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Yorkshire Post (27/Jan/1938) - Alfred Hitchcock's New Film Success

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MURDER HUNT IN ENGLAND

Alfred Hitchcock's New Film Success

"YOUNG AND INNOCENT"

From Our Film Correspondent, LONDON, Wednesday

Alfred Hitchcock has found a good story for his new film, "Young and Innocent," which opens at the Gaumont Theatre in the Haymarket on Sunday next. Based on a novel called "A Shilling for Candles," by Josephine Tey, it is about a young man, Robert Tisdall, who is accused of murdering a famous film star whose body is found on the beach.

She has been strangled with the belt of Robert's raincoat, and Robert decides that the only way to clear himself is to find the coat. Accordingly he contrives to escape from the police court and sets off to trace the coat with the aid — unwilling, at first — of the chief constable's daughter. Erica, who finds. herself driving him about the country in her ancient small car, with policemen in pursuit and her worried father telephoning at intervals for news.

Unexpected Incidents

The essence of the film is the ingenious variety of unexpected incidents which go to keep the chase alive. Typical of Hitchcock is the arrival of the harassed pair in the middle of a children's party, with a conjurer producing paper streamers out of his mouth. The background types, too — constables, rustics, tramps — are drawn with the lively relish which Hitchcock always bestows on his minor characters. He has said than he would like to film the Derby.

and here, on a smaller scale, he has captured an English atmosphere thoroughly and made it consistently amusing and enjoyable. Nor is excitement forgotten, for the tension of escape and pursuit is admirably maintained, and there is one particularly graphic moment when Erica's car, with herself alone in it, threatens to crash down into the workings of an old mine Eventually Robert finds the coat in the possession of Old Will, an itinerant china-mender, and there is a delightfully amusing and dramatic final sequence when Erica takes Old Will, wearing a hastily-bought tail coat, into a fashionable hotel in order that he may spot the man who gave him the coat and who proves to be the real murderer.

Nova Pilbeam, who has had few chances in British pictures since her first success in schoolgirl parts, is a charming Erica, fresh and youthful and enterprising, and Derrick de Marney is equally good and natural as Robert. This is a partnership which should certainly be maintained and developed. Edward Rigby gives a good performance as Old Will, and Percy Marmont as Erica's anxious father. Mary Clare as her suspicious aunt, in charge of the children's party, and J.H. Roberts as an ineffective solicitor are other members of a strong cast which includes also a number of cleverly used children.

Effective Shots

The story is not always very probable — Erica's relationship with her father, for instance, seems rather strained and artificial — but it serves the purposes of the picture well enough.

There are no special novelties, this time, in Hitchcock's technique, but his first and last shots are effectively unusual. The film opens with close-ups of a violent quarrel and ends with a close-up of Erica's smile.

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