BEFORE: Well, this was unexpected - Lillian Hall-Davis, lead actress in "The Ring", carries over to appear in this one. I guess I should have known that Hitchcock would build up a supporting cast of players that he would use again and again, it's just more efficient that way. Hall-Davis was supposedly Hitchcock's favorite actress in the early days, but she only made 5 more films after this one, and had some kind of nervous breakdown in 1931, and then commited suicide in 1933, Sylvia Plath-style (head in the gas stove).
THE PLOT: After his daughter weds, a middle-aged widower with a profitable farm decides to remarry but finds choosing a suitable mate a problematic process.
AFTER: Speaking of unexpected, when I think about Hitchcock, I think about spies and intrigue and crime, not a widower looking for a new wife. This really comes out of left field, but I think it's from a time where Alfred was still looking for his niche, trying to find his own voice as a filmmaker.
I am just not doing well with these silent films - so far they've all managed to lull me to sleep, but then I wake up and realize I've missed half of the film, so I have to rewind (do you rewind a DVD? No? Damn, whatever you call it, I do that...) back to where I left off and try again. Then I doze off again, so I end up watching the film in little chunks, and it takes me about three hours to watch a 90-minute silent film. This is a very inefficient use of my post-midnight time each morning.
I see this Farmer Sweetland character as sort of the "Ron Swanson" of his time - he expects to get married again, but that doesn't mean he understands the process. In the meantime, he comes off like a down-to-earth, no B.S. kind of guy, and I can respect that. But you can't just make a list of women and go and visit them to see which ones are into you. That's not how the game is played, and it says something about Sweetland's character that he thinks the process will be just that simple.
One woman is too proper, another is prone to hysterics - a third runs a successful tavern, and has no shortage of eligible suitors, so she's not interested. Oh, and they're all terrible gossips. Yeah, women don't exactly get the best depiction here, but again, it's a product of the time it was made. It's also a bit of a shortcut, to make all of the women on the list undesirable in some fashion, which clears the way for the one woman already in his life who IS desirable to shine through. Goodness knows, we don't want to present the lead character with too many choices, or things could get complicated.
Once Farmer Sweetland's eyes are opened, and he's determined that the perfect woman for him was under his nose all along (hey, she's already got experience running the farm's household AND she happens to fit into his dead wife's clothes - talk about a perfect match!) Hitchcock couldn't resist getting in one more swipe at the nature of women. Two of the women who the farmer called upon and proposed to show up at his house, one stating that she's reconsidered his offer, but it's done only to put the other woman in her place. Because everyone knows that women often get married just to spite each other, right?
I failed to realize that Sweetland's farm handyman was also playing the role of the butler working at the party held by one of Sweetland's prospective mates. This is played for laughs, the character is given an ill-fitting coat, and can't seem to keep his trousers up, and this bit of physical comedy almost seems like it has no place in this picture. Besides, it's an awful coincidence that Sweetland goes to a party where his own servant is also helping out. Were there so few jobs in town that one guy has two of them, or did being a farmhand pay so little that the guy had to moonlight on odd jobs?
The footage of the fox hunt is another strange tangent - I don't see how it adds anything to the plot, so with a final running time of just over two hours (which is quite long, given the year it was released), this is something that could have easily been jettisonned to make a more reasonable running time.
Also starring Jameson Thomas (last seen in "It Happened One Night") , Gordon Hawker (also last seen in "The Ring"), Maud Gill, Louie Pounds, Ruth Maitland.
RATING: 4 out of 10 foxhounds
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