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It took me a while after the last in my “Hitchcock marathon”, Downhill to get up the energy, as it were, to watch this one. There hasn’t been a truly disappointing movie yet in my first experiences of Hitchcock’s early work, but being an avid multi-tasker, I do tend to find feature length silents fairly exhausting even at their best. Yet – as seems to be an emerging theme in my movie watching – now that I’ve seen it, I really wonder why I put it off so long.
To read a summary of this movie, it really doesn’t sound like much, and certainly not the kind of thing you’d expect from the man who came to be known as the Master of Suspense, etc. A widowed farmer seeks to marry again without much success with a series of local spinsters, not realising until he’s learned through rejection that the answer was right on his doorstep all along.
It has a slow build to the comic series of meetings with the prospective new wives, where the admirably limited dialogue (it was apparently a very wordy play) struck me as embarrassingly patronising of country life, and it takes as long to adjust to its highly inappropriate and dated attitudes about the place of men and women. Once the farmer sets out on his blundering, overconfident mission to wed, however, I don’t think a feature length silent movie has ever made me laugh so much in my life.
This isn’t just the funniest silent movie I’ve seen however, nor even the funniest Hitchcock (I remember really laughing through The Trouble With Harry, but it’s been a while, we’ll see if it works so well on me when I get to it on this marathon)… it’s genuinely one of the best romantic comedies I’ve seen, and it’s not a genre I get along with well. For while the middle section is pure hilarity, Hitchcock always comes back to the soulful Lillian Hall-Davis as the farmer’s maid at home, who we slowly come to know might be exactly the lady the farmer is looking for. There’s one scene in particular where she’s alone at the fireplace and begins almost caressing an empty chair, the same chair that plays a part at various points as a symbol of the farmer’s need for company, and it really broke my heart.
There are two things you could call “wrong” with the movie, I guess, and one’s far larger than the other. It’s a very long movie like many of Hitchcock’s early work. I’ve read of a version that runs over 2 hours, but learned that this version may simply be the version I saw today (around 95 minutes) played at the wrong speed. Well, even in a form closer to 90 minutes, it does feel long and could probably benefit from a few heavy cuts.
The other thing, I almost don’t want to mention because really I feel Hitchcock kept the balance better than most movies of the time (certainly mostly thanks to his real life leading lady Alma Reville). Like I said, the gender politics of the movie are highly questionable to anyone watching the movie today. The farmer’s approach to his prospective new partners, though completely hilarious, is just as inappropriate. He tells one of them, “I’ve come here, like those foxes you’re so fond of… to catch myself a fat hen!” Another he asserts dresses her “mutton lamb fashion”, laughing at the idea she should call herself a “girl”.
But it can’t be said that the ladies in question don’t get to fight back, and they do, laughing at his efforts, relishing in their refusal, and one even laughing right in his face, “Marry you? At your age?!” And it’s a credit to Jameson Thomas’ performance that in the final scenes he genuinely convinces that he’s learned the error of his ways and is more than deserving of young Minta. This is a genuinely sweet and well-meaning movie with some of the funniest silent comedy I’ve ever seen. That it comes from Hitchcock makes it all the more surprising, and I recommend it even to those slightly averse to a silent feature.