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Alfred Hitchcock British Films

The films Alfred Hitchcock made during his British period show considerable experimentation with the language of film, drawing on a number of traditions for effect and style. Sabotage (1936) shows a number of such influences, including classical Hollywood style, German Expressionism, and Soviet Expressive Realism. Hitchcock embodied the two major stylistic threads of filmmaking, the montage of the Soviet theorists such as Pudovkin and Eisenstein and the fluid camera of F. W. Murnau, and these traditions as well are evident in this film.

The Hollywood influence is seen in the way the characters are presented and treated, and this is also apparent in the differences between the film and its source material in the novel The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. The character of the wife is essentially "prettified" in the film version, made a much more sympathetic and victimized character who asserts herself after years of abuse. There is also a deliberate set of references to Hollywood films because the protagonist, Verloc, manages a small London movie theater where American films are shown. His wife at one point sits down to watch American cartoons and laughs along with the crowd even though she has just learned that her husband is an accomplice in her brother's murder. Hitchcock uses this scene first to show how the comedy alleviates her suffering for a moment and then how it reminds her of it as the cartoon characters ask, "Who killed Cock Robin?"

However, certain Hollywood traditions are notable in their absence, or rather in the way the filmmaker deliberately ignores or twists them. The heroine murders her husband, but she is not punished and in fact prospers once the evidence against her is destroyed. The policeman who knows she is guilty does not turn her in even before the evidence is destroyed--he is going to help her get away with it, yet he also is never punished and in fact prospers.

Maurice Yacowar (1977) writes: ...

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Alfred Hitchcock British Films. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 15:23, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1683641.html