Jump to: navigation, search

Philadelphia Inquirer (12/Nov/1993) - Hitchcock short films made for the war effort

Details

Article

Hitchcock short films made for the war effort

Hitchcock's response, conveyed through the media, was that "the British government has only to call upon me for my services." In 1944, it did.

The fruits of Hitchcock's war effort are two shorts celebrating French Resistance efforts, Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache (Madagascar Adventure), curiosities that are must-sees for Hitchcock completists. They share a bill with Richard Schickel's essential 1973 television documentary/interview with the filmmaker, The Men Who Made the Movies: Alfred Hitchcock.

Made for a pittance, and using the services of French actors and technicians exiled in Britain, the bilingual Hitchcock's French-language featurettes telegraph intriguing themes that the director would explore more fully in such movies as Notorious and North by Northwest. Espionage, innocents believed guilty, and the difficulty of distinguishing truth from contrived "performance" are elements of both shorts.

Of the two projects, the superior is Bon Voyage. Told in flashback as a London-based Free French officer debriefs a Royal Air Force gunner who has escaped, through France, from a German POW camp, the film first narrates events from the gunner's narrow perspective. Later his chronicle is contradicted — and clarified — by the omniscient Free French officer who retells the story, explaining what really happened. The moral being that your point of view determines how much of the truth you are able to see. (Slyly, the gourmand Hitchcock suggests that the gunner was so easily duped because he was hungry and couldn't see straight.)

Hitchcock fans will recognize in Bon Voyage a kind of rehearsal for the double narrative in Stage Fright, a story told first to absolve a central character of guilt, and then retold in a way that implicates him.

Aventure Malgache more clearly shows the economic restraints on the director, who shoots much of this Resistance reminiscence (also told in flashback) in uncharacteristically long takes, instead of the snap-crackle edited shots for which he is beloved. Kind of a dull recitation of Casablanca (but without the romance), the film contrasts a Free French colonial in Madagascar with his Vichy counterpart.

The film's one amusing sequence — wordless, as all the best Hitchcock moments are — has the Vichy turncoat preparing for the arrival of the British Navy by replacing his bottle of Vichy water with Scotch and soda and exchanging the wall portrait of Marshal Petain for a framed photo of Queen Victoria.

At best, both these films are quick sketches for Hitchcock's more fully fleshed portraits of suspense. They are footnotes to the main text of this retrospective, the excellent made-for-television profile of Hitchcock, whom writer/director Schickel calls the artist of anxiety for an age of anxiety.

The most comprehensive filmed interview with the director (who was 74 when it was made), The Men Who Made the Movies includes sequences from Hitchcock's The Lodger, Saboteur, Notorious, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds snd Frenzy. Narrated by Cliff Robertson, Schickel's entertaining critical profile likens Hitchcock to a composer/conductor who orchestrated every note and conducted like a maestro.

Retrieved from ‘http://the.hitchcock.zone/w/index.php?title=Philadelphia_Inquirer_(12/Nov/1993)_-_Hitchcock_short_films_made_for_the_war_effort&oldid=181390’