not to be true, a lying flashback, the first ever to take place in a movie. Apparently, François Truffaut thought the flashback in ”I Confess” was also a lying flashback, for it tells of what happened from the dreamy perspective of a young woman in love, without giving us any direct insight into what Michael is actually thinking and feeling.

With the outbreak of the war, Michael enlists, something Ruth wishes he had not done. He refuses to marry her, saying that there are too many widows already. There is something a little detestable about a man who does exactly what he wants to do, and then tells the woman that he is doing it for her benefit. In any event, compared to all the movies we have seen where couples, desperately in love, get married just before the man is sent off to fight a war, Michael’s excuse makes him out to be something of a cold fish. Sure enough, as the war drags on, he stops writing Ruth letters, none of which were love letters in any event. She says the letters were all serious. She ends up working as the secretary of Pierre Grandfort, a member of Parliament, whom she eventually marries. We know he must be a good husband, because when we first encounter him, he is arguing before the House of Commons that female teachers should receive pay equal to that of the male teachers, as opposed to a conservative member of Parliament who claims that it would wreck the economy.

The war ends, and Michael returns. Ruth meets him as he gets off the ship, and they agree to meet the next day. She is still in love with him, and does not tell him she is married. They spend the day in the countryside, where he talks about how the war changed him. She tries kissing him, but he pulls away, cool to her attempt at lovemaking. Suddenly a storm comes up. They are forced to seek shelter in a gazebo, where they spend the night. This immediately made me think of The Aeneid, where Aeneas and Dido hide in a cave when a storm comes up, and they end up becoming lovers. That may be the first, but certainly not the last time that a storm has proved conducive to lovemaking in a work of fiction. As a result, when Michael and Ruth do not have sex when they hide from the storm, it is a bit of a let down.

In addition to the fact that they do not have sex, there are two other sanitizing features in this scene: Michael has not yet become a priest, and he does not know Ruth is married. Imagine the opposite: Michael, now an ordained priest, has sex with Ruth during the storm, even though he knows she is a married woman. Juicy! But as it is, Michael’s innocence is preserved at the expense of sapping this movie of any vitality.

In the play that was the source for this story, the priest does have sex with a woman, gets her pregnant, and she has a child out of wedlock. According to the commentary on the DVD, Hitchcock wanted Michael to have sex with Ruth, but before he had become a priest. And he wanted her to have an illegitimate child. I hate to be technical, but I don’t think the child of a married woman would be illegitimate, even if it is the child of her lover rather than her husband. Furthermore, that would seem to violate a general principle concerning sex and pregnancy in the movies, which is as follows: if an unmarried woman in a movie has sex just one time, she always gets pregnant; but if a married woman in a movie has sex with another man, she never gets pregnant. In any event, Hitchcock was not allowed to follow the play in this regard either.

The next morning, the owner of the estate, a Monsieur Villette, discovers them and makes a remark suggesting Michael and Ruth were having sex. Outraged, Michael knocks him down. Then Villette sees Ruth, realizing she is Madame Grandfort and addressing her as such. As a result, Michael and Ruth do not see each other again for five years.

But then Villette finds himself in a “tax scandal.” He tells Ruth that she must get her husband Pierre to use his influence to get him out of trouble, or he will tell about that night in the gazebo. She refuses, saying that her husband would never get involved in anything shady. Villette keeps putting pressure on her. She turns to Michael, now Father Logan, and gets him to meet her one night. She tells him her problem, and he becomes angry, saying he will take care of Villette. Then he goes back to the rectory.

A Religious Villain

Somewhat later, he looks out his window and sees someone entering the church. Logan goes down to see who it is and finds Otto Keller, the sexton, praying. Logan asks if he can help him. Keller replies:

No one can help me. I have abused your kindness…. You gave my wife and me a home, a job, even friendship. I felt you would let me be your friend. So wonderful a thing for a refugee, a German, a man without a home. You will hate me now…. You trusted me. You saw that my wife and I were not common servants. It was you who found more pleasant tasks for us, working here in the rectory.

But notwithstanding his reference to how well he and his wife have been treated, he adds a remark somewhat incongruous with that: “It was my wife, working so hard. It breaks my heart.” Following this, Keller confesses to Logan that he accidentally killed Villette while trying to rob him.

Later, Keller confesses again to his wife, Alma. He says he stole the money because it broke his heart thinking of her working so hard. Here we go again. Just as Michael came up with that lame excuse for refusing to marry Ruth, saying there were too many widows already, Keller tells his wife that he didn’t steal the money for his own selfish reasons, but rather he did it all for her.

Anyway, he says he figured that with $2,000, they could start a new life. Adjusted for inflation, that would be a little over $22,000 today. I don’t know what kind of new life a married couple could start with that.

Keller wore a priest’s cassock the night he robbed and killed Villette in order to throw off suspicion in case someone saw him. A couple of school girls did see him, and they tell the police that they saw a priest leaving Villette’s house. The result is that Logan falls under suspicion, especially when Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden) sees him meeting Ruth on the street the morning after the murder, just outside Villette’s house. But Logan can’t defend himself against the charge of murder because he cannot reveal what he heard in the confessional.

I wondered about this. Can a priest really allow a murderer to continue to walk the streets, possibly killing again, simply because the killer confessed to the murder to him? I looked into it, and apparently it’s true. I even came across one article in which a priest admitted to the way “I Confess” bothered him:

People wonder, “Can the priest ever reveal what is said in confession?” The simple, straight answer is “no.” … (Just as an aside, a great movie which deals with this very topic is Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess, which deals with a priest who hears a murder confession and then is framed for the murder. As a priest, I was in agony during much of the movie.)

There seems to be a conflation of what Logan cannot say to the police regarding what he heard in the confessional and what Logan does not want to say to the police because it regards his relationship with Ruth. When Larrue interrogates Logan, asking about the woman he met in front of Villette’s house, or who he was with the night of the murder, it is easy to blend his refusal to answer for personal reasons with his refusal to reveal who murdered Villette. But the fact is that he could easily have answered Larrue’s questions. We might imagine him saying the following:

The woman was Ruth Grandfort, whom I knew before the war. Villette was blackmailing her because he thought we were having an affair. It wasn’t true, of course, but Ruth asked to meet me that night, because she didn’t know what to do about it. We agreed to meet at Villette’s house the next morning, which is why you saw her talking to me on the street. This is a personal matter, inspector, so I trust you will be discreet with the information I have given you.

Anyway, having failed to get this information from Logan, Larrue eventually finds out the woman in question was Ruth, and he brings her in for questioning, along with her husband Pierre. Ruth tries to give Michael an alibi, telling Inspector Larrue that she was with Michael that night, when she told him that she was being blackmailed. This is where the flashback occurs, when she tells how she and Michael were in love before the war. Pierre already knew about her love for Michael before the war, but the investigation really brings things out in the open, leading to marital discord. Ruth tells Pierre with brutal frankness that she never loved him and that he can leave her, for all she cares. She could have lied, saying she no longer is in love with Michael, that she cares about him only as a friend, telling her husband that he is the one she truly loves now. Maybe he wouldn’t have completely believed her, but he would have accepted it, and their marriage could have been saved. Instead, she proudly asserts that she has never deceived him in this matter, as if that were a virtue. But when a woman reaches the point where she is no longer willing to lie to her husband, that marriage over. I guess that’s what happens when a woman marries a man she doesn’t love because she is still in love with a man that never loved her.

However, it is all for naught. When she and Logan parted at 11:00, there was still time for him to murder Villette, for the autopsy establishes that he could not have died before 11:30.

The supposed time of death of Villette is an inconsistent mess. The school girls said they saw the priest leaving Villette’s house between 11:00 and 11:30, which would mean Villette did die before 11:30. So, either they were wrong about the time, or the coroner was wrong about the time of death. Furthermore, Larrue says that since Madame Grandfort and Father Logan parted at 11:00, “You can do a lot of things in thirty minutes,” suggesting that it was in that time period that Villette was murdered. But Logan wouldn’t have had to kill Villette in that thirty-minute time period, because the autopsy said Villette could not have died before 11:30. The murder would have had to take place after that thirty-minute period. Finally, Pierre tells Ruth the next morning that the autopsy report showed that Villette died at exactly 11:30. And later, during the trial, the crown prosecutor also says the murder took place at 11:30.

In order for all this to make sense, the autopsy should have said that Villette died sometime between 11:00 and 11:30. That would be consistent with what the school girls said, and it would make sense of Larrue’s remark about doing “a lot of things in thirty minutes.” Pierre’s remark should have been, “The autopsy showed that Villette could have died as late as 11:30,” and the crown prosecutor should have made a similar statement in court.

In any event, Larrue now knows that Logan had a motive for killing Villete.

The Employment of Spiritual Technology

That would be bad enough, but when Keller tells his wife what he did, saying that Logan told him he must give back the money, which would presumably mean admitting to the murder, he suddenly gets an evil look in his eye. We know what he’s thinking. Now that he has absolution, he will still go to Heaven, but he is safe here on Earth as well, for Father Logan cannot tell what he knows. But he does not simply sit back and let Logan be accused. He lies about when Logan returned to the rectory. Whereas Logan got back to the rectory at 11:15, and he saw Keller entering the church somewhat later than that, Keller says he saw Logan entering the church at 11:45, thereby making it seem as though Logan had time to murder Villette. He says Logan appeared to be distressed and wanted to be left alone. But, he goes on to say, he did not want to leave him because he wanted to help him, because Logan had been so kind to him and his wife. On a later occasion, he suggests that Logan was acting like a guilty man. Then, he even takes the cassock he wore, which has Villette’s blood on it, and plants it among Logan’s things for the police to find later.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. He might have been absolved of the murder, but is not the prohibition against bearing false witness against your neighbor one of the Ten Commandments? Won’t he go to Hell for that? Not at all. He’ll just wait until Logan is convicted and hanged, after which he can go out and get himself another priest and confess to that, thereby ensuring his future felicity.

If this sounds farfetched, it really is not. Religious belief falls on a spectrum ranging from the moral to the magical. The more one believes that the important parts of a religion are about doing good and eschewing evil, the less one cares about the magical side, which may be dismissed as silly superstition. But those who are on the magical end of that spectrum will care more about material gain than about what is right and wrong. It is not unheard of for such people to use religious magic to protect them while doing something immoral or illegal. Keller is clearly located way over on the magical end of that spectrum, using religious magic for his own evil ends.

The Half Trial of Father Logan

Eventually, Logan is put on trial for murder. But it is only half a trial. We never see the defense attorney cross examine the prosecution’s witnesses, call his own witnesses to testify, or present his closing argument to the jury. The only thing he does of any significance is object a couple of times, but the crown prosecutor continues with his line of questioning unimpeded. Speaking of which, the prosecutor often stops asking a witness questions so he can give his theory of what happened. We know that movies take liberties in their presentations of trials, but the absence of an objection from the defense at these points is preposterous. In any event, when the jury comes back with a not-guilty verdict, it strikes us as arbitrary, for we never heard anything from the defense casting doubt on the accusation. In fact, for all practical purposes, Father Logan might just as well not have had a defense attorney, whose part is so minimal that he is not even listed in the credits. Hitchcock could have made this his cameo.

This reminded me of Helter Skelter (1976), a television miniseries about Charles Manson, including his trial. There too, we have a defense attorney that is practically nonexistent. The day before the closing arguments are to begin, the prosecuting attorney tells his wife how worried he is about the summation he will have to give, because so much depends on it. I remember thinking to myself, “Is he kidding? Everyone knew Charles Manson was going to be found guilty. No special skill was required from the prosecutor in giving his closing argument.” In fact, I was wondering what closing argument would be heard from the defense. That was where the real challenge lay. So, in the next scene, we see the prosecutor give his all-important summation, while I waited patiently for him to finish so I could hear what the defense attorney would say. But my patience went unrewarded, because we never got to hear from the defense attorney at all. And that is why Helter Skelter is inferior. In general, when a trial takes place in a movie in which we never hear from the defense, it is completely lacking in dramatic value.

Returning to “I Confess,” let us consider how the trial might have been made more interesting by having Logan’s attorney do more than just make an occasional fruitless objection. While Logan may have been unable to reveal what was said to him in the confessional, he is not bound to remain silent about other matters, especially anything that happened before he heard the confession. When being questioned on the witness stand by the crown prosecutor, Logan asserts that much of what Keller said was not true, but his own attorney makes no attempt to get him to elaborate on this matter. Had he done so, we might have heard the following:

Defense attorney: Father Logan, was Otto Keller already in the church when you returned to the rectory?

Father Logan: No, he was not.

Defense attorney: Do you know when he arrived at the church?

Father Logan: Yes, it was after 11:30.

Defense attorney: So, when Keller says he followed you into the church and found you there kneeling, that is not true?

Father Logan: No, it is not.

Defense attorney: Do you know any reason why Keller would lie about this matter?

Father Logan: I cannot say.

Anyway, Father Logan is found not guilty by a jury that says they think he did it, but there just was not enough evidence to convict beyond a reasonable doubt, and the judge even goes one step further and says he disagrees with the jury, that they should have convicted Logan. As a result, the whole town ends up being against him, aside from Ruth, of course. That is totally unrealistic. In real life, we would expect him to have some supporters who believed he was innocent. The unanimity of the townsfolk in this regard is as one-sided as the trial, and therefore just as simplistic.

More Guilt for Logan, Less Guilt for Keller

Just as it would have been more interesting had Father Logan been guilty of something, such as having sex with Ruth, so too would this movie would have been far more interesting if, instead of trying to incriminate Logan, Keller had given evidence that would have helped him, short of admitting that he was the one who was guilty. He could have told Larrue that he saw Father Logan get back to the church too early to have committed the murder, not only giving Logan an alibi, but cleverly giving himself one at the same time. This testimony from Keller in defense of Logan would have created an even greater degree of moral tension. Logan would not only have to keep it a secret that Keller killed Villette, but he would also have to accept that the alibi that Keller provided for him was a genuine effort to help exonerate him, making him grateful to Keller.

An Evil Man Gets His Eternal Reward

In the end, Alma cannot stand it when Logan is being attacked by the mob outside the courthouse. She points to her husband, trying to say he is the one who is guilty. Keller shoots her to keep her from talking. So much for his excuse that he was doing it all for his wife. We already knew that Keller was evil, but this is even worse. Fortunately for Alma, just before she dies, another priest performs the last rites as she asks to be forgiven. As a result, her soul goes to Heaven.

Then Keller runs off. He kills a chef in a hotel kitchen. Then, by means of a kind of logic that can occur only in a melodrama, Keller concludes that Logan has told the police what he knows, and thus blurts out the fact that he killed Villette while the police are within earshot. Subsequently, the police shoot him. Logan goes over to Keller, who asks for forgiveness. Logan makes the sign of the cross, while uttering the words, “Te absolvo in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” at which point Keller dies. As a result, his soul ascends to Heaven, where he will join his wife, allowing them to share eternity together.

As a final improvement for this movie, imagine that Keller dies before Father Logan can reach him. “Too late, Father,” Inspector Larrue says, “that’s one confession you’re never going to hear.”

Just as the miracle in The Wrong Man was a distraction, forcing us to think about divine intervention when the movie would have been much better if it had restricted itself to the natural world, so too does “I Confess” irritate us with the mechanics of salvation, forcing us to think about the arbitrary rules concerning confession that will allow a man to commit three murders and then get off on a technicality.

Frenzy (1972)

Frenzy is an Alfred Hitchcock movie. It is misanthropic, misogynist, misogamist, homophobic, antifeminist, and illogical. Other than that, it’s quite a good movie.

When the movie begins, a British official, presumably the Minister of the Environment, is giving a speech along the banks of the River Thames, promising that it will soon be a clean river again, free of pollution, “clear of the waste products of our society.” As an example of said waste products, a naked woman is seen floating face down in the river with a necktie around her neck. From the remarks of the crowd, we gather there is another serial killer in London, one that strangles women with a necktie. The government official is deeply concerned: not about the woman, but that it appears to be his club tie that’s wrapped around her neck.

The scene changes, and we see a similar tie being tied around the neck of Richard Blaney (Jon Finch). He has a room upstairs from the pub he works in, and he begins the day by having a glass of brandy. The manager sees him do it, accuses him of stealing drinks, and fires him. As they exchange words, we see that Blaney has an explosive temper. His co-worker, Babs Milligan (Anna Massey), walks in and defends Blaney, saying he always pays for his drinks. The manager says he’s either a thief or a boozer, and he doesn’t need either one. Besides, he says, Blaney spends too much time “pulling on your tits,” and the customers talk about it. Babs snaps back, “What about you? Always fingering me.” The ugly side of sex is a theme of this movie.

Babs knows Blaney doesn’t have much money on him, but he’s too proud to borrow any money from her, or rather, borrow any more than he already has. He heads over to the fruit market, which is run by his friend, Bob Rusk (Barry Foster). Unlike Blaney, Rusk is easygoing and has a good sense of humor. When he hears that Blaney has been fired, he pulls out a wad of cash and offers it to him, but Blaney refuses. Failing that, Rusk gives him some grapes, quoting his mother (who is quoting Mae West): “’Beulah, peel me a grape.’ That’s what my ol’ Mum used to say when I was a kid.”

Just then a police sergeant walks up, telling Rusk how much of a headache the necktie strangler is causing them. Noting that Rusk is a bit of a ladies’ man, he asks Rusk to let him know if any of his girlfriends have a “near miss” with someone like that.

“Sure,” Rusk replies. “Mind you, half of them haven’t got their heads screwed on right, let alone knowing when they’ve been screwed off,” he smirks, pleased with his witticism. He starts to introduce the sergeant to Blaney, but he has disappeared. We are, of course, supposed to wonder if Blaney is the necktie strangler.

Blaney steps into a pub to have another brandy. While in there, two distinguished-looking men enter, one apparently a solicitor, the other, a doctor. In a lighthearted tone, they begin discussing the necktie murders. A slightly plump, grey-haired barmaid serves them a couple of pints. Being informed as to what they were talking about, she says, with a naughty look in her eyes, “He rapes them first, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, I believe he does,” the solicitor says with amusement, giving his companion a knowing look.

With a similar look of amusement, the doctor adds, “I suppose it’s nice to know every cloud has a silver lining.”

“Oh,” the barmaid says, acting as though she is shocked.

Now, it is true that when this movie was made in 1972, women were still being advised that if rape is inevitable, they should just relax and enjoy it. And this advice was not only proffered by the men, but I heard women say this as well, including my own mother. Still, it was always assumed that the woman would survive the rape she enjoyed. To suggest deriving pleasure from being raped, knowing that strangulation might follow right after the man had his climax, is beyond gross.

While the doctor is speculating on the nature of the sexual psychopath behind the murders, saying they are most likely to kill when their desires are frustrated, we see Blaney being especially rude to the barman regarding the amount of brandy in his glass when he asks for another. The doctor continues, saying that these psychopaths usually don’t have a linking motive, which makes them hard to catch.

“Let’s hope he slips up soon,” says the solicitor.

The doctor replies:

In one way, I rather hope he doesn’t. [The solicitor looks surprised.] Well, we haven’t had a good, juicy series of sex murders since Christie. And they’re so good for the tourist trade. Foreigners expect the squares of London to be fog-wreathed, full of hansom cabs, and littered with ripped whores, don’t you think?”

Blaney leaves the pub. Rusk greets him from his room on the second floor. His mother sticks her head out too, for she is visiting him. We can see that Rusk truly loves his mother. In real life, this would be a good thing; in a movie, a bachelor that loves his mother arouses suspicion; and in a Hitchcock movie, that is the sign of a psychopath. So, we’ve been warned.

Earlier, Rusk told Blaney to place a bet on a horse named “Coming Up.” (Hitchcock could have picked any name he wanted for this horse, so the inclusion of the word “coming” is deliberate.) He asks Blaney if he took his advice, since the horse won and paid twenty-to-one. Blaney lies, saying he placed a bet and made a killing. As he walks down the street, he becomes furious that he didn’t have the money to bet on the horse, throwing down the grapes that Rusk gave him earlier, and stomping on them.

He decides to visit his ex-wife at her business, the Blaney Bureau, offering “friendship and marriage.” As he walks up the stairs, a Miss Barling (Jean Marsh), apparently a secretary, is congratulating a couple that the Blaney Bureau has brought together, who plan to get married. They are physically mismatched, the woman being taller and wider than the man. But they do have a shared interest in beekeeping. As they head down the stairs, the woman informs the man about her first husband, how he got up at 5:30 every morning, cleaned the whole house without waking her once in fourteen years, and then brought her a cup of tea at 9:15, while she was still in bed. And then she brushes some dandruff off his shoulder, saying they’ll have to do something about that. After viewing that example of matchmaking success, Blaney goes into the office.

As we gradually learn, Miss Barling is a manhater. We are probably supposed to read her as a lesbian: she is not pretty, her hair is pulled back tight on her head, she wears thick-rimmed glasses, and she has a stern look on her face. She informs Mrs. Brenda Blaney (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) that Mr. Blaney is here to see her, and he goes into his ex-wife’s office. It’s not clear why he has come to see her. He’s too proud to ask for money. Apparently, he just wants to vent his spleen. He starts making snide remarks about the lonely-hearts business, saying that in an age where people think marriage is a “living hell,” he is surprised that she has any clients at all, obviously resentful of the fact that she divorced him several years ago. When Brenda asks him to lower his voice, he naturally raises his voice, saying she ought to marry off “Vinegar Joe” out there, referring to Miss Barling, preferably, he says, to a seven-hundred-pound Japanese wrestler to “iron out her creases.” Brenda tells Miss Barling to take the rest of the day off. As she is leaving, she hears a loud noise as Blaney slams his hand down on a desk, making her think he has hit Brenda.

He finally calms down and agrees to have dinner with her that night, at her club. While at dinner, he again becomes so agitated that he breaks the glass he is holding. He doesn’t realize it until later, while sleeping at a Salvation Army hostel, but at some point during the evening, she slipped twenty pounds into his raincoat pocket.

The next morning, while Miss Barling is at lunch, Rusk shows up at the Blaney Bureau. Even though Blaney and Rusk were friends, going back to when they were in the same squadron in the Royal Air Force, and even though Blaney was married to Brenda for ten years, she was apparently never introduced to Rusk. He is going by the name of Robinson. Brenda says they have been unable to match him with women that are willing to submit to his peculiarities. But Brenda is the one he wants anyway. What follows is an extended rape scene. With each thrust into Brenda, Rusk says, “Lovely!” while Brenda recites from Psalms 91, a prayer to a God that has no intention of getting involved in the matter. Finally, Rusk reaches an exquisite orgasm.

It is at this point that I must pause for a speculative comment. I can’t remember for sure, but I believe it was in 1971, a year before this movie came out, that I first heard a woman say that rape was not about sex. That seemed counterintuitive to me, but I let it go. My guess is that Hitchcock was also acquainted with this notion, and he decided to have some fun with it cinematically when he made Frenzy. For that reason, he made it abundantly clear that Rusk is in sexual ecstasy while raping Brenda.

Up to this point, Brenda has thought that this was just an ordinary rape, but then Rusk says, “You bitch! Women! They’re all the same, they are. I’ll show you.” When he removes his tie, she realizes that he is the necktie strangler. She screams and struggles, but is strangled all the same. Rusk helps himself to the money in Brenda’s purse, as well as the apple she was eating for lunch, and leaves.

Shortly after that, Blaney returns to the Blaney Bureau, perhaps to thank Brenda for the money she gave him. The door is locked, so he leaves, just as Miss Barling is returning from lunch, and she sees him. Minutes later, she discovers Brenda’s body.

Blaney calls Babs at the pub and asks her to pack up his stuff and meet him. She does so, but instead of using the money Brenda gave him to find some inexpensive lodgings while he looks for a new job, he figures this is a good time for him and Babs to check into a nice hotel and have sex in style. It costs him twelve pounds for one night. Converting pounds to dollars and adjusting for inflation, that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred dollars today. Babs wonders where he got the money. He tells her he spent the night at the Salvation Army hostel, but this morning he collected an old debt. At the hotel, he checks them in as Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Wilde, presumably as a joke, because the real Oscar Wilde was a homosexual.

Meanwhile, the police are at the Blaney Bureau. Chief Inspector Tim Oxford (Alec McCowen) arrives. Miss Barling tells him that she saw Blaney leaving just before she arrived, and she also tells him how violent Blaney had become the day before. He asks her if she can describe Blaney, and she gives, as Oxford admits, an “extraordinarily precise description.”

“In my job,” she says, as she stares straight back at him, “I’ve learned to keep a sharp eye on men, Inspector.” Because Oxford is as nice a man as you could ever hope to meet, he is taken aback by being implicitly included in her animosity toward men.

Thanks to her description, published in the newspaper, the porter at the hotel realizes the next morning that the so-called Oscar Wilde is the man the police are looking for. As he says to the woman that registered Blaney and Babs, “You know, Glad, sometimes just thinking about the lusts of men makes me want to heave.”

He calls the police, but by the time they arrive, Blaney and Babs have sneaked out the back way, for they too have seen the newspaper, which was delivered to their room that morning. They end up sitting on a bench in a park. Babs is suspicious, suspecting he raped and murdered Brenda. Blaney argues that it would be ridiculous to suppose a man would rape a woman he had been married to for ten years. The idea is that a man’s passion for his wife, even an ex-wife, would have diminished to the point that rape would be out of the question. That is, it would be out of the question, if rape were about sex, and from Blaney’s point of view, that’s exactly what rape is about. Later in the movie, the same reasoning is advanced by the wife of Inspector Oxford, giving sexual indifference after years of marriage as the reason Blaney is not the necktie strangler. She says their own marriage is proof of that. Whereas the marriage between the Blaneys ended in a bitter divorce, the marriage between the Oxfords survives through mutual sufferance. But in both cases, there is an absence of sexual passion.

In response to Blaney’s argument, Babs replies that she’s always hearing about kinky things. (Like raping a woman for some other reason than sex, perhaps?) Then it occurs to Babs that he got the money for the hotel room from Brenda. Since he spent the night at the Salvation Army hostel, he did not have the money until the next day, when he raped and killed her, she concludes.

Blaney replies that he didn’t know about the money until later, that Brenda had sneaked it into his raincoat. Babs doesn’t believe that at first, but then agrees that if he had known about the money, he would never have spent the night with a bunch of old men. Therefore, she concludes, Blaney did not rape and murder Brenda.

That argument makes my head hurt. The obvious explanation, from Babs’ point of view, is the one she originally advanced: the reason he spent the night where he did was that he had not yet raped and murdered Brenda, after which he stole her money. And that, of course, is the theory of the case as far as the police are concerned. That Babs would be persuaded by Blaney’s argument is ridiculous.

Speaking of the police, at the building of the New Scotland Yard, Sergeant Spearman (Michael Bates) is watching Inspector Oxford devour his breakfast. He tells Spearman that his wife is taking a course in gourmet cooking, and they’ve never heard of the principle that “to eat well in this country, one must have breakfast three times a day, and an English breakfast at that.” Ugh! I eat food in the morning, but I haven’t eaten what you might call a traditional breakfast, either American or British, since I was in college. That’s when I had a revelation: you don’t have to eat stuff like eggs, toast, and grits in the morning; you can eat a cheeseburger or have a pizza.

Anyway, with all the evidence they have accumulated against Blaney, they figure he is their man. Spearman asks what men like Blaney are like. Oxford replies, “Oh, they vary, but not a lot. The thing to remember is they hate women, and are mostly impotent.” Spearman balks at the notion of impotency. Oxford elaborates: “Don’t mistake rape for potency. In the latter stage of the disease, it’s the strangling, not the sex, that brings them on.”

It’s clear that Oxford has embraced the rape-is-not-about-sex theory, but to the point of absurdity. All the victims of the necktie strangler were found dead. The only way the police could know that the women had been raped would be by finding semen in the vaginas of those women; the only way semen could be found in the vaginas of those women would be if their vaginas had been penetrated by a penis; the only way a penis can penetrate a woman’s vagina is if it is erect; and the only way a penis can be erect long enough for penetration and ejaculation would be if the man is not impotent. Q.E.D. Of course, this is Hitchcock’s ultimate jab at the claim that rape is not about sex. It’s almost as if Hitchcock is saying, “Well, if rape is not about sex, then there is no need for the rapist to have an erection.”

Babs quits her job at the pub. Like Blaney, she also had a room above the pub, and needs a place to stay. Rusk offers her his place while he will supposedly be out of town. She becomes his next victim. Blaney has two friends who could give him an alibi, but they don’t want to get involved. He turns to Rusk, who is only too glad to help, allowing him to stay at his place. But he plants evidence, Babs’ clothes and purse, in Blaney’s bag and calls the police. That’s when Blaney realizes Rusk is the necktie strangler, but no one believes him. He is convicted and sentenced to prison, swearing revenge against Rusk.

However, Inspector Oxford begins to have doubts. He gets a photograph of Rusk and shows it to Miss Barling. She identifies him as Mr. Robinson, saying they didn’t want him for a client because he wanted women who enjoyed certain peculiarities. When asked if Robinson would go to other agencies in search of women who were masochists, who liked being hurt, she says he would. Once again staring straight at Oxford, as if to let him know that her attitude toward men applies to him as well, she says, “Men like this leave no stone unturned in their search for their disgusting gratifications.”

After that, things wrap up nicely. Just as Inspector Oxford collects enough evidence to convince himself that Rusk is the necktie strangler, Blaney escapes from prison and heads for Rusk’s apartment. He gets inside, and seeing what he thinks is Rusk sleeping in bed, he bashes “his” head in three times with a tire iron. But the hand of a woman slides out of the sheets. Pulling down the covers, he sees Rusk’s latest victim, strangled with a necktie. At that point, Oxford comes in through the door, and Blaney thinks he will be blamed for this murder too. But then Rusk comes in through the door with a trunk. Inspector Oxford observes, “Mr. Rusk, you’re not wearing your tie.”

But now let’s take a step back and consider this movie again. Blaney is unworthy or our concern. As the manager of the pub says, even if Blaney is not a thief, he’s a boozer. Indeed, we see Blaney having three brandies while it’s still morning. He’s irritable and has a bad temper. He would not be a nice person to know.

Furthermore, he is irresponsible. Having just lost his job, he should be out looking for a new one. Instead, he wastes what little money he has on the two more brandies I just mentioned. The last thing he should be thinking about is playing the horses, but he becomes furious when he wasn’t able to place a bet on Coming Up. When he finds that Brenda has slipped twenty pounds into his pocket, he squanders twelve pounds on that hotel room instead of using the money to find an inexpensive flat to live in while he looks for a new job. And as an indication of how vain he is, he even takes pleasure slapping down the money, letting the woman who manages the hotel know that he has plenty of cash.

Let us imagine an alternative movie in which Blaney is the necktie strangler, who raped and murdered his ex-wife out of resentment for how well she was doing in her own business. In that case, Rusk not only would be innocent, but let us further imagine as well that he never patronized the Blaney Bureau. As the sergeant said, he was popular with women, so he would have no need of the Blaney Bureau for help in fixing himself up with a date. Rusk is likable, has a good sense of humor, and is willing to stand by his friends. We might even imagine Rusk saving Babs at the last minute before Blaney has a chance to kill her, and Rusk and Babs end up being the heterosexual couple that satisfies the formula for a happy ending. Moreover, it would be a clever twist to have the bachelor in a Hitchcock movie that loves his mother turn out to be the good guy.

As it is, the likable Rusk turns out to be guilty, while the unlikable Blaney is innocent and ultimately vindicated. But while we were sorry that Babs was one of Rusk’s victims, her death made the movie more palatable, in a peculiar sort of way. If Babs had not been killed off, we probably would have had her and Blaney be together at the end, ostensibly a happy ending, but not one that we could really accept. Brenda divorced Blaney for a good reason, and we don’t believe any woman would be happy with him, including Babs.

disinterestedspectator

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