February

12, 1938

193

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THE T H E A T E E Q m D presents t l a

Artist of Anxiety

COMMONPLACE about Alfred Hitchcock is that he

has no peer among directors in the fine art of suspense.
For most of his compeiitors, as for most story-tellers, it is in
fact a gross art: we are kept waiting for the end and-that is
all. For Mr. Hitchcock there are as many ends as there are
moments in the tale; even his means are ends; he polishes
as he goes, ,lavishing as much skill upon details, and upon
transitions between details, as upon the swift disastrous curve
described by the whole. His material is melodrama, and he
does not mind if the examples of it which come to his hand
are relatively empty; he even prefers them thus, since then
he is freer to be the virtuoso he naturally and by discipline is.
The virtuoso of suspense; or, by a further refinement, of
anxiety. For his special distinction is that he knows perfectly
how to worry us and keep us worried. If there were time to
do so we might reflect that it did not matter whether the
young man ever reached Mr. Memory (TheThirty-Nine
Steps), or whether the bomb ever got to the point where it
would do the most public mischief (The Woman Alone).
But Mr. Hitchcock sees to it that we do not reflect; he makes
a s as restless as the hero is, and keeps our anxiety identical
with his untilthe sudden moment when the mystery dissipates.
The new Hltchcock film now about to be released in America, The Girl Was Younga (Gamont British), is perhaps
not as good as the bestof its predecessors, but it is better
than any current melodrama and it is typical of Mr. Hitchcock. The situation here is that the hero (Derrick de
Marney) mustfind his stolen raincoat before he can prove
t o the Engllsh police that it could not have been his raincoat
beIt which strangled Christine Day. The fact that when he
finds the coat its belt is missing does not for the moment
matter; another pursuit begins then, and that is not the good
Qne,Mr. Hltchcocks conclusion for once failing in a measure
to come off. The pursuit of the coat is also a flight from the
police, undertaken with the hazardous help of none other
khan the chiefconstables
daughter (NovaPilbeam),
a
marked girl. If the two of them can keep far enough ahead
of the law they mdy come into the only evidence which would
stop it in its tracks. Were there tim? to think-but
again
there is no time to do anythingexcept urge on the boy and
girl with our enlisted nerves and groan at. each unexpected
delay. For of course there are devilish delays. At Toms Hat,
where the raincoat was stolen, a free-for-all fight threatens
to hold up everything; at the house of Ericas aunt, where
the couple think to invest a precious three minutes atablishing an alibi, children playing blind mans b l d draw the
newcomers into their game and will not let them go ; at the
lodging house where Old Will, the fellow last seen with the
raincoat, is scheduled to spend thenightthe boy himself
falls asleep from exhaustion and wakes up the next morning
almost too late for his purpose; and so on. I speak of the
childrens game although I have not seen it; it has been cut
out of the present version. Yet plenty of what remains is
good, and the whole can be recommended to those who can
take their excitement straight.
The River is in New York at last, at the Criterion, and
should be seen by literally everybody.
.

II

productton o l JEAN GEBDOUXS comedy

A M Adapted
P H IbyTS. R
Y O N 38
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