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Film Review: The Manxman
Review of an early silent film by Alfred Hitchcock made when he was learning his craft in Britain. Many of the visual and thematic tenets of his classic Hollywood years can already be seen in The Manxman from 1929.
Dir: Alfred Hitchcock, 1929, UK, 80 mins
Cast: Carl Brisson, Malcolm Keen, Anny Ondra
Set in The Isle of Man, The Manxman involves a love triangle: naïve fisherman Pete (Brisson) unknowingly vies with his childhood friend Phil (Keen) for the attention of Kate (Ondra), the daughter of the local publican. Determined to earn her father’s respect, Pete goes overseas to make his fortune – but only after he has had Kate promise herself to him.
Having been treated to a glowing remastering for Hitchcock: The Early Years, Optimum’s box-set of Hitchcock’s silent British cinema, The Manxman is glorious to behold. The image quality does deserved justice to the composition of Hitchcock’s shots, which already evinced a sophisticated understanding of mise en scène only a few years into his professional career. As Noël Simsolo indicates in his brief but insightful introductory featurette, many of Hitchcock’s later, recognised techniques were retrospectively becoming apparent in The Manxman, making the film stylistically prescient.
But what is most revealing in hindsight is the discernible beginnings of recurrent thematic content that would mark Hitchcock’s triumphant Hollywood years: his focus on lapsed or decaying morality. In fact, you can appreciate why, according to the relative moral austerity of 1929, the British Board of Film Censors gave The Manxman an “A” certificate – “passed for public exhibition to Adult Audiences”. There is something truly sinister about the manner in which Kate reacts to news about Pete in Africa (which arguably prefigures the misogyny that has been perceived in Hitchcock’s storylines); this sense of morality that has been “corrupted” by a desire to yield to the sensual is also found in Phil: Keen’s glowering turn as the duplicitous friend manages to combine his character’s authentic sense of shame at betraying his childhood friend’s trust with a disturbingly dark sense of indignation upon Pete’s eventual “return” from Africa.
It may be a sign of those Silent times that narrative cogency wasn’t heeded as much as in today’s cinema. Indeed, the way in which the story dispatches with how Pete was able to return from overseas is matter-of-fact to say the least: it is treated as a casual plot incident rather than as a veritable turn of the narrative screw. This blasé attitude to explaining away plot twists is also found in the climax of The Lodger and so either points to flaws in Hitchcock’s early storytelling technique (it certainly wasn’t in evidence in such classics as Psycho (1960)!), or else to the lack of refinement in plotting during the Silent era. However, it would be ill-judged to quibble over such a deficiency in The Manxman that recurs throughout Silent cinema. For The Manxman displays considerable mastery of a still-young art form by a still-nascent talent: by emphasising characterisation and narrative inevitability, Hitchcock fashioned a film that has all the grandiose hallmarks of a classic Greek tragedy.
