Stage Fright (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Darragh O’Donoghue

Produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock; screenplay by Whitfield Cook, Alma Reville, Ranald MacDougall, and James Bridie, based on the novel Man Running by Selwyn Jepson; cinematography by Wilkie Cooper; edited by Edward B. Jarvis; music by Leighton Lucas; art direction by Terence Verity; starring Jane Wyman, Marlene Dietrich, Michael Wilding, Richard Todd, Alastair Sim, Sybil Thorndike, and Kay Walsh. Blu-ray, B&W, 110 min., 1950. A Warner Archive Collection release.

By 1950 it seemed to many that Alfred Hitchcock had lost his way. Commercial films like The Paradine Case (1947) were underwhelming. Experiments with the long-take Rope (1948) and in particular Under Capricorn (1949) were received with a mixture of bafflement and boredom, as arid and pointless exercises in formalist bravura that added nothing to either Hitchcock’s reputation or the art of narrative cinema. Stage Fright was the last straw. The British Film Institute’s quarterly magazine Sight & Sound described Hitchcock’s return to Britain after a decade in Hollywood as evidence of “the recent decline into the ineptitudes of his latest film” (Simon Harcourt-Smith, “‘Stage Fright’ and Hitchcock,” Sight & Sound, July 1950). Twelve years later, even François Truffaut, who managed to find a kind word for even the director’s most minor curiosity, opined that Stage Fright “added little or nothing to [Hitchcock’s] prestige” (François Truffaut, Hitchcock, London: Secker & Warburg, 1968). 

Of course, in 1962, Truffaut knew what contemporary reviewers could not—that by the time Stage Fright was released, Hitchcock was embarking on the miracle decade of the 1950s, starting with Strangers on a Train, that would secure his critical status and ultimately lead to his apotheosis as the greatest, most influential, and most studied filmmaker in the history of cinema. With the charity of hindsight, we can see that Stage Fright was less a creative dead end or proof of decline than a transitional work, a regrouping of creative energies. The lessons with staging in duration learned on Rope and Under Capricorn were applied to more accessible generic material. The film is full of dramatically intense and formally exquisite long takes—usually involving the runaway villain, as if entrapping him in time as well as space—that operate in tension with the more conventionally cut thriller elements.

Hitchcock himself said that his primary motive for making the film was its theater setting. Besides adapting numerous plays, Hitchcock had foregrounded performers and performance spaces throughout his work, using theater to analyze the roles people adapt in everyday life. The most obvious antecedent of Stage Fright is Murder! (1930), set in a provincial English stage company and with a theatrical knight as its detective hero. Stage Fright begins with the raising of a stage curtain during the credits, revealing a documentary–style image of bombed- out London to immediately alert us that the film will play on the intersection of theater and “reality.” The sequence is scored to Leighton Lucas’s overture whose driving tarantella rhythms anticipate Bernard Herrmann’s legendary score for North by Northwest, the last great Hitchcock film of the decade. The film ends symmetrically with another stage curtain that, after a lengthy denouement in the theater, drops to decapitate the murderer.

Three of the leads are actors—Marlene Dietrich–like cabaret singer Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich), her sometime leading man Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd), and his helpmeet, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art student Eve (Jane Wyman). The fourth, detective Wilfred “Ordinary” Smith (Michael Wilding), is himself an amateur performer. Eve’s father Commodore Gill (Alastair Sim) delivers a cautionary lecture on the danger of confusing theatre with life, but this doesn’t stop her from adopting the role of maid to spy on Charlotte whom she believes is the real murderer. The film’s central set-piece is a garden fundraiser for RADA, staged as a kind of Grand Guignol farce, with most of the film’s main characters sharing the same space, and the mechanics of disguise, misrecognition, concealment, diversion and exposure leading to the astonishing scene whereby Gill, who has won a doll to use as a prop to confront a fifty-year-old chanteuse with her alleged crime, cuts his own hand with a penknife to smear blood on the toy infant’s dress. It is a symbolically loaded scene that is too disturbing in its thematic implications to think about for long.

Truffaut showed a rare lapse of taste when he said of Sim that ‘I didn’t care for Alastair Sim…I objected to the actor as well as the character’ (Truffaut, Hitchcock, 158). The most distinctive performer in all British cinema, Sim is, pace Truffaut, the heart and soul of Stage Fright. Gill is a rare ‘good’ father in Hitchcock’s work, precisely because he abrogates the usual oppressive tyrannies the filmmaker associated with domestic patriarchs. A man of means and, supposedly, a former naval officer, Gill has rejected the advantages of his class by abandoning his dotty, respectability-craving wife (wonderful Sybil Thorndike) for a marginal existence on the English coast, playing the dilettante smuggler. Gill is at once the film’s spirit of play and its Greek chorus—undercutting the melodrama of the Hollywood-style main plot with his ghoulish yet avuncular irony, then spinning it in new directions with a willful whimsy that is closer to the nonsense and proto-Surrealism of Lewis Carroll and G. K. Chesterton than the conventional English whodunit Stage Fright purports to be.

Much was made at the time of Hitchcock’s return to England for Stage Fright, and ostensibly, to the more idiosyncratic style and narrative approach of his 1930s English films where performative set-piece and thespian fancy often trumped narrative logic and character consistency. In truth, Stage Fright embodies a fascinating fusion of Hitchcock’s English and Hollywood manners. There is more freedom given to great English comedians such as Miles Malleson and Joyce Grenfell to halt the plot than there would be in the Hollywood films, but Grenfell’s delightful sequence manning the shooting gallery where a financially embarrassed Gill hopes to acquire the doll, is darkened by the narrative and psychological context in a way that is alien to the countless local comedies she made with Sim at this time. Conversely, it’s hard to think of a Hollywood film of the period that would indulge the eccentricity, the grotesquery, the horror even, of the heroine’s father—Jane Wyman’s father, for goodness’ sake!—splicing himself to smear the effigy of an infant girl.

Stage Fright remains infamous for its opening ten-minute flashback sequence. Did Hitchcock betray some unwritten contract with his audience by beginning with a reel of deliberately deceptive narration? Even before the ‘reveal’, the audience knows that there’s something “off” about the flashback. Something “off” about the apparent hero—the innocent man on the run who is the defining protagonist of a Hitchcock film—whose dark-ringed, flashing eyes suggest haunted madness rather than wronged virtue and romantic suitability for a character played by Jane Wyman. The way the sequence is staged—all skewed angles, weird matte shots that look like something out of 1980s video art, subjective decelerations of tempo, and narrative implausibilities and aporia—generate unease and confusion. Then there’s the overload of overdetermined symbols—the bloody dress, the broken glass. As Truffaut noted, it’s all far too much for a device that is supposed to clarify the narrative and orient the viewer. It is one of the major sequences in all Hitchcock, full of the imponderables and contradictions that will haunt an entire masterpiece like Vertigo. 

Digital restorations and home entertainment versions of Hitchcock films have often proved controversial, as restorers fiddle about with sound, color, contrast, and aspect ratio in arrogant attempts to “update” or “refresh” these modern classics. This basic, on-demand edition is content to present a stunning image that brings out the complexity of Hitchcock’s compositions, all chiaroscuro and experiment with shallow space and shooting in depth. A glossy, undemanding 2004 featurette includes interviews with surviving cast and crew and admirers such as the late Peter Bogdanovich. An essential disc for anyone who wants the full Hitchcock story. 

Darragh O’Donoghue, a Cineaste Contributing Writer, works as an archivist at Tate Britain in London.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 3