The Manxman (1929)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / UK / 116 mins.


Although the title makes it sound like it could be an early werewolf movie, Alfred Hitchcock's final silent film is an insufferable and predictable soap opera, not only a low point from his early career but a low point from his entire career.

Two friends – an ambitious but poor fisherman (Carl Brisson) and a shy lawyer (Malcolm Keen) – are both in love with Kate (Anny Ondra). The poor fisherman realizes there is no way he will be able to woo Kate unless he is successful, so he takes off for Africa and tells her to wait for him. She obliges, but then there's the lawyer. Kate and the lawyer fall in love when it appears the fisherman has died in Africa, but – gasp! – he isn't dead and his return creates a tense and melodramatic love triangle that will end the way you imagine it will and takes entirely too long to resolve.

I consider myself a judicious man, so let me note that there's one really brilliant shot (there's one in every Hitchcock film, no matter how bad it is). It is near the end of the film, and one of the characters dramatically jumps into deep water. The shot of the dark bubbling water dissolves into another scene and another liquid, and when the camera pulls back, the new liquid remains ambiguous until we see a quill dip into it and immediately it is recognizable as an inkwell. There, now I've said something nice.
The Manxman was cinematographer Jack Cox's fourth collaboration with Hitchcock, and he also must be given credit for helping capture some beautiful landscape shots at Cornwall, substituting for the Isle of Man, where the film is set. (A "Manxman," if you're curious, is the descriptor for an ethnic group from the Isle who frequently lumped in with the Gaels.) The script would be Eliot Stannard's final collaboration with Hitchcock, with whom he had worked since The Mountain Eagle (now a lost film) in 1926.

What is continually amazing about Hitchcock's career is not necessarily that it ebbed and flowed between great films and bad films, but how he could produce a bomb and a masterpiece back to back. After The Manxman, he began production on what might truly constitute his first fully realized Hitchcockian production, Blackmail. Later he would go from the atrocious Jamaica Inn in Britain to Rebecca, his American debut which won Best Picture of 1940. I don't think you have to see the clunkers to realize how great his other films are, but it certainly is illuminating. That said, please stay as far away from The Manxman as possible.