STAGE FRIGHT - João Bénard da Costa (Patreon)

Not that anyone will give one single fuck, but I found the piece I was talking about on Club Ellen regarding Stage Fright. It's a chatGPT translation, original review linked below — again, not that anyone will give one single shit nor fuck. - T

Stage Fright is a double entendre title because the expression can both mean "fear in the wings" (the "stage fright" mentioned in the Portuguese title) and the literal translation that evokes the "fear of the stage" that actors often feel when they have to face the audience.

And now I'm in the film, in this new foray by Hitchcock into the world of theater (the "pleasure garden" of his first work), which had such an important place in two of his most celebrated English films: The Lodger and Murder. The film opens with a stage curtain. When the curtain rises, the "show" presented to us is London. Immediately, the sign under which this work will unfold is pointed out: the relationship between theater and life, or better, the relationship between theatrical illusion and the illusion of reality. And associated with it, the sign of representation.

Actresses are the two main characters: Charlotte and Eve. One is renowned and famous, the other a novice. But the mission of this novice, in the criminal intrigue of Stage Fright, is to play the role of Charlotte's maid and to play it so well that Charlotte indeed takes her for a maid (Jane Wyman even has to speak with a cockney accent). Step by step, this performance will lead her to change boyfriends (the policeman will take Richard Todd's place) and to discover Todd's performance, guilty of playing the role of innocent for her (and for all of us, the audience). But it's not just Marlene, Wyman, and Todd who doubly perform in this film: everyone does, from the policeman (pretending to be something he's not and disguising his growing interest in Jane Wyman under the professional guise) to her divorced parents, who throughout the film, assume successive roles, the least of which is their status (divorced), which they never fully embrace, appearing more like an old, complicit couple than a separated one. And the representation extends to the secondary characters, just think of the extraordinary old woman at the fair booth (the one with the ducks) or Patricia Hitchcock's episodic creation (in her first appearance in her father's films), disturbingly similar to Jane Wyman.

This constant play between appearances and reality (from which arises, and we'll get there, the trap set for the audience in this whodunit, one of the rare examples of such a genre in Hitchcock's work) unfolds through various shows, from the music hall (the astounding sequence where Marlene sings "The Laziest Girl in Town," falsely respecting the rules of the musical until we discover the backstage perspective) to the fair (another key sequence of the film) and through the specular world and glasses. Numerous are the shots where we enter and exit through mirrors (just think of the sequence in Marlene's dressing room), few Hitchcock films have so many people wearing glasses (the real maid and the fake maid, Patricia Hitchcock, the multiple secondary characters, etc.). We are in a specular film (characters and situations reflect each other), we are in a film where characters disguise themselves with glasses to better perform, or to better simulate a vision that is permanently denied to us and to them (notice the boy who shows the doll to Marlene).

This constant variation on appearances culminates in the greatest appearance, the one that allows Jane Wyman and the audience to be deceived. If we are misled about the true culprit, believing in Todd's innocence and Marlene's guilt until the end, it's because we saw how everything happened at the beginning of the film and thought we knew the whole truth from that moment. Only at the end do we realize that this flashback did not correspond to any "objective" vision but to Todd's narration to Wyman of what had happened and that consequently, Todd lied. The surprise of this revelation comes from Hitchcock's "deviation" from one of the most constant conventions of cinematic codes: that the flashback never lies. Although we associate it with Todd's narrative in the taxi, we don't doubt it because we saw it, taking that vision as real (the reconstructed past) and not as what it actually is: the set of images that Wyman forms while listening to the story Todd is telling her.

Astutely (those engrossed in the story will only notice afterward), Hitchcock places elements in that flashback that don't quite fit: when Marlene Dietrich goes to Todd's apartment with a blood-stained skirt to tell her story, the actress deliberately acts poorly because in Wyman's vision (dependent on Todd's narration) everything she tells is false; when Todd goes to Marlene's house, the camera doesn't interrupt the movement from the street to the building's entrance and up the stairs. This uninterrupted movement is all the stranger because the door apparently closed, which would prevent a continuous shot. But our illusion that the door closed comes from the soundtrack (we hear the sound of it closing) but we don't actually see it close, thus creating a double illusion, a trick, certain because the narrative was also a trick.

But the effect of reality created by associating those images with Todd's story is so powerful that it doesn't occur to us (like Wyman) to doubt this truthfulness, thus creating total surprise when we discover the criminal's identity at the end. And only then do we realize that everything that seemed to confirm suspicions about Marlene (the stained skirt, her reaction to the policeman and the maid, her conversation with Todd at the theater, the astounding doll episode) only seemed so because it was linked to our initial conviction, that is, it was only consistent from a basic inconsistency. Of all, Marlene is the one who performs the least, or at least, the only one who doesn't resort to disguises (like Wyman), concealments (like Wilding), or tricks (like Alastair Sim, the famous English actor who plays Jane Wyman's father).

And in this astonishing specular entertainment, the only character who doesn't follow the general convictions (because he introduced the initial lie) is Todd, who only unmasks himself (in the astounding backstage sequence, a monumental moment in Hitchcock's cinema) because he doubts the credibility given to his story, that is, because he doubts (Jane Wyman's disguise) that his girlfriend, her parents, and the policeman completely believe (as they and we believe) in the truth of what he told. And it's this doubt that dooms him because, in a way, he is the only one outside the film, staging a fiction that never coincides with that of the others and ours. In the "small difference" between these two stagings (the flashback and the one commanded by the flashback), he is lost, doubting the reality of all other representations. Richard Todd is the only one left backstage: his passage to the stage is fatal: the curtain falls on him, caught between the two worlds in which he moved and made everyone else move.

It is known that neither Hitchcock nor the majority of critics held this work in high regard, of which Robin Wood said it was "more interesting in retrospect than while viewing." But if every vision here is commanded by a retrospective (the flashback), isn't that the best compliment one can pay to such a surprising film?

João Bénard da Costa

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock, Cinemateca Portuguesa

https://letterboxd.com/notbenard/film/stage-fright/