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It’s a boring sunday afternoon, isn’t it? How about making it even more boring by watching my latest video essay? This time I blabber about how Hitchcock manipulates the mind of the audience in this pretty little movie called Rope.

HITCHCOCKPALOOZA #3
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Secret Agent (1936): This one features a young, very Sherlockian-looking John Gielgud. Peter Lorre plays another secret agent who gets very irritated by Gielgud’s too-goody-Britishism. Most interesting scene: a metal button spinning along the rim of a bowl. The dialogue in this film is quite good, as it is in nearly all the early Hitchcock talkies. Realistic and witty, even the ‘nice’ characters can be punchy. A german grandmother, speaking perfect English herself, asks the American in her group to speak a little German. “Why, your pronunciation is just terrible,” she says sweetly. There are love scenes, but not the horrible melodramatic kind. Hitchcock’s lovers, when they are not sparring, are enjoying each other’s banter in a more congenial manner— as Lorre’s character puts it, “the morning husband and wife exercises.” The rest of the film is not uninteresting when the scenes are about the characters, but the WWI-related plot is quite workaday, and the only point of interest are the war events that glide into that most famous biopic made almost 30 years later, Lawrence of Arabia. This Hitchcock is not one of the great ones, but it has its moments.
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REVIEWS CONTINUE IN COMMENTS (at Franklin, Tennessee)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CJtomzWhMzr/?igshid=1wczusrv8tp7j

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Reviews are below and continue in the comments…
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Juno and the Paycock (1930): This is an Irish film, and even in 1930 it does what a lot of Irish films do as a family-and-friends drama. It’s based on a play, after all. It’s hard to tell if the acting and the script are exactly good or bad because the characters are so firmly stock. This is not a major film. There are traces of Trouble With Harry, believe it or not, with the proximity of violence to daily life (this is sometimes a gangster/revolutionaries film), trying to put a fun face to death. But Juno’s final scene of genuine emotion, a moment of crisis of faith, elevates it to a stratosphere far above that other, godawful, film. This alone makes it one of Hitchcock’s most powerful, if abrupt, endings.
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Saboteur (1942): It hadn’t been that long since Sabotage— six years, but this one shares the same chase-’em-to-the-end breathlessness, updating the previous film with a 39 Steps-esque battle-ax romance, and a finale set atop a national landmark. Secret societies, a circus car, and heartless villains—it’s classic stuff. It may not be his most original plot, but the settings are, the acting is fine, and sometimes the remix is just as good. One of Hitch’s most underrated.
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REVIEWS CONTINUE IN THE COMMENTS (at Franklin, Tennessee)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CJnNftUBgYw/?igshid=5bou809hq018