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THE EUROPEAN CINEMA
principally from a calculated use of the resources of the medium, and particularly of cutting, which is related to Russian theories of montage as of the late twenties. Montage is used for its physical shock effect and, deliberately, to cause the sensation of surprise and fear. Like Lubitsch and Chaplin, the structure of his films is centred around the invention of incident, of business. His description of the opening sequence of Secret Agent (1936)1 can be regarded as a classic exposition of the way purely literary or theatrical material can be re-worked into film form.
All of Hitchcock's successes — The Man Who Knew Too Much (1935), The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), The Woman Alone (1937) and The Lady Vanishes (1939) — were based upon the invention of business and the deliberate alternation of chronology towards the end of suspense. Preposterous often, these pictures were visually and rhythmically gripping to an extent that often seemed more humanly convincing than more serious films. Oddly, it was Hitchcock's one serious effort, Rich and Strange (1931), in which his visual imagination failed him. Here he ignored the material implicit in his theme to concentrate on a talkfest between individuals.
Hitchcock's increasing reputation led him inevitably to Hollywood, where his pictures have continued the style of his British thrillers, but it is recently a style somewhat blurred by production supervision and star values. Foreign Correspondent (1940), Rebecca (1940), and Shadow of a Doubt (1943) were more or less up to his British standard, but more lately it has been increasingly a matter of Spellbounds (1946) and Paradine Cases (1947) in which cinematic construction has had to be subordinated to pseudo-romantic conflicts involving the highlighting of principal players. Lifeboat (1944), his one war-related film, was intended as an allegory of conflict between democratic and totalitarian ways of doing things. It was at sea in more ways than one, since the majority of critics agreed
1 Footnotes to the Film, edited by Charles Davy (Lovat Dickson, 1938).
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