“Oh what’s the matter with you two? Do you always have to talk about killing people?”
“We’re not talking about killing people – Herb’s talking about killing me and I’m talking about killing him!”
“It’s your father’s way of relaxing, dear…”

I’d heard much of this movie in the time since I first saw it and the consensus seemed to be that it was one of Hitchcock’s very best (and he himself apparently described it as his favourite many times – though just as I came to post this I reminded myself that he actually denied this to François Truffaut in the book-length interview) so I was really looking forward to seeing it again (frankly it felt almost like the first time, so vague was my memory of it).

Joseph Cotten plays a man on the run (from what, we don’t know) who takes refuge at his sister’s house in a quaint old town where everybody knows everybody’s name, coincidentally at the same time as his niece, desperate for a change in life, is about to telegram him herself asking him to visit. Initially the doubt rests with us, the audience, as Hitchcock’s eye reveals to us Cotten concealing things – deliberately knocking over a glass at dinner to divert conversation, or making a house for the children out of a newspaper containing, we presume, details of why he’s running – but soon enough his clever-clogs niece’s curiosity gets the better of her and she begins investigating on our behalf.

One of my favourite Hitchcock scenes comes in Strangers on a Train when Bruno engages a delighted old lady in fantasising about killing her husband. I mention it because I’d mistakenly remembered that scene (the general idea of it, at least: high class conversation turning to slightly too enthusiastic talk of murder) as coming from this one. There is here, however, something similar: an ongoing gag between Cotten’s brother-in-law and a crime-obsessed friend trying to one-up each other with their ideas of how to commit a perfect murder, always just as delightedly as that Strangers scene; and this morbid sense of humour can be found elsewhere in the movie, like the veiled lady at the bank while Cotten deposits a suspicious wad of cash: “There’s one good thing about being a widow, you don’t always have to ask your husband for money…” Or the waitress whose whole demeanour tells a story of its own as she looks upon the incriminating ring Cotten gives Wright, “I’d just die for a ring like that…” Or the little girl skipping down the street, “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” and later, “I broke my mother’s back three times!” It’s as pure Hitchcock as it gets, I think.

The movie is brilliantly acted throughout: Teresa Wright’s excitement and pride at her uncle’s presence as she shows him around the town is positively infectious while Cotten’s mysterious performance is equally troubling as it is arresting. This movie expands on that thing I spoke of in my Suspicion review, Hitchcock’s kind of insidious way of inserting dark notions in the moviegoing mind; here, as there, that the nicest person we know might be – and in this case actually is in the end (I guess Cotten wasn’t the protected star that Grant was) – a criminal. The monologue in which he condemns just about the entire world ending with the thought “The world’s a hell, what does it matter what happens in it?” is probably one of the darkest things ever put on film – and not just in Hitchcock’s work, it still kinda stings to hear today. It’s certainly up there with his best… and I think as I watch it more in future I’ll only think even more highly of it.

Tags: Hitchcock, small town

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