Well this is the end of the bag. We are minus a few iconic Hitchcock films, which got lost when we moved a while back. But these have since been released on Blu Ray, so it's not trouble to replace them with the next paycheck. I wrote a post on this, Hitchcock final British film back in August when we did a Friday on pirates to celebrate a sick cat's birthday. That post can be found here. That post only contains opening credits; below is the entire film.
So early British acting great Charles Laughton has the last say in the massive Hitchcock marathon! The film also stars Irish great Maureen O'Hara. Internet Movie Database page here; Wikipedia page here.
Rich & Strange aka East Of Shanghai was another early Hitchcock talking movie from 1931 that her adapted for the screen himself, from a novel penned by Dale Collins. It involves a young married couple living a quiet boring middle class existence in London, when a sudden and unexpected inheritance, this leads them to believe that the money will be the vehicle to allow them to realize all their dreams; the problem is that they don't have very imaginative dreams to begin with. Deciding on taking a world cruise, they board the liner behaving like "rich people"--more like caricatures of rich people. It doesn't take long on board before they have to mingle with real rich people, which immediately start to take their toll on the relationship. Soon the husband is bedridden with sea sickness and the wife is left alone to roam the ship alone. Turns out not everyone on board is above-board, so to speak, and at least one very suspicious guy attaches himself to her....and this guy is creepy! But she can't see it. I don't know when Hitchcock decided to make this movie initially, because it actually uses quite a few title cards. So, perhaps he intended to make this as a silent several years before and ordered the title cards, and decided to use the ones that describe scene, instead of narration.
Made in the exact year as Suspicion, the two movies couldn't have plots that were more different; however, strangely enough, the core stories about marriage are quite similar, if not turned up side down and inside out. Were as Suspicion is really about being "too married" with a cloud of scarier and scarier worry gathering; Mr. & Mrs. Smith is about a couple thinking they are more than secure in marriage, without a shadow of doubt, and yet...they find out they are not legally married at all. It's all topsy turvy. This is one of those moments in Hitchcock's career where he took on a project that was viewed as generally outside his line of interest. Even The Trouble With Harry was a seriously black comedy about a dead man. This is more of an experiment with a re-marriage comedy. I have to admit, that I like the change that was made in the "remake" of this film. Despite the baggage it carries with the whole Brangelina thing, the assassin part, I thought, was clever. The one thing that really strikes me as Hitchcockian about this film are some the bizarre angular shots, in places it has a bit of a funhouse feel to it. So it may not be scary or even suspenseful, but it is bizarre at least.
