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Close Up (1930) - Attitude and Interlude

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ATTITUDE AND INTERLUDE

And thus to Murder, Hitchcock by now must be an admitted authority on the black arts, having graduated with Blackmail.

Hitchcock, of course, is an interesting phenomenon, said he, adopting the quietly introspective style. A rambler rose on an arctic slope. Or perhaps it would be better to say a walrus on Everest. He has his moments. He is the one man in this country who can think cinema. He may never achieve half of what he thinks. One cannot expect too much of the British industry. Indeed, one expects nothing of any attitude, even one's own.

But Hitchcock's moments justify themselves. Obviously Murder had its moments. It may not achieve real unity, but it comes nearer than any of its homemade competitors. And after Two Worlds !

There is a suggestion in Murder of a talk-film idea which personally has appealed to me from the start of the dialogue film. Too much, in my opinion, is made of the deliberate distortion of sound to make a counterpoint to the visual rhythm. For myself, I have always been interested in the direct linking of sound and picture by the employment of a literary translation in the dialogue of a similar rhythm as is used in the montage.

In this way a speeding of development with a very considerable increase in dramatic content can be obtained cinematically. While we are box-office bound we are justified in attempting compromise.

In the jury sequence in Murder Hitchcock has discovered this same idea. The acceleration of cutting, coupled with the dialogue rhythm, speeding up, speeding up. Speech montage. So much more fundamental than that psychologically interesting "Knife" episode in Blackmail.

Much could be said about Hitchcock, his use of the detached camera. Documentation. His efforts to weld literary satire into cinematic development, the old fault for which Lubitsch has to answer. His idea-fertility, the use of dialogue as a thought-medium—a throwback to the Elizabethan stage, this.

Anyway, Hitchcock gives the screen ideas, in which it is so bankrupt. Murder has several ideas, flung off, used to serve a purpose and then forgotten.

Regarded as a motion picture Murder is a praiseworthy effort, quite the best thing this country has done. Looked at from the straightforward angle of the film-goer it gets dangerously near the highbrow, which means to say that the fact it has brains may militate against it.

Its literary link is too strongly noticeable. Too much footage is occupied with the novelists' preoccupation regarding the psychology of crime. There is much too much of the stuff that Clemence Dane is made of.

The evolution of an attitude. The surprise that someone's cinematic attitude may be worthwhile. The problem as to whether Hitchcock's attitude is compatible with the film-goers'.

We have lately, said he, adopting his best impersonal style, been interesting ourselves in the evolution of an attitude.

And in most cases much has been found wanting.

Hugh Castle.

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