Largely dismissed as a jingoistic anomaly in the generally anti-establishment Hitchcock canon (and dwarfed by the meatier fort/da of the same year's Rebecca), Foreign Correspondent is arguably a superior representation of the screwball genre to which the later Mr. and Mrs. Smith aspired. That it has political undertones is undeniable (its spies and hunters plot a throwback to Hitch's Gaumont years), but most conspicuous is the kind of macabre, visual wit that would define the bulk of Hitchcock's early American output. Consider a haunting sequence with titular journalist Huntley Haverstock (Joel McCrea) trying to find a missing getaway car in a Dutch field dotted with windmills that begins with a gust of wind blowing off his hat (a castration metaphor--the film is full of them) as his girl-Friday Carol Fisher (Laraine Day) laughs uncontrollably, proceeds to the inside of a false mill where Haverstock is nearly discovered when he gets his coat caught in gears, and ends with an exchange with non-English speaking Dutch police resolved by one of Hitch's precocious little girl characters. With an intimidating self-possession, an already mature Hitchcock presents in fast fashion a dizzying series of technical gags (the suspicious windmill suspicious because it's turning in the wrong direction--compare to the tennis crowd of Strangers on a Train and this film's own chase beneath a canopy of umbrellas); a preoccupation with birds as representatives of the corruption of social order (introduced in Young and Innocent, it became a central throughline in Hitchcock's career); a serio-comic scene of near-discovery; and a slapstick vignette that makes asses of the police, Hitch's favourite target.

Haverstock himself comes off as a parody of American arrogance, huffing his way through the picture with a chip on his shoulder the size and shape of Texas. His constant affirmations of patriotism instantly suspect for the insouciance of his character, when the picture ends with him pontificating like Kevin McCarthy to the strains of "The Star-Spangled Banner," the only appropriate response is to giggle. His romancing of Fisher, too, is a convenience of the genre, one referenced first by Hitchcock obscuring the initial part of the central courtship conversation under background noise, then by the dialogue itself, with Haverstock referencing how Fisher's forwardness has the effect of shortening their love scene. Offsetting the picture's pervasive air of bemusement (no surprise that co-star Robert Benchley contributed heavily to the shooting script) is a series of action set-pieces culminating in a still-harrowing plane crash and establishing Hitchcock early as a master of not only suspense, but also special effects and stuntwork. Viewed in conjunction with its VistaVision counterpart North by Northwest (and, backwards glancing, The Lady Vanishes), it represents the wellspring for the suave sex comedy/elaborate action sequence alchemy of the better James Bond pictures. (Indeed, lovable lunk Haverstock is to debonair Brit colleague Scott ffolliott (George Sanders) what CIA stalwart Felix Leiter is to Bond in the Ian Fleming mythology.) Too slight a picture for serious study but one so loaded with Hitchcock's evolving signatures (including lenses, cigarettes, and ersatz fishbowls) that it's due a resurrection, Foreign Correspondent is funny on purpose and that, obviously, makes all the difference in the world.

Though the transfer for Warner's DVD release of Foreign Correspondent--by itself or in its Signature Collection box set--was struck from a print flawed with the occasional line, nicked reel change, and blooming artifact, the fullscreen presentation itself seems bright and clean. It looks better than fine for the most part, while the original mono soundtrack, remastered for the DVD in Dolby 1.0, is clear if dropping occasionally into the tinny. Laurent Bouzereau's retrospective making-of "Personal History: Foreign Hitchcock" (34 mins.) follows the basic structure of his work on the director, collecting historians like Rudy Behlmer and Robert Osbourne to speak about history and personalities like Nat and Peter Benchley and Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell to wax on about behind-the-scenes intrigues and tell broad production stories. Day has warm recollections of being picked up off the contract scrapheap by a practical joking Hitch, and Behlmer, as he always does, impresses with his erudition and research. Peter Bogdanovich puts in a late appearance to do his Hitchcock impersonation and dissect a sequence (the windmill scene, in this case). It's the usual stuff, in other words, and fine for what it is, but to be frank I would have appreciated comment on Miracle on 34^th Street Santa Claus Edmund Gwenn's hilariously evil cameo as a hapless assassin who meets a comically ignoble end. A theatrical trailer (2 mins.) that's a little in the fashion of a newsreel and features the assassination of a Dutch ambassador (compare to the death of Arbogast in Psycho) rounds out the platter.-Walter Chaw

Even a cursory glance at Alfred Hitchcock's favoured themes would find the idea of rules--particularly as they're expressed by written forms of communication--to be the ineffectual rein seeking to subdue the protean tumult of human identity, greed, and passion. The way that books hide the body in Rope, for instance; the newspaper headlines discovered too late in Shadow of a Doubt; the contracts and penny dreadfuls of Suspicion; Norman Bates' hotel book; the profession of Foreign Correspondent; Carlotta's engraved headstone and Mozart's mathematical structure in Vertigo; Melanie's birthday wishes in The Birds; the beckoning empty cages in Rutland's house in Marnie; or how the lines of a ledger page predict North by Northwest's astonishing play on humans reduced to numbers before a brilliant bit of business involving a message written inside a matchbook cover. In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Hitchcock pairs with good friend Carole Lombard (on her second-to-last film before a plane crash ended her life), a prototypical Hitchcock blonde for whom the term "screwball comedy" was invented, to produce what's widely seen as an anomaly in Hitchcock's career: a slapstick romantic imbroglio. And indeed, the film is different from nearly anything Hitchcock ever did (though it shares a similar plot with Rich and Strange and a similar antic energy with The Trouble with Harry), but not because it deviates from his themes. Rather, Mr. and Mrs. Smith seems to be a film that outlines what it is exactly about rules and written communication that Hitchcock perceives to be so fundamentally unstable and misleading.

Consider the engine of the narrative. Mr. David Smith (Robert Montgomery) answers truthfully when his wife Ann (Lombard) asks if he'd marry her again if he had it to do all over. That afternoon, a man with a piece of paper tells Mr. Smith that because of a technicality, he's not actually married. This leads to Mr. Smith trying to seduce the suddenly very desirable Mrs. Smith, and to Mrs. Smith (who by the conventions of this sort of film has found out about the snafu) being outraged that Mr. Smith would seek to sully her virtue. In reality, the source of her anger is that Mr. Smith has neglected to renew their marriage license, thus affirming what Hitchcock scholar Lesley Brill refers to as his "dominion" over her. Mrs. Smith is Mr. Smith's possession by some kind of concomital Deed of Trust, a state referred to constantly by Mr. Smith: "You're mine and you belong to me." The idea of a renewal of society is common in Hitchcock's work (even The Birds, his most nihilistic piece, finds Melanie eventually supplanting the mother and taking her catatonic place as the broken, passive, utterly domesticated housewife), but in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the standard sunny resolution to the screwball master plot doesn't land with a hint of irony--the suffering in the picture is the couple's joy. Misery doesn't love company in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, it's the glue that binds Mr. and Mrs. Smith together.

The crossed ski-tips that end the film become like the family seal of the quarrelsome Smiths: swords in conflict and union. But neither side has sacrificed anything for the resolution, particularly Ann--as a Hitchcock blonde, she would have been expected to at least sacrifice her individuality and strength at the altar of the questionable prize of domesticity, marking the world of the picture as Hitchcock's perhaps German Expressionist-inspired nightmare of automatons ruled by arbitrary rules and social systems. It's those rules and systems, after all, that consistently place Hitchcock's protagonists in the role of outsider, fugitive, wrong man... In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, they are the Big Brothers, and what fun is that, really? With Hitchcock flourishes like food fetish, hat play, and a scene at a carnival (to say nothing of the picture's brilliant central image of Mrs. Smith shaving Mr. Smith with a straight razor as an expression of spousal devotion (and an echo of scraped toast)), Mr. and Mrs. Smith is serviceable and workmanlike, occasionally obviously the work of a genius. What it isn't, however, is very funny, very manic, or particularly current. It shows its age in a way that most of Hitchcock's pictures don't: it's all about the order of the patriarchy instead of the chaos of carnal night. When all's said and done, the most that can be remarked about it is how odd it is that this Hitchcock picture is so very predictable. The things we'll do for love.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith's b&w DVD transfer is commendable, although it demonstrates more grain and streaking artifacts than the other films in Warner's "Alfred Hitchcock: The Signature Collection" do. The centre-channel Dolby mono sound is clean, though there are a few moments where the score undercuts the dialogue, leading to a little choppiness that dates the source. Laurent Bouzereau does his typical (fine) job producing the supplementary documentary for Mr. and Mrs. Smith, "Mr. Hitchcock Meets the Smiths" (16 mins.), which assembles the usual suspects: Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell, Bill Krohn, TCM's Robert Osborne, Peter Bogdanovich, and so on. O'Connell is animated and full of anecdotes (the saddest of which here involves the impact of Lombard's untimely demise on the Hitchcocks), but the rest are basically retreads of the opinion (shared publicly by Hitch) that the flick is a minor curiosity. Disappointing that more scholarship wasn't expended on the film regardless of whether the assessment would echo mine. The film's original theatrical trailer rounds out the presentation.-Walter Chaw

In truth, watching any of Alfred Hitchcock's American films is like hearing the voice of your master. So it is even with 1941's Suspicion: probably the most compromised of Hitchcock's major pictures, it nevertheless sports a trio of sequences that rank among his best. An early flirtation between Cary Grant's layabout playboy Johnnie Aysgarth and Joan Fontaine's unlikely take on a dowdy spinster, for instance, looking for all the world like a rape and featuring a brilliant Lubitsch-esque purse play, is as dense a five minutes as whole pictures. (The second virtuoso sequence involves a staircase and a glass of milk lit from inside the liquid while the third is a fantasy that transforms laughter into the howls of a dying man.) So coy and hesitating that it's a lot like courting a eunuch, Suspicion is not easy to like, but it does offer a glimpse of what's possible within a studio system that won't allow one of its marquee players to play a villain. The picture gives lie to the idea that creative people suddenly lose their creativity when they move to Hollywood: it's still there, it just goes (in this case, deep) underground.

Hitchcock is in every frame of this film, literally--mailing a letter that was to have been the way that murderous Johnnie receives his post-film comeuppance--and thematically through his obsessions with eyeglasses as the source of knowledge and power, trains as the suggestion of sex and sophistication, perilous perches as the places where seismic changes occur, and morbid dinner conversations as subversions of the social strata. (Not to mention the sort of symbolic sexual acrobatics that compare vaginas to purses and sexual awakening to horses.) Early on, a photographer is thwarted, and Hitchcock spends a second showing the man's displeasure before introducing Fontaine's Lina rapturously astride a frothing steed and Johnnie avoiding the curious gaze of the gathered glitterati. Suspicion, starting at the races, establishes out of the gate that it's going to be about the misinterpretation of appearances: Johnnie is not actually a wallflower but rather the talk of the town (the cock of the walk, as it were), and by wedding the outwardly confident yet truthfully meek Lina, he has saved her from what her parents are sure will be a lifetime of loneliness. But did he do it with designs on her modest inheritance?

Such is the groundwork for Lina's titular suspicion of Johnnie's intentions. Perhaps he wants to kill her to pay off his debts and strike up a business with hale chum Beaky (Nigel Bruce), or perhaps he'd prefer to kill Beaky and feed his entrepreneurial bug himself. Hitchcock, throughout production, hoped that the higher-ups would allow him to film the intended ending of Johnnie polishing off poor Lina and then, unwittingly, mailing his own confession to Lina's mother--and that impression of bets hedged hamstrings the flow of the piece. (The conclusion, in particular, feels artificial and tacked-on, guilty of the sort of mawkish sentimentality that Hitchcock avoids when he's not using it like a satiric weapon.) Still, there's something about Grant's performance that carries the film; the whiff of anxiety and facile insincerity that fuels Grant's iconic turns in screwball comedies serves him well as the slightly askew Johnnie. He's charming, but hungry, too--though of course it's Fontaine who wins the Oscar for the film. That being said, it's the very fact that Grant is the glue that holds Suspicion together which relegates it to the second tier of Hitchcock films: without the ability to follow through with his vision of an ironic restoration--there's nothing shocking in a nice girl getting married to a nice boy, after all--the great tragedy of the film is Beaky's premature demise and a lot of loose Hitchcockian undercurrents desperately in need of a MacGuffin.

Suspicion comes to DVD from Warner in a crisp fullscreen b&w transfer that beautifully preserves Hitchcock and DP Harry Stradling's stark chiaroscuro images. There are the expected age-related artifacts now and again, but they're so infrequent and subtle that it's quibble to even make mention of them. (Ditto the occasional streaking and fluctuations in grain.) A Dolby 1.0 mono audio mix is similarly clear with good volume and dialogue distinguishable and distinct from Franz Waxman's unremarkable score. A new documentary by king of drab supplementary material Laurent Bouzereau, "Before the Fact: Suspicious Hitchcock" (22 mins.), collects the usual suspects (the always-delightful Pat Hitchcock O'Connell, the always-fallible author/historian Bill Krohn, the always-quick-to-Rich Little Peter Bogdanovich) as a series of talking-heads discussing Suspicion's inferior source material, the difficulties Hitchcock had with RKO, and the fact that though Fontaine won an Oscar for her work here--likely as consolation for her unawarded work in the astonishing Rebecca. A theatrical trailer rounds out this very fine disc for a picture whose legacy is one of missed opportunities, apocryphal stories, and the small-mindedness of the moneymen. Suspicion is timeless. And for all the wrong reasons.-Walter Chaw