| I love Hitchcock, and I was willing to cut this film a lot of slack for it being such an early work, both in Hitchcock's and film-in-general's history. Even so, it was *painful* to watch. The pacing is leaden, there's precious little story, the whole "society drama" thing seems unsalvageably dated. Especially early in the film, the story is quite hard to follow. Hitchcock goes out of his way to use an absolute minimum of title cards, which theoretically sounds like a fine artistic ideal. But if you're at all like me, you'll find yourself wishing you were a lipreader, desperately trying to figure out what they're saying so you can know what's going on! Now, there are some fine Hitchcockian touches. You'll hear much talk about the telephone operator scene, and rightly so; it is the best scene in the film. The subjective view through the judge's monocle early in the film is a nice bit of work. But there's just not enough to make it worth sitting through the long slow tedium to watch this story about basically unlikeable people who you really don't care what happens to them. Even the poor suffering heroine, I found it hard to work up much sympathy for her and her quiet suffering. You just wish she'd instead just tell all the ignorant idiots where to get off! Yes, I know, that's a modern sensibility, women didn't DO that in 1920's high society. But that doesn't make watching her meekly submit to the ridiculous moral code of the time any less ennuyeux. But my biggest complaint has to be with the story, or lack thereof. You spend most of the film knowing that eventually her secret has to come out and wondering what will happen when it does. And the answer turns out to be: not very much. Frankly, if this film didn't have the name "Hitchcock" in the credits, there'd be no reason to watch it at all. |
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