BEFORE: Another Hitchcock film with multiple names - in the U.S. it was released as "The Girl Was Young", but in the U.K. it was titled "Young and Innocent". Why couldn't they just pick one name and stick with it? Anyway, I'm about 1/3 of the way through the Hitchcock chain, and we're somehow halfway through May. I've got to stick to the schedule, because in a couple weeks I'm going to start taking some weekend trips and losing viewing days.
Linking from "Sabotage", Jack Vyvian, who played a detective in that film, also played a policeman in "The Man Who Knew Too Much", with Nova Pilbeam, who re-appears tonight.
THE PLOT: Man on the run from a murder charge enlists a beautiful stranger who must put herself at risk for his cause.
AFTER: It feels like a little backslide in quality tonight, because there's no connection to international espionage, just a man wrongly accused. And if it feels like I've seen this before, it's only because Hitchcock was starting to repeat himself. How is this not just a rehash of "The 39 Steps", minus the spy angle?
The film starts with a couple of major contrivances - namely that when a woman is strangled and/or drowned, and her body washes up on the beach, the first person to find her is Robert, her younger boyfriend, and after running to get help, he is instead accused of fleeing the scene. I suppose you could make the argument that she wanted to keep her secret lover near her, but he later states that he was living in a flophouse, so couldn't she have arranged for him to stay in a nearby inn or something?
Then it's revealed that she left money to him in her will - another major coincidence, one that happens to give the police a motive, so they charge him with her murder. Since he knows (as does the audience) that he's innocent, and his lawyer appears to be railroading him to prison, every act he then commits to get free, however extreme, is therefore justified. Sort of like Harrison Ford in "The Fugitive".
Meanwhile, the woman's husband (??) has disappeared after the murder, but the police don't seem to have any desire to follow up on this particular angle. So it's up to Robert, with some help from the police chief's daughter, to prove his own innocence. This means that he's got to get back to the flophouse to find his old raincoat, since the belt was used to strangle the victim.
In the climactic scene, there is a band performing in a hotel ballroom, and they're all men in blackface make-up. As detestable as it seems today, I can sort of justify a singer like Al Jolson wearing this make-up in the 1920's, since he was performing in the style of Southern Negro music - but I just can't understand why a jazz band would appear this way.
Also starring Derrick De Marney, Percy Marmont (last seen in "Secret Agent"), Edward Rigby, George Curzon (also last seen in "The Man Who Knew Too Much"), Basil Radford, Mary Clare, John Longden (last seen in "The Skin Game").
RATING: 4 out of 10 party games
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