Why bother adapting Noel Coward as a silent movie? I guess they needed material. It starts with Isabel Jeans on trial- her drunken husband accused her of having an affair with an artist she was posing for. (The QC is Ian Hunter from The Ring). The artist was in love with her so the husband attacks him, the faints. The highly strung artist then shoots himself and the woman is found guilty of misconduct. So she flees to the Riviera where she has a romance with a younger man. After marrying him, he takes her home to meet the parents, including a creepy mother with a moustache – the first in what would be a long line of emasculating Hitchcock mamas unwilling to tie the apron strings. The family don’t like her and they figure out her past and are shocked. (I don’t know why they’re shocked – I mean he did pick her up on the Riviera.) Ian Hunter turns up again and he’s one of the few people to be nice to her. So she divorces her second hubby.
Jeans is very pretty and her character is quite sympathetically depicted. It’s clear her first husband was an idiot and the artist a whimp, and her second husband’s family, except for the dad, are horrible. So at the end when she goes “shoot there’s nothing left to kill” (after her second divorce) – it’s not really tragic, because I don’t think she really loved her second husband and she’s better off without her. And you get the feeling she won’t be single long.
It is very well directed with the added benefit of some location filming on the Riviera and in impressive country homes. It’s full of visual flourishes – POV of a judge’s magnifying glass, there’s a great scene with a switchboard operator listening in over a romantic conversation and really getting into it (this is very clever silent filmmaking). Hitch seems particularly interested in exploring match cuts in this one there are heaps of them: a letter held up in court going to flashback, a kiss on the wrist, a suitcase arriving near a cat to indicate France and then a dog to indicate England. The story concept of a woman marrying a rich man and meeting his family, some of whom would be hostile, would pop up in Rebecca and Marnie.
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