Product: Young & Innocent [VHS] (1938)
Rating: 4.0
The Wrong Man
It's not as first-rate, perhaps, as THE 39 STEPS or THE LADY VANISHES, but it's very much along the same lines, and part of the really fun streak of famous films Alfred Hitchcock made right before the war, when he came to the United States to make REBECCA. Handsome, Roman-nosed Derrick de Marnay is accused of murdering a wealthy actress who left him quite a bit of money; he has to enlist Nova Pilbeam (she of the strange eyebrows), a wealthy constable's daughter, to help him clear his name. Loosely based on Josephine Tey's A SHILLING FOR CANDLES, this 1937 film is a wild ride, and though it holds together very well in terms of plot its mostly an excuse for some very good thrill sequences. Several of them seem to be clearly homages to the great silent serials of Louis Feuillade: there are a couple of very close shaves with cars speeding to beat locomotive crossings (these are accomplished with some beautifully precise miniature sets) and even a car in a collapsing coal mine. The most famous of all is the lengthy sequence at the hotel tea dance at the end with the famous dolly shot from high in the ballroom down to the real killer's eyes, which give a telltale twitch for which the heroine is searching; perhaps almost as accomplished is the shocking first sequence with the killer and his wife (the victim) loudly arguing, which segues first to the killer stepping outside the house during a rainstorm hatching his plans, and then to down the cliff the next day as the wife's body and the murder weapon (a raincoat belt) gently roll up together onto the beach. There are some fun throwaway gags with children, including one with an enthusiastic young boy at a gas pump and one with another enthusiastic boy named Harold at a kids' birthday party. This new restoration of the film on this DVD looks terrific; the interviews with Francois Truffaut and Peter Bogdanovich that appear as extras have appeared elsewhere in print form and are hardly worth hearing (particularly the Bogdanovich interview, since the younger director hadn't even seen YOUNG AND INNOCENT before interviewing Hitchcock).