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A cork is popped straight at the camera and the bottom of a champagne glass becomes a fisheye lens, because Alfred Hitchcock is funny like that. The heroine (Betty Balfour) is a New York heiress introduced behind smudged aviator glasses, making a splashy mid-Atlantic landing on her private airplane, a proto-screwball sequence. (Recall how the manacled fugitives of The 39 Steps would follow It Happened One Night.) The undulating ocean liner allows for a seesawing frame é la Keaton (cf. Rich and Strange), the girl's beau (Jean Bradin) and a wolfish interloper (Ferdinand von Alten) scowl at each other in a dry little send-up of Stroheim's Blind Husbands. Back on dry land the eloping couple live the high life until her twitchy magnate father (Gordon Harker) drops by, bearing news of ruination. And so begins the brat's education, a cruel trap disguised as a charming ruse, a female version of Downhill. Moved to a shabby flat, Balfour looks for work and falls to pieces, or at least body parts: A sign seeks "young girls with beautiful teeth," but at the office "we're only looking for legs." She finally finds a spot at a bustling restaurant, where Hitchcock keeps an eye out for the flapper gyrating wildly in the ballroom and the brioche dropped on the dirty kitchen floor. Suddenly freeze-framed, a New Year's Eve soiree is revealed by a reverse tracking shot to be a snapshot on a display window, a gag that finds its way to The Shining. "Simplicity to me is the key to good taste!" Mr. and Mrs. Smith picks up the comedy of betrayal, froth on the edge of the abyss. With Alexander D'Arcy, Clifford Heatherley, and Vivian Gibson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |