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The upshot is a girl who wishes to dispel tedium only to discover fear, a matter of finding the war at home. "At night, you sleep your ordinary sleep filled with peaceful, stupid dreams. And I brought you nightmares." Alfred Hitchcock in Northern California like Nabokov in New England, with Thornton Wilder himself at hand to pervert Our Town. Being average means "a terrible rut" for the Santa Rosa maiden (Teresa Wright), Mom (Patricia Collinge) fusses about meetings at the women's club and Dad (Henry Travers) exchanges grisly hypotheses with their crime-buff neighbor (Hume Cronyn), cozy Americana as if under a glass dome. The East Coast uncle (Joseph Cotten) steps into the postcard while on the run from Kafka's agents, the train carrying him blackens the screen with smoke. He shares his name with the adoring niece, "sort of like twins," and is promptly embraced by the community. He's also the "Merry Widow Murderer," a smooth veneer to camouflage bottomless, cold disgust. "It's not good to find out too much." To expand a conscience is to darken it, Hitchcock wouldn't have it any other way, his intricate system of doubles gives knowledge's betrayal of purity. Waltzing couples embody the "sweet and pretty" past for the dandy with a crack in his skull, he expounds on the "foul sty" that is the world while using a strangler's hands on a napkin at a jangly nocturnal bar. (His greatest contempt is reserved for the kind of "horrible, faded, fat, greedy women" he's slaughtered in the past, the camera dollies in for a close-up and Cotten's blandly pleasant features turn subtly demonic.) A staircase step breaks off and a garage door seals in death, an emerald ring hides tell-tale initials and appalling truth gets buried under the pomp of a hero's funeral. "Sometimes it needs a lot of watching," says the ineffectual bearer of justice (Macdonald Carey) of the monstrous cosmos just revealed, and from there to Blue Velvet is Lynch's rapture. Cinematography by Joseph A. Valentine. With Wallace Ford, Janet Shaw, Edna May Wonacott, Charles Bates, Irving Bacon, and Clarence Muse. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |