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The Manxman (1929)
- Wayne State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
If Champagne suffers from the unresolved tension between the moralist and the light romantic, The Manxman explores the tension between the moralist and the passionate romantic. Hitchcock frames the film with the moral he took from the title page of his source, Hall Caine’s extremely popular novel: “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”1 But in the film the romantic holds sway. The result is a film with brilliant characterization , camera work, and evocative use of landscape, but to which the drawn moral seems irrelevant. The Manxman is perhaps not a total success like The Farmer’s Wife, but it is as unfairly neglected. The Bioscope reviewer recognized the triumph of Hitchcock’s style over his source material: “Only a skilful director like Hitchcock could have devised from a story of this kind a picture of such remarkable power and gripping interest” ( January 23, 1929). John Russell Taylor admits there are “excellent things” in the film (unenumerated) and praises Hitchcock for the “admirable, restrained , and severe fashion” in which he dealt with the melodramatic Caine novel.2 Most commentators on Hitchcock ignore The Manxman altogether. John Smith’s study is weakened by his omission of this film and Downhill (“Individualism: A Selection of English Hitchcock”), The Manxman 1929 65 The Manxman for in no Hitchcock film (except The Skin Game) does Hitchcock deal more clearly with the individual’s duty to break with the traditions of his class. Rohmer and Chabrol rate it with The Ring as Hitchcock’s best silent work. Unlike Champagne, The Manxman “est un film tres ambitieux et sans aucune concession”: Pour la première fois, Hitchcock pénétrait dans un domaine qui lui est devenu cher, celui du vertigineux. La situation de The Manxman est sublime parce qu’elle est inextricable et refuse l’artifice. Elle est inextricable parce qu’elle ne s’appuie pas sur la malignité des personnages, ni sur l’archarnement du sort. Hitchcock s’est plu à décrire minutieusement, complètement et sans faux-ruyant, le confit moral opposant trois etres dont les actions sont practiquement irreprochables. La faute est la faute du genre humain. La morale ordinaire est impuissante à résoudre leurs problèmes. Chacun est obligé d’assumer ses propres responsabilit és, de se forger une ethique . . . La mise en scene est deliberement axee sur les visages, sur les regards. La péripétie est repoussée a l’arriere-plan. Cette purete que l’on se doit de louer, ne va pas d’ailleurs sans son revers: le trait hitchcockien, dont The Ring avait déjà prouve l’efficacité, est ici presque totalement absent. Perhaps Downhill bears the seeds that Chabrol and Rohmer find here in full flower.3 The powers at British International Pictures thought so little of The Manxman that it was shelved for some months and was only released after the success of Hitchcock’s brilliant sound debut, Blackmail . By then this classical silent film had had its day. Hitchcock did not like The Manxman. “The only point of interest about that movie is that it was my last silent one,” he tells Truffaut, “it was a very banal picture.” He denies Truffaut’s sense that Hitchcock “believed in this film”: “It’s not a matter of conviction, but the picture was the adaptation of a very well-known book by Sir Hall Caine. The novel had quite a reputation and it belonged to a tradition. We had to respect that reputation and that tradition. It was not a Hitchcock Hitchcock’s British Films 66 movie, whereas Blackmail . . .”4 To Bogdanovich, Hitchcock even gives an erroneous plot summary: “A kind of old-fashioned story. An assignment , more or less. It was a domestic melodrama, you know, the illegitimate child and the brother and the judge—one of those things full of coincidences—the brother happens to be a lawyer and the poor girl gets involved with a fisherman and so on.”5 There are no brothers in the film and in the novel there are only half brothers, the noble fisherman and the wastrel gentleman, the lawyer being a cousin. “Romantic and novelettish” is how Peter Noble dismisses both Champagne and The Manxman.6 Unfortunately, those terms have stuck. Even the sympathetic Kirk Bond dismisses it as “on the whole conventional and old-fashioned. . . . There are a few nice shots, but little else.”7 The film opens with a ship’s flag...