I am never entirely decided which out of John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock should be regarded as the most hugely over-rated director of all time. Sometimes I tend one way, sometimes the other.
It is not that Hitchcock did not make some very fine films; evidently he did. But he made some rather poor films too, particularly at the beginning and during the long end of his career. And even some of his good films are in doubtful taste and overly reliant on trademark gimmicks. The sycophantic attitude adopted by his admirers (the gullible idolator François Truffaut en tête) bear witness as much as anything to to his dominant personality and extraordinary talents as a self-publicist.
Neither the 1930 British version of this film nor the German version (shot simultaneously but only released in 1931) are very good. According to one reviewer the Germans would have liked more changes and this I can well believe. Hitchcock, who had learned most of what he knew from German film-makers really does not take advantage of the opportunity to be more adventurous in his cinematography and mise en scène in the way that marks the films of the great German directors up to this time (a golden age soon alas to be robbed of its glitter by the folly and philistinism of one Herr Hitler). Using German technical skills, he could have made a much superior version of this film.
Some changes the Germans did get. The British version is very seriously by the extremely unpleasant racist and homophobic tone of its conclusion (the villain being very clearly marked as a half-caste pansy to be ostracised on both accounts). As, to my astonishment - how protective people are of their icons! - only one reviewer to date seems to have pointed out, these unpleasant elements are removed in the German version. The character still works as an acrobat en travesti but the notion that he is homosexual (derived from the Dane novel) is hardly there at all and his motive for murder is no longer to conceal that he had "black blood" as in the English version (a notion that did not horrify the German public who, even under Hitler and whatever Hitler may have thought of it, gave a hugely warm and enthusiastic welcome to the athlete Jesse Owens five years later as Owens himself would testify sardonically on his return to a segregated USA. In this version Fane is simply an ex-convict wishing to conceal his criminal past.
It is easy to read history backwards in the manner of the egregious Siegfried Kracauer and forget that the Weimar period in Germany was in fact notable for its broad-mindedness (films treating homosexuality with sympathy such as Oswald's Anders als die Andern - which is also a plea for a change in the law - Dreyer's Michaêl or Dieterle's Geschlecht in Fesseln simply could not have been made at all in Britain at this time) and its multiculturalism. When the anti-semitic British short-story Saki had imagined a German invasion of Britain in his 1913 novel When William Came, what he feared most was not militarism or autocracy but the spread of a "cosmopolitan" culture (typically a euphemism for "jew" at the time) that would undermine the British identity.
Regarding Hitchcock and race, how many African American faces can you recall seeing in all the films that "the Master" made in the US, a period that included the life and death of Martin Luther King, the Civil Right movement, the Johnsonian legislation that transformed US society, the heyday of Mohamed Ali, the Black Panther movement?
So these important changes to this film are a reminder that as late as 1931 racism and homophobia that was perfectly acceptable in Britain was considered inappropriate in Germany. Two years later, alas, and both German state and cinema would be in the hands of suicidal and homicidal fanatics. Quel gachis!
It is not that Hitchcock did not make some very fine films; evidently he did. But he made some rather poor films too, particularly at the beginning and during the long end of his career. And even some of his good films are in doubtful taste and overly reliant on trademark gimmicks. The sycophantic attitude adopted by his admirers (the gullible idolator François Truffaut en tête) bear witness as much as anything to to his dominant personality and extraordinary talents as a self-publicist.
Neither the 1930 British version of this film nor the German version (shot simultaneously but only released in 1931) are very good. According to one reviewer the Germans would have liked more changes and this I can well believe. Hitchcock, who had learned most of what he knew from German film-makers really does not take advantage of the opportunity to be more adventurous in his cinematography and mise en scène in the way that marks the films of the great German directors up to this time (a golden age soon alas to be robbed of its glitter by the folly and philistinism of one Herr Hitler). Using German technical skills, he could have made a much superior version of this film.
Some changes the Germans did get. The British version is very seriously by the extremely unpleasant racist and homophobic tone of its conclusion (the villain being very clearly marked as a half-caste pansy to be ostracised on both accounts). As, to my astonishment - how protective people are of their icons! - only one reviewer to date seems to have pointed out, these unpleasant elements are removed in the German version. The character still works as an acrobat en travesti but the notion that he is homosexual (derived from the Dane novel) is hardly there at all and his motive for murder is no longer to conceal that he had "black blood" as in the English version (a notion that did not horrify the German public who, even under Hitler and whatever Hitler may have thought of it, gave a hugely warm and enthusiastic welcome to the athlete Jesse Owens five years later as Owens himself would testify sardonically on his return to a segregated USA. In this version Fane is simply an ex-convict wishing to conceal his criminal past.
It is easy to read history backwards in the manner of the egregious Siegfried Kracauer and forget that the Weimar period in Germany was in fact notable for its broad-mindedness (films treating homosexuality with sympathy such as Oswald's Anders als die Andern - which is also a plea for a change in the law - Dreyer's Michaêl or Dieterle's Geschlecht in Fesseln simply could not have been made at all in Britain at this time) and its multiculturalism. When the anti-semitic British short-story Saki had imagined a German invasion of Britain in his 1913 novel When William Came, what he feared most was not militarism or autocracy but the spread of a "cosmopolitan" culture (typically a euphemism for "jew" at the time) that would undermine the British identity.
Regarding Hitchcock and race, how many African American faces can you recall seeing in all the films that "the Master" made in the US, a period that included the life and death of Martin Luther King, the Civil Right movement, the Johnsonian legislation that transformed US society, the heyday of Mohamed Ali, the Black Panther movement?
So these important changes to this film are a reminder that as late as 1931 racism and homophobia that was perfectly acceptable in Britain was considered inappropriate in Germany. Two years later, alas, and both German state and cinema would be in the hands of suicidal and homicidal fanatics. Quel gachis!