This is a painful cinematic experience.  It takes a certain amount of masochism for all but the most rabid of Hitchcock fans to sit through this 129-minute snoozer.  But old Alfred was the auteur of auteurs and he manages to make even this vapid storyline come to life…occasionally.

Samuel Sweetland

might just be

the most inept

womanizer

in the history

of cinema.

The good farmer

would really be

out of luck

in today’s world.

His heavy-handed,

condescending ways

didn’t even fly

in 1928!  Yet,

there is the

good, sweet Lillian Hall-Davis

who sees something

in her boss.

Hall-Davis,

who plays the

housekeeper Minta,

is charming throughout

this sleeper

(and I mean sleeper).

Mercifully,

the comic relief

of Gordon Harker

makes the whole thing

bearable.

Harker plays

the handyman

Churdles Ash.

With his bent,

crushed hat

perched perilously

atop his head,

Harker is the tired,

nihilistic voice

of humor

throughout

(like a slapstick Louis-Ferdinand Céline).

Of particular note is the burgeoning style of Hitchcock and his archetypal use of images.  The two cocker spaniels at the beginning of the film are a cute example of a director truly using pictures to tell a story.  Likewise notable is the relative scarcity of intertitles.

Truly, one must have the intestinal fortitude of a François Truffaut to wade through this unending, Chaucerian version of motion pictures.  Not recommended unless you typically watch a silent film every. single. day.  Murnau and Dreyer were light years beyond this kind of film making.

-PD