Jamaica Inn

Movie Review: Jamaica Inn

Year of Release: 1939
Country of Origin: UK
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, Leslie Banks

Plot outline: In Cornwall, around 1800, a young woman discovers that she's living near a gang of criminals who arrange shipwrecks for profit (IMDb).

An assortment of Hitchcock's greatest early movies are featured in a three-disc collection. Adapted from Daphne du Maurier's novel of the same name, Jamaica Inn was the first of three of du Maurier's works that Hitchcock adapted (the others were Rebecca and The Birds). Having set his own standards, Hitchcock must be judged by them; and, by them, this movie is merely journeyman melodrama, good enough of its kind, but almost entirely devoid of those felicitous turns of camera phrasing, the sudden gleams of wicked humor, the diabolically casual accumulation of suspense which characterize his best pictures. Without them, Hitchcock is still a good director, imaginative and cinema-wise, but with no more individuality than a dozen others in his field and subject, like them, to the risk of having a mere actor run away with the movie. That had never happened to Hitchcock before. His pictures always were his. Jamaica Inn will not be remembered as a Hitchcock picture, but as a Charles Laughton picture. It bears the Laughton stamp. Perhaps that is the root of the evil, if it is an evil. For Hitch never faced a player his size before. With two such stalwart individualists battling on a bare sound stage they might have come to a draw. Laughton sets the pace, slower than Hitch would have ordered it. Laughton is such a bulky man to get into motion. I had the impression, as the movie rolled on, of Hitch rushing the action to his doorstep and then having to wait three or four minutes for Laughton to answer the bell. Actually, the wait must have told more on Hitch than it did on me. There are other virtues: Maureen O'Hara, who is lovely, has played Mary Yellen well this side of ingenue hysteria, with charming naturalness and poise, with even a trace of self-control in her screams. Leslie Banks is capital as Joss Merlyn, the wrecker ringleader, with a fine crew of cutthroats around him - Emlyn Williams, Wylie Watson, Edwin Greenwood among them. Marie Ney as the girl's aunt, Robert Newton as the undercover man, George Curzon as one of Sir Humphrey's blanker friends are splendid in their degree. I enjoyed it all, Laughton most, but it doesn't seem like Hitchcock. (NYT)

My judgement: *** out of 4 stars