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A little burlesque of Lifeboat introduces the characters bobbing queasily on the way to the island, the old salt manning the vessel devours a gargantuan sandwich all the while. Men of justice and medicine (Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston), the sour sleuth (Roland Young) and the judgmental grand dame (Judith Anderson), the doddering general (C. Aubrey Smith) and the drawing-room parasite (Mischa Auer), the secretary (June Duprez) and the man of mystery (Louis Hayward) and a pair of servants (Richard Haydn, Queenie Leonard), a conference of guilt in the isolated manor. "Well, that breaks the ice, gentlemen." The guests have each been responsible for other people's deaths, so says the oracular gramophone, the unseen executioner operates to the tune of a nursery rhyme. A posh ensemble dressed to the nines and dropping like flies, that's all there is to the thing, "the game of the mind" that is Agatha Christie by way of René Clair. Figurines that crumble after each murder, footsteps on the ceiling, dimming lights, keyholes for the camera to track through, the whole whodunit shebang. Asked about dinner, the butler assesses the situation: "Just cold meat, sir." Hitchcock also in the serpentine lifeline of the biddy's ball of yarn (The Man Who Knew Too Much), the compliment is returned in The Trouble with Harry with the corpse's feet splayed in the foreground to frame a discovery. The inquisitive psyche finds illumination at last only to be readily crushed by a pile of bricks, the killer sees himself as a meticulous artist. "Providence leaves the work of punishment to us mortals." A hermetic, tightly self-winding trap for Clair's farewell to Hollywood, of the utmost importance to Resnais' later work. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |