The MacGuffin: News and Comment (14/Jan/2004)
(c) Ken Mogg (2004)
January 14
Hoax! Still apropos Rear Window: there's a reference on our New Publications page, in the review of James Vest's 'Hitchcock and France', to a film made in 1927 by 'Dadaist filmmaker, Maurice Burnan' which was said (originally by Georges Sadoul) to have anticipated Hitchcock's film in several ways. Vest's book reads: 'Each [film] had as a main character a man with one good leg, who, along with a female companion, was engaged in looking out a large window. In each there was much ado about a woman whose dismembered body was never seen, and both films featured a memorable scene showing a glowing cigar in a dark room.' (Vest, p. 119) That sounds Dadaist enough, I remember thinking! Vest's book then goes on to comment: 'Sadoul [whom we've been consistently informed was bitterly opposed to the large claims for Hitchcock appearing in 'Cahiers du Cinéma' and who himself wrote for the rival journal 'Positif'] concluded that [...] Hitchcock owed more to Burnan than that professional liar [i.e., Hitchcock!] would ever admit. [...] Corroborative evidence for such claims was scarce, since Burnan's film was shown only once to a small audience, including Sadoul.' (Vest, p. 119) Well, it now appears that Vest's phrase 'only once' is an exaggeration! Australian critic Adrian Martin informs me that 'Maurice Bernan does not exist!!! "Positif" made him up in an essay that parodied the fashionable modes of criticism in 1955 - mainly [in] "Cahiers" of course.' Thanks, Adrian, and I fell for it! Mind you, I'm still not sure whether Vest himself realised that he was reporting a hoax! (He sent me an enigmatic email when I forwarded him Adrian's comment!) Hell, after I originally sent a copy of my review of Vest's book to a friend who writes for 'Cahiers', no mention was made of any hoax! And films do disappear for many years (as the one by 'Maurice Bernan' seemed to have done)! For example, Michael Walker in London has just seen a very rare screening of Arthur Robison's The Informer (1929), made in England six years before the John Ford version of Liam O'Flaherty's novel. Michael writes (there's a Hitchcock connection): 'It begins unpromisingly, but soon picks up and the last half hour, as all the threads are drawn together, is simply tremendous. It reworks the story as a melodrama, and is so much the better for it. It's certainly more powerful overall than the Ford, and it's in the script that the key improvements lie. The reason I'm telling you about it is that the [principal] scripwriter was Benn Levy.' Thanks, Michael! Levy of course later scripted Lord Camber's Ladies (1932), produced by his friend Hitchcock, and would eventually be summoned to Hollywood to work on Hitchcock's ill-starred Kaleidoscope project in the 1960s. [Note: I'll leave my review of James Vest's book unchanged for a few days on our New Publications page.]
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