The Hitchcock 9 - 8


CARL BRISSON AND ANNY ONDRA IN THE MANXMAN

The Manxman (Jan. 1929)

"Adapted from the famous story by Sir Hall Caine," the opening title proclaims. Another topic designed to be easily grasped by the popular audience that devoured several new movies every week, The Manxman is about a fisherman and a rising young lawyer, who grew up "as brothers," and as adults, as the story begins, fall in love with the same girl, which leads to tragedy. The origins of their friendship are never explained as they are in the book, and the credibility of their remaining friends while being so different as adults is only somewhat artificially established by having them cooperate in the opening minutes in a legal campaign to maintain free trawling rights for the local herring fishermen. The theme seems heavily sentimental and manipulative, a doomed situation with much room for torment and confusion but no surprises, and few of the flourishes Hitchcock was capable of. Not surprisingly, he said he was not happy with this picture, though it was nonetheless a critical success, if undercut at the box office by the rapid rise of talkies.

Philip Christian, who has become a lawyer, is played as a tense and repressed man by Malcolm Keen, who had already had small roles in the lost The Mountain Eagle and in The Lodger. Carl Brisson, whose given name was Carl Frederik Ejnar Pedersen, and who was Danish, had also effectively played Jack "One-Round" Sander, also rival with another man for the love of a woman in The Ring. He is the reverse of Keen, a simple, vibrant actor, with plenty of life but little complexity. Anny Ondra, who plays Kate Cragen, the girl, here, was to play the girl protagonist Alice White in Blackmail later in the year. When it came time to do the sound version of Blackmail, Anny Ondra's heavy Polish accent led to her voice being dubbed. But she handles the most emotionally complex role well here as the volatile, tormented Kate.

While in The Ring Jack knows perfectly well that Bob Corby is his rival for The Girl all along and knows the risk he takes in leaving her alone with Bob, in The Manxman, we are asked to believe Pete, the fisherman, is so naive he doesn't see Phil also is in love with Kate, and is so simple he asks Phil to plead his case with Caesar, Kate's father. We don't know what kind of case the obviously conflicted Phil would make for Pete, but as soon as Caesar hears it he brusquely rejects the sailor as too poor to be worthy of his daughter. Pete goes sailing to foreign parts to make his fortune and thus gain Caesar's approval, leaving Phil to "take care of" Kate. Naturally once Pete has been away for a while, Phil and Kate begin going on romantic sun-dappled walks. Phil has the opposite trouble. He comes from a distinguished Isle of Man family of judges and Kate's father runs a pub. Phil's aunt tells Phil "that publican's daughter" isn't somebody he should be seen with.

Then a mistaken report comes that Pete has died "up country" in South Africa, and to Phil's pleasant surprise Kate is glad because it leaves them "free." Only Pete isn't dead, but rich, and on his way home. As in The Pleasure Garden, a pleasant "surprise" -- he doesn't want Kate to be told he's coming -- is not going to be one. Phil, continually set up to be conflicted, is the one Pete informs that he's coming home. Some dramatic shots of the rocky coast alternate with closeups of Phil's tormented expressions. Kate goes through many expressions too, because Phil tells her she must go with Pete because she "promised herself to him." Details of why Phil renounces Kate are buried in Isle of Mann custom explored in the lengthy Hall Caine source novel but elided in the adaptation by Eliot Stannard which must make the main strands clear while skipping background detail. So Pete and Kate marry, with Phil best man. Pete is always grinning, while Phil looks as if he has perpetual indigestion, wearing a smile, if at all, that has a decidedly sickly cast. Kate's wedding veil looks like a white shroud. When she cuts the cake, it partially collapses. Phil and Kate make the wedding seem like a funeral, and so does the ultra-Protestant Caesar's threatening preachiness. But Pete remains blithely enthusiastic. He grins too much. Nonetheless when Kate leaves him with their little baby and hides at Phil's, Pete is a sympathetic figure, and the strong one of the three.

We have to understand, the BFI note explains, that in this milieu, perhaps even with the story updated from the 1890's to the 1920's, "attempted suicide was punishable by a prison sentence and a woman who left her husband was treated as an outcast." These "structures of Manx society" were doubtless "better understood by the contemporary audience," the note says. Maybe. But the problem with the screenplay is the way it loses the details about the culture of the Isle of Man that the writer Hall Caine specialized in. While The Manxman has the kind of pure emotional impact silent films are capable of at their most melodramatic, logic seems to be missing, and there are also fewer Hitchcockian details to revel in. Hitchcock surely must have felt much more in his element when he got to making Blackmail later in the year; and then was ready to move from the world of "pure cinema" of silent film to the more complex, mixed world of talking pictures.

According to the BFI online notes on the restoration, this penultimate Hitchcock silent "is one of the best and most mature works of Hitchcock’s early career." That still is true because The Manxman tells a strong emotional story and has narrative drive -- and it has a bang-up dramatic climactic courtroom scene.

Caine specialized in stories set on the Isle of Man, but the film was shot in Cornwall (like the popular current UK TV series, "Doc Martin"). The SF Silent Film Festival DVD of the BFI restored The Manxman has a special piano accompaniment.

Reviewed as part of the US premiere of The Hitchcock 9 BFI-restored silent films by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, shown at the Castro Theater June 14-16, 2013. Screener DVDs provided by Larsen Associates.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.