Stage Fright

It's impossible to discuss Alfred Hitchcock’s STAGE FRIGHT (1950, TCM) without getting into the ending, so if you’ve never seen it or heard much about it and want to maintain your innocence on the subject STOP READING NOW.

And now the rest of you still reading can join me in laughing at the ones who stopped.

Just joking. But let’s get on with the discussion.

Acting student Eve Gill (Jane Wyman) has a crush on a man (Richard Todd) who tells her, in flashback, he’s been having an affair with an actress (Marlene Dietrich) who’s just murdered her husband. In attempting to cover up for her, Todd claims to have made himself the chief suspect, so Wyman hides him with her father’s (Alastair Sim) help and masquerades as Dietrich’s maid to try to get the goods on her.

Hitchcock always said his mistake in STAGE FRIGHT was opening the film with a flashback that lies. More recent critics (and those pesky French) have hailed the device as a witty subversion of genre expectations. I think it could indeed work that way in another movie. I think if one set up the characters properly, discovering the plucky young woman and her eccentric father had gone to a great deal of bother to protect a guilty man would make for a solid post-modern detective thriller. But here the characters aren’t set up at all before the flashback starts. The film opens on Wyman driving Todd to get away from the police as he tells her his story (which includes seeing Wyman in an acting class at RADA doing a scene from high comedy, and that may be a bigger crime than the story’s murder). It all feels too abrupt, and it seems to take forever to get to know the characters.

Of course, in Wyman’s case there isn’t much of a character to get to know. Hitchcock wanted a star, and he was working at Warner Bros., and she was their top female star at the time. But though she had done good work in lots of other films. she’s all wrong for the role. Eve has to be implusive and energetic and, above all, innocent. When she realizes she’s falling in love with the detective (Michael Wilding) on the case, she needs to be winsome and vulnerable.  The younger Wyman could have played that, but after years of fighting to get anywhere at Warner Bros. she’s about as winsome as a Mac truck. It’s like watching Norma Shearer trying vainly to become Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Juliet. The business has kicked all the necessary elements of those characters right out of her. The film drags whenever she’s on screen, which is a lot. Wilding is charming in their love scenes, but he might as well be playing to a brick wall. Fortunately, there are some wonderful British character actors on the periphery: Sim, Sybil Thorndike, Miles Malleson, Kay Walsh and Joyce Grenfell as the lady with the lovely duckies.

And, of course, there’s Dietrich. The woman is a holy wonder, one of the screen’s supreme technicians. When Wyman doesn’t move her face for fear of betraying her age, she projects almost nothing. Dietrich’s face may be even more frozen, but she knows how to move her head, her eyes — it’s almost cellular. Watch the way she holds her feet performing Cole Porter’s “The Laziest Girl in Town,” and you’ll realize what an amazing artist she was. She knows how to write the script with her voice and her body. In the midst of a poorly constructed screenplay, she creates a compelling character who draws you in. When the film has to cut from her final closeup (which is almost breathtaking) to get to the rather clumsy denouement, it’s hard to care what happens to anybody else.