Jamaica Inn (1939)

If you are rating Hitchcock's films, assigning a number to each, this one is the wild-card, the x-factor. Some people (like Hitchcock himself) hate it; others (like me) adore it, and both are correct--the people who hate it have very valid reasons for hating it, and those of us who adore it have an unassailable reason for loving it. Specifically, Charles Laughton.Victor Buono once said of his role as King Tut on the "Batman" show (you know, Adam West and Burt Ward) that he treasured the opportunity to shed every trace of inhibition or restraint and over-act to the maximum degree. That is what Charles Laughton does here, and Laughton could have given Buono lessons in how to over-act. He (Laughton) was already typecast for loud, arrogant, room-filling characters by his smash hits "The Private Life of Henry VIII" and "Mutiny on the Bounty", but Captain Bligh and even King Henry VIII have nothing on his character here: the brilliant, cunning, pathologically vain land-owner, Justice of the Peace, and criminal mastermind Squire Humphrey Pengallan, who gradually morphs from being insane-but-capable (dangerously capable) to insane-and-detached-from-reality-altogether as law-enforcement closes in on him. There are other great actors in the cast too, including Maureen O'Hara (in one of her first roles), Leslie Banks (who was quite famous in his time, for playing big, sinister bruisers) and young Robert Newton in a very unusual role for him--a likeable good-guy. But they are all guests, secondary, and so is Hitchcock himself; the set belongs to Charles Laughton.

Even though it's based on Daphne Du Maurier's novel, and features a particularly evil character by Charles Laughton, this Alfred Hitchcock directed film is not a particularly engaging or satisfying drama. However, though it lacks much of the suspense and intrigue characteristics of most of the director's other films, I wouldn't label it a complete waste of time. Besides Laughton's performance, another plus for this picture is Maureen O'Hara, who plays the innocent, beautiful heroin. Most Hitchcock fans will find that, not only is the other "good guy" not up to the director's standards, its ending is rather convenient as well.With nowhere else to go upon her mother's death, Mary (O'Hara) must find her way to the titled Inn, which is owned by her aunt Patience (Marie Ney) and uncle Joss (Leslie Banks). What she doesn't know is the Inn's reputation, as a place for bandits, pirates, and other sorts of unsavory characters.On the road to finding the Inn, she gets some idea of it, and in fact will only be taken as far as Sir Humphrey's (Laughton), the elected official of the region and, in effect, its law officer. Sir Humphrey, who lives rather lavishly, is naturally impressed with her beauty and agrees to escort Mary to the Inn. It appears that Sir Humphrey is a perfect gentleman, but appearances can be deceiving.In fact, it is Sir Humphrey that gives the scallywags who reside at the Inn the information they need to cause ships to crash on the rocks below it, such that they can loot their treasures and kill all aboard. This bounty allows Sir Humphrey to live the way he does, but his greed causes him to take too much from those who perform the evil deeds on his behalf. The fact that they depend upon his position, which protects them as well as providing them the ship's cargo information, keeps the pirates at bay.Upset with these losses, an agent is sent to infiltrate the rogues to learn why they seem to know about the ships and when they are worth pirating. Naturally, there are conflicts between the evildoers themselves, and the agent, James Trehearne (Robert Newton), gets exposed. However, Mary is able to help him and, combined with help from Patience, who is finally overcome with guilt from her husband's complicity with Sir Humphrey, good eventually triumphs over evil, if unsatisfactorily.Screenplay co-written by Joan Harrison, who received Oscar nominations for both of Hitchcock's films released in 1940. Basil Radford appears in his last of three Hitchcock films.

"Jamaica Inn"'s opening convinced me that I was going to watch something thrilling and spectacular, a heart pounding wreck , a gang of wreckers living no survivors and using the titular inn as headquarters, efficiently preceded by an aura of obscure terror. When the carriage driver refuses to stop at the inn, and leaves Mary, the mysterious stranger from Ireland, a few miles away from her destination, at that point, I thought it would be like Manderlay, a sort of claustrophobic place where any indiscretion can immediately switch to a life-and-death situation Unfortunately, "Jamaica Inn" is in the best case an interesting adventure story with a great villain, except that this greatness cancels out the other characters' appeals, so if it wasn't for Laughton, the film would have been worse... or maybe better. I don't know. What I know though is that it's very difficult to have an objective opinion of the film because it is so unknown that only a Hitchcock fan would be curious enough to discover it, however, only a fan will be biased enough to try to like it. Somewhat it reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Marge's painting teacher is impressed by her work and compliments her, but then he sees a banal sign painter and says "another triumph!". Now, Hitchcock have made more masterpieces than any director with the exception of Kurosawa, that we're ready to find signs of greatness or of his suspense-instinct in every of his early films, but the truth is that "Jamaica Inn" doesn't hold up very well, not by Hitchcock standards, and certainly not 1939 standards. And not to use it as a convenient alibi but didn't Hitch himself disown the film? Wasn't Daphne Du Maurier so displeased that she almost considered withholding her rights for "Rebecca"? Speaking of "Rebecca", Hitch will finally redeem himself by making a Best Picture winner. And despite the one-year lapse, you really feel like there was a whole decade of technical improvement between "Rebecca" and "Jamaica Inn". Now, to Hitch's defense, I just read in Wikipedia that Laughton wanted a bigger screen time and indirectly forced Hitchcock to reveal earlier in the film that the debonair and suave squire he played was the mastermind behind the engineered shipwrecks, and indeed, this would have made for one hell of a middle plot twist and would have kept a shadow of mystery on the character of Pengallan, Hitch wasn't too hot about Laughton's mannerisms because they gave away his vileness, not to mention these horrific and distracting eyebrows. No disrespect toward Laughton but a subtler performance would have served the film instead of depriving it from the one mystery that could have maintained a bit of suspense. So yes, this is not even a Hitchcock film we're to judge, but a Charles Laughton's film. I suspect Laughton wanted to steal the show and pull a "Captain Bligh" in his acting, as his continuous "Chadwick!" (his imperious calls for the poor butler) had the same resonance than "Mr. Christian!" in "Mutiny on the Bounty", and to some extent, it manages to elevate the film to a sort of cult-like guilty pleasure, but Laughton took the lion share of one-liners and memorable moments, so that when you have Maureen O'Hara and Robert Newton, instead of acting like leading characters, they're just the foils to Laughton's Pengallan. Imagine, she's the naive outsider and he's the undercover but we're always ahead of them, so when they discover the truths, there is no surprising effect, worse, the truth doesn't even come from a sign, a scar, a message, anything... Hitch loved signs and rarely indulged to on-the-nose dialogues, but in "Jamaica Inn", revelations are made through straightforward narration, without any form of emotional reward. (And even when comes the biggest shocker, when the aunt is about to give the name of Pengallan, she's shot dead, by -guess who?- Pengallan himself. Hitch wasn't always the most subtle director, but he rarely challenged logic in his work, that he let such a thing happen in the film proves that he didn't care much and just let Laughton makes his show.) The film succeeds in providing the right period atmosphere of the early 18th century, and the action sequences are well-handled, but Hitch was no newcomer at the time and that technical quality was expected from his work, the element where he had to shine was the storytelling, something that relies on the script, the editing, the directing, and there was so much good material to explore: the relationships between Joss (Leslie Banks) and his wife, the identity of Traheme, since Pengallan was always revealed as the villain, the character of Mary deserved more development, but Maureen O'Hara is extraordinarily uninteresting within the film's narrative, even the wreckers had better lines. So overall, "Jamaica Inn" is a disappointingly conventional movie, that throw overboard the only aspects of the plot that could carry some suspenseful elements, and can only provide thrills that consist on escaping from the bad guys, big deal. The best thing about the film though was its climax, with that grotesque sight of Laughton climbing to the top of the masts, and finally jumps to his death, as if the story was deliberately embracing its own zaniness for the sake of making an impact on the audience, let's just wreck the whole thing and have fun with it, and maybe it's the ending that redeems the film, a little. Such a literally over-the-top death was the perfect demise for a larger-than-life villain, as long as he doesn't dwarf the other plays. So, yeah, this is a memorable Laughton's film, but a pretty forgettable Hitchcock. So, atleast, the fans can give the film a 5 or a 6 without feeling too guilty about it.

Jamaica Inn begins with a gang of pirates wrecking a ship, killing the survivors, and looting the booty. We cut to Charles Laughton and a false nose and eyebrows, taking a lady in who is looking for her sister at the infamous Jamaica Inn.The picture is not really about the Jamaica Inn so much as about the pirates who operate out of there. There are a few cool twists, and some attractive leads, but the tone is Dickensian and theatrical, not what you might expect from a Hitchcock. Its a period piece, and some of the costuming and acting contributes to the hokey tone. That was initially what turned me off it, along with the VHS-like quality of that first public domain release I saw. Don't bother unless you're watching the high definition version. This is a public domain piece so is quite common in horrible versions with fuzzy picture and audio so bad you can hardly understand it. The 2015 Cohan Blu Ray is the only way to watch.Overall its a good news bad news situation. At times, the dialogue is wooden and the framing boring mid-shots like in the worst Hitchcock movies. At other times, it has a nice flair for a dramatic twist, like the best Hitchcock. I'd call it non-essential viewing.