Stage Fright (Transatlantic Pictures, Warner Bros., 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that I watched a Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” showing of a movie that barely qualifies as film noir at all: Stage Fright, a 1950 thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock at a low point in his career. He’d come to the U.S. a decade earlier and had a string of films that were both critical and commercial hits: Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt, Spellbound and Notorious (the only film of his that failed during that period was Lifeboat). Then his luck turned sour big-time and he made three flops in a row: The Paradine Case, Rope and Under Capricorn. After finishing his contract with David O. Selznick on The Paradine Case (a story Selznick had wanted to make since his days as a producer at MGM in 1933, and it shows), Hitchcock had formed an independent company with an old friend, British producer Sidney Bernstein, called Transatlantic Pictures. He signed with Warner Bros. to release the Transatlantic films, and the idea was he would make at least some of the movies in his native Britain – though Stage Fright would be the only one of his films shot there until Frenzy (1972), Hitchcock’s next-to-last movie and one of his best. Stage Fright was based on a novel by British author Selwyn Jepson called Man Running; Jepson had created a series character called Eve Gill, whom TCM host Eddie Muller described as “a British Nancy Drew,” and Man Running was originally part of the series. Hitchcock’s first idea was to cast the role with his daughter Patricia, who had aspirations to be an actress and was studying at the time at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (which features prominently in the film). But Warner Bros. got cold feet at entrusting the lead role to the director’s inexperienced daughter and insisted he use the 32-year-old Jane Wyman in the part. (Patricia Hitchcock got to be in the film after all, though only in the minor role of “Chubby Bannister.” Later she would play small but significant roles in two more of daddy’s movies, Strangers on a Train and Psycho.)

The film opens with a long flashback sequence narrated by Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd, who two years later would star in Walt Disney’s Robin Hood, the first all-live-action film Disney produced to take advantage of frozen funds), who tells his girlfriend Eve Gill (Jane Wyman, deliberately made to look as frumpy as possible) that he’s fleeing from his other girlfriend, British stage star Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich), because she’s just knocked off her well-to-do husband and wants his help to cover her crime. This flashback became the most controversial part of the film because it’s later revealed to be a lie; against the advice of both his writer, Whitfield Cook, and his wife, former film editor Alma Reville, Hitchcock decided to make Jonathan the killer after all – though just before he dies (literally bisected by an iron safety curtain as he’s being chased through the theatre where Charlotte performs) he says she goaded him to do it and it looks like she’s going to be arrested as an accessory at the end. The reason for the controversy is that no film by a major director had ever contained a flashback that turned out to be a lie; the convention was that while you could have one character lie to another in dialogue, if you saw it on the screen it had to be part of the story’s reality. (I’m quite sure I’ve seen at least one movie made before Stage Fright that contained a dramatized flashback that turned out to be a lie, but I can’t trace it at the moment. So far all the instances I’ve seen on line about films with flashbacks that turn out to be a lie postdate Stage Fright.) Unfortunately for Hitchcock, Stage Fright turned out to be his fourth flop in a row – though his next film, Strangers on a Train, would be his critical and commercial comeback (and one of his best). The best thing about it is Dietrich; and after her the great British character actors with which he filled out his cast, including Alastair Sim as Jane Wyman’s father and Dame Sybil Thorndyke as her mom.

One of my favorite anecdotes about this film, Hitchcock and Dietrich, concerns the cinematographer Wilkie Cooper, who’d never worked with either before. Dietrich came in with elaborate instructions to Cooper explaining exactly how she should be lit, what lenses he should use and all other aspects of how he should shoot her. Cooper complained to Hitchcock that Dietrich was telling him how he should do his job and he said, “What should I do?” Hitchcock said, “What should you do? You should do everything she tells you to do.” Cooper was nonplussed by this – he thought, “Isn’t this Alfred Hitchcock? The ‘actors are cattle’ guy?” – until Hitchcock explained, “She got her start with Josef von Sternberg, who knew more about how to photograph women than any of the rest of us – and he taught her everything he knew.” (One reason I particularly love that story is it indicates that Hitchcock knew Sternberg’s work and shows that the striking similarities between Sternberg’s Dishonored – also with Dietrich – and Hitchcock’s Notorious are not coincidental.) Dietrich gets to sing several numbers in the film, not only Cole Porter’s “The Laziest Gal in Town” (the song Mel Brooks and Madeline Kahn hilariously parodied in Blazing Saddles) but Édith Piaf’s huge hit “La Vie en Rose.” The songs are so beautifully staged I’m more curious than ever to see the one out-and-out musical Hitchcock directed, Waltzes from Vienna (1933), a biopic of the Strauss waltz family with Edmund Gwenn as Johann Strauss, Sr.; Esmond Knight as Johann Strauss, Jr.; and the great British dancing star Jessie Matthews top-billed as “Resi Ebezeder.” (It was during the making of this film, shot at Gaumont-British studios even though it was produced by an independent company, that Hitchcock was visited by Gaumont-British production head Michael Balcon and told him, “I hate this kind of stuff. Melodrama is the only thing I can do.” As soon as Waltzes from Vienna was finished, Balcon signed Hitchcock directly and gave him the first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, a huge success which “typed” him as a thriller director for the rest of his career.)

Aside from that, Stage Fright is a pretty mediocre movie, hamstrung by that lying flashback and by two rather dull leads: Jane Wyman is visibly uncomfortable with having to tone down her looks so as not to overshadow Dietrich, and Richard Todd is a dull, boorish character whom we don’t particularly like even before Hitchcock pulls his switcheroo on us and reveals that he’s really the murderer. It also doesn’t help that the other leading man, and the one Wyman ends up with at the end, is played by Michael Wilding, a serviceable but not particularly interesting actor (he was the second Mr. Elizabeth Taylor and one of the few exes she had kind things to say about in later years). Doubtless Hitchcock was going for the hero-heroine-villain romantic triangle in which the two men competing for the woman’s affections are the bad guy and the cop trying to catch him, but he’d done that far better in previous movies, including Blackmail (1929), The Secret Agent (1936), Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Notorious (1946). In his Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” introduction, Eddie Muller made the bizarre claim that in Stage Fright Hitchcock had for the first time in his career made a movie about the artifice of acting and the theatre generally. Not so: in 1930 Hitchcock had made the film Murder!, a flawed but quite compelling drama also centered around the theatre world. The hero in Murder! is a well-known actor who sits on a jury hearing a case in which a young actress, Diana Baring (Norah Baring) is convicted of murder; the actor, Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall), goes along with the guilty verdict but later becomes convinced that Diana is innocent. He sets out to find the real killer, who turns out to be one of Hitchcock’s best, most interesting and most complex villains: Handell Fane (Esmé Percy), a drag performer who actually committed the murder and framed Diana for the crime because she’d refused his advances. Obviously Fane was hoping Diana’s love would convert him from the Gay and racially mixed character he is into the straight white man he hopes to be. Though Murder! is also a flawed movie (and one I haven’t seen in quite a while), I remember it as a good deal deeper and richer than Stage Fright and strongest where Stage Fright is weakest: in the depth of the villain’s characterization. One other aspect of Stage Fright worth noting is where Hitchcock’s trademark cameo appearance comes – almost 45 minutes into a 110-minute movie – in which Jane Wyman passes him while muttering to herself about her impersonation of Dietrich’s dresser. Over time Hitchcock started moving his guest appearances closer to the opening of the film so audiences would stop waiting for him and get into the story, and he rarely showed himself interacting with a character the way he does here.