Tuesday, December 4, 2007

The Manxman - Alfred Hitchcock (1929)

I believe this is Hitchcock's last silent film. A love triangle presented visually as a shifting set of pairs separated by a third placed in between. The three often play looking straight into the camera, which not only gives us the opportunity to dissect their emotions but at one point ensures that the girl's gaze is ambiguous. Which man is she lusting after? We can't know because we are staring directly into her eyes.

In a distinctly perverse Hitchcock touch, the wedding dinner is held in the same room where the lovers consummated their illicit affair. Graphic match on inkwell/ocean.

A touch of censorship? Oddly the the woman is free to voice her dirty secret to her lover, but the filmmaker was not free to add her words to the subtitles. We have to read her lips!

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