Wado (thanks) to the good folks over at Internet Archive for the embed of the full film above! Great site for old frights!
Yet another Hitchcock film based on a play, this time one by the very famous playwright Noel Coward. Hitchcock's The Lodger is one of my favorite silent films of all time, but in his directorial catalog, this is really one his most accessible silents and one that I like a lot as a Hitchcock film. It's got real teeth to it. At times, it's even easy to slip into the story to such a degree that you forget that you are watching a silent film. The camera work is cutting edge and extremely modern and is a bit like that found in Rope, without the specialty camera and there is more freedom to move about...there is at least a garden to wander in. The plot has a bit in common with Young And Innocent, in that scandal is involved. In many ways it's kind of the exact opposite of Young, in that it explores what happens when a woman actually cares about a life scandal. A young correspondent finds herself in divorce court. After the divorce, she flees to France and manages to put her life back together. There she meets a respectable man from a very well to do family. After a whirlwind romance, they decide to marry--without her telling him that she is a divorcee. Then the tension comes. She is taken to meet his family and gradually they start suspect that there may be a lot more to her than meets the eye. The suspense starts to tighten like a wire at this point, leaving the viewer with an urgent sense of when it is going to snap. This is made credible because Larita Filton (Isabel Jeans) is a character you can root for, afterall, she was married to a terrible drunk and was genuinely wronged in her divorce. Jeans went on to have a role in Hitchcock's American made Suspicion. I should also mention that this contains tennis in it. I don't know if this was the first time Hitch's tennis obsession was put into one of his films....but it certainly wasn't the last!!!
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