C. A. Lejeune Quotes

Hitchcock had an artificial story and an artificial society to deal with here, but his treatment of them is not that of a director who matches artificiality of substance with artificiality of form, but of a man who has in himself so little reaction to flesh-and-blood truth that he is almost incapable of knowing the living from the dead. Hitchcock's blindness to the things that people do in expression of their real emotions is not a mannerism but a fact. In his work he thinks, and cannot feel. No director in England, and very few in America, can tell a screen story as cleverly as he—can narrate so subtly and simply to the eye, without a word written, using all the tricks of the camera and all the loquacity of silent things to carry his audience from point to point in perfect understanding and ease. But he will have to learn to know men as well as he knows the camera or, not knowing men, to turn his talents from the intimate to the impersonal kinema before he can become one of the great directors of the screen.

A Night at the Opera, which is, oddly enough, quite largely about a night at the opera, seems to be the best of all the Marx Brothers pictures so far. It has more movie sense if you can call any Marxian manifestation sense; than any of its predecessors; it is better cut, better presented, has better gags, and the emphasis is more evenly distributed among the brothers. Groucho, whom the microphone has always distorted unfairly, is tuned down and slowed up a little to the level of his stage performance; Harpo's zany act is better assimilated, and Chico, for whom I have always had a sneaking preference, comes out more strongly than in the earlier pictures.

I have spent the afternoon arguing with my old friend Alfred Hitchcock. Because we are old friends it was a long argument. And we did not, oddly enough, argue about his new picture, which I review, with some asperity, below. I did not like Sabotage, and Hitch," who never tries to persuade the Press against their conscience, didn't attempt to suggest that I should like it. But it is a long-standing custom between us that we should meet and eat and talk after every Hitchcock first-night.

It's a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom (Plaza). This so-called entertainment is directed by Michael Powell, who once made such distinguished films as A Matter of Life and Death and 49th Parallel.

They have not only given us a first-class detective story but they have added the suggestion that this sort of thing might impinge on any one of us, unknowingly, on our way home from business; but would not in the end affect a community armoured with life and decency, private concerns, family responsibilities, mealtimes, bedtimes, train schedules and sunlight. The film has been shot almost entirely, and most magnificently shot, in the streets, homes, stores, and Government departments of New York, and I have never seen a picture that expressed more fundamentally the difference between the extraordinary person who practises crimes of violence, and the normal, blessedly ordinary person who doesn't. The Naked City is at once keen observation and grand filmmaking.

If Mr. Hitchcock would rid himself of the delusion that it is enough for an artist to give perfect expression of any subject—the feelings of a cat sitting on a garbage can, the smell of over-ripe bananas in a broken basket on a dusty street—he would become a film producer of considerable merit in the world. He has originality. He has a fine economy of detail. He has made himself independent of words with a strongly developed pictorial sense. Some day he may surprise us all, and himself among the number, by making a picture that is as good in its conception as in its execution. And when Hitchcock sets to work on real film material, real artist's material, there will not be more than half a dozen producers in the world who will be able to beat him. There are none in England now.

Oliver Twist (Odeon, Marble Arch) is the third of the Dickens novels to be filmed, with conscious solicitude, in this country; and while it is obviously very much better than Nicholas Nlckleby, I cannot think it as good a picture as Great Expectations. Possibly the fault lies in the choice of subject: for Oliver Twist, let us face it, is a pretty ugly story. ... And while it is one thing to read about the violent and vicious and sordid experiences that attended the progress of the poor-house boy, it is quite another to see them acted. The only essential difference between Oliver Twist and the modern gangster tale is that the former is written superlatively well.

Sabotage, the new film at the Tivoli, is the cleverest picture Alfred Hitchcock has made since the arrival of talkies. It is also, to me, the least likeable of them all.
Every shot in it, every sound, every conjunction of images, is the result of close and consummate care. It is a cold, calculated, and quite masterly piece of film technics, designed to raise suspense and horror to the highest frequency. There is no department of the industry, script-writing, direction, cutting, sound, and camera, that could not learn something from this picture. I am prepared to give it every honour in the academy so long as I am never asked to sit through it again.
The keynote of Sabotage is complete destruction. Not only is the main plot concerned with a conspiracy to blow up Piccadilly Circus and terrorise London, but everything that is human and innocent and ordinary in the picture seems consecrated to the needs of ruthlessness. The young schoolboy brother of the heroine, the only really sympathetic character in the piece, is smashed to pieces with a time bomb in a London omnibus. With him go a puppy, an amiable old lady, a friendly conductor, and all the most cheerful group of sentimental commonplaces that Hitchcock can gather together into one locale. Following this event, the heroine sticks her husband in the stomach with a carving knife, and a kindly old anarchist blows the corpse and himself to glory with another hand grenade, leaving the murderess free to marry the Scotland Yard detective.

It is an odd and somewhat ironic commentary on the entertainment of the times that the best, happiest, most intelligent and human picture of the week, I was about to say of the year, should be a murder story. But so it is: The Naked City (Gaumont and Marble Arch) is a thriller and a beauty.

He has a funny voice that makes you nervous on its high notes, a funny face, no one could call handsome; he cannot, so far as I know, act, and he never appeared yet in a film that merited a moment's serious attention. And yet this frank and friendly Yankee hoofer, hat, white tie, tails, and everything, been elected to the academy of international celebrity. After the first gasp of surprise, however, at the thought of Fred Astaire in company with Pythagoras and astronomies and the alimentary canal and the origin of species, you realise that the compilers of the Encyclopaedia [Britannica] have behaved in a perfectly natural way, assuming—as it is reasonable to assume—that they are going to do their job properly for Mr. Astaire [in the next edition to be published].

I have never made any secret of my distaste for films concerned with the glorification of the spiv, and I must declare al once that Brighton Rock, the new British film at Warners, is not my notion of entertainment. Graham Greene's savage storv about a couple of race-course gangs and their fancy ways with a razor is one of the most brutal things I have seen on the screen since They Made Me a Fugitive...
Once having made this point clear, I have nothing but the highest praise for the way in which the film has been done. Brighton Rock is a splendid bit of picture-making. I do not think that for direction and all-round performance it could have been excelled by the work of any other country. ... [The Boulting Brothers] have taken the audience triumphantly behind the front of Brighton in the holiday season, into an underworld as subtle as the Casbah, where sleazy-lodging houses bed shameful secrets, and a youth can become a seasoned murderer at seventeen.

[On the new CinemaScope process] The effect produced on the viewer is to make him feel he is sitting inside a monster pillar-box looking out through the slot at a world in the rough proportions of a dachshund.
For views of processions, or wide horizontal sweeps of plain or water this does not work out badly, but it comes hard-on actors who have to 'exchange confidences from the opposite, sides of a proscenium arch.

The Cineguild director and producer, David Lean and Ronald Neame, have spared us nothing of the brutality of Oliver Twist.
All the ugliness is there: the filth and cold, humiliation and hunger; the thrashing of Oliver; the savage beating to death of Nancy; the special lust which Dickens describes in italics as "the passion for hunting something." All these things are realistically set out in the film in pictures as remorseless as a Cruikshank drawing. The producers have even added two special savageries of their own; an introduction in which Oliver's mother is seen battling through the storm in the last pangs of travail, and a climax in which the child is forced to climb to the chimney-stack and watch Bill Slkes hang himself. The introductory scene, as it happens, is magnificently done; the roof-tops sequence seems to me both distasteful and silly.

Les Enfants du Paradis seems to me to stand head and shoulders above every other film of the year. I recommend it ... to anyone who relishes fine performance, exact dialogue, magnificent manipulation, and an honest, if fatalistic, groping towards a philosophy. He may not get the thing completely, but he will feel the bite of it.

[Recalling The Mark of Zorro (1920)] Suddenly, as I watched [Douglas] Fairbanks' harlequin poses and swirling trajectories across the screen, there sprang into my mind a wonderful idea. Why should I not turn my pleasure into profit, and earn my living by seeing films? The profession of film criticism had not yet come into being ... An extra deterrent was the fact that women had very little standing yet as journalists.