STAGE FRIGHT

This 1950 mystery thriller is a sub-par Hitchcock film which fails to deliver the thrills and suspense we expect (although to my astonishment it gets 92% on Rotten Tomatoes).

The main protagonist is Eve, an aspiring actress, who is in love with Jonnie, who has got himself into a spot of bother, to say the least.  As he explains to Eve (in a flashback which we are thrown into, rather jarringly, at the start of the film) famous actress Charlotte Inwood has killed her husband, but now because of his attempts to protect her it will look to the police that he is the murderer.  

As to why he helped Charlotte, it seems that there has been some relationship going on between the two.  Despite this, Jonnie seems to expect Eve to help hide him, which she does.

In fact she goes far and beyond this, because the rest of the film is taken up with her trying to prove to the police that Charlotte is guilty.  

It is only at the end of the film that she (and we) learn that in fact the initial flashback we saw was deceptive - the truth is that Jonnie was so infatuated with Charlotte that he was the one who killed her husband.

Not that Charlotte herself is an innocent party.  She was using Jonnie as a way of getting rid of her husband, so that she and her manager could be together.

In outline this sounds like a decent enough story, and certainly Hitchcock must have thought so.  But the film just doesn't work.

The problem isn’t the misleading flashback, even though it came in for some misplaced criticism at the time.  But the way I see it, characters may lie, and the flashback is simply a visualisation of Jonnie's lie to Eve.

Hitchcock was always clear as to the distinction between mystery and suspense, and he nearly always favoured the latter.  It is for example why in 'Vertigo' he reveals to the audience key information before James Stewart's character discovers it, so we can enjoy the suspense of wondering what his reaction will be.

In this picture Hitchcock could have shared with us the truth about Jonnie from the start, which would have created some suspense - what will Eve's reaction be when she finds out, and isn't she is in danger when she is with him?

Instead the film suffers from a lack of dramatic tension.  Jonnie disappears from the film for large sections, and Eve's efforts on his behalf seem meandering and not that interesting.  I guess we are supposed to be invested in her attempts to save the object of her affections from the gallows but I for one wasn't.  

It certainly doesn't help that midway through the film Eve easily transfers her affections to a police detective working on the case.  But more fundamentally my lack of involvement came down to the casting.

Eve is played by Jane Wyman, the dullest of actresses in my opinion, so the fact that she is centre stage for most of the running time is a big problem.  

Jonnie is played by Richard Todd, who actually gives a decent performance as the fall guy, but he's not an actor who I feel warmth towards, so the fact that he is an innocent man who might be hanged didn't cut much ice.  Anyway, even by his own account he's not that innocent, since he's happy enough to protect a murderer from justice.

Charlotte is played by Marlene Dietrich, and she doesn’t do much more than her usual shtick, by which I mean she portrays Charlotte as a glamorous and self-centred piece of work who throws in the odd sultry song.  Apparently she dictated to Hitchcock how she should be lit, so at least she looks great throughout. 

Having now seen her in several films of this era I knew for sure that her character was not going to enjoy a happy ending, and indeed at the end Charlotte faces being charged as an accessory to murder or something adjacent.

The aforementioned police detective is played by Michael Wilding in a thankless role in that we are supposed to believe that he falls instantly in love with Eve, so much so that he spends a lot of time with her rather than trying to find Jonnie.  

I was hoping that he knew all along who Eve was, and that he was using her to lead him to Jonnie.  If he had been pretending to love Eve that would have been consistent with a potential theme of the film, that of role playing.

The other important character is Eve's father, played by Alistair Sim.  Well, I say important but I'm not convinced his constant appearances throughout are necessary.  Sim gives the kind of droll and detached performance one would expect, but his comedic touches, including a scene with Joyce Grenfell, further dilute what little dramatic tension there is.

Sub-par Hitchcock is better than most, but this is still a disappointment nevertheless. 

RATING: ✓ Cheers