The Thrilling Forties: My Favourite Vintage Hollywood Thrillers

This was not originally written for this blog but I’m posting it here too. It’s a bit long, but it’s about three films so think of it as being three posts in one.

I love old movies. I love the glitziness of it all, the way they walked and talked back then. I love how the men looked dapper and the women looked glamorous. I love their voices, the way all those women had the most marvellous drawls, often all steely and sarcastic but with a little giggle or lilt to them that softened the effect. The special effects were simpler, but often just as effective (sometimes, sometimes they were very definitely not as effective). The movies that people still watch after all this time are the ones worth writing about. So, today I’m going to write about my favourite thrillers from the 40s.

#3 Rebecca

I read the book Rebecca long before I saw the film and (surprise!), for once the film was better than the book! I know, that’s mad but it’s true. Joan Fontaine is so adorable, she adds so much humanity to a character who was just annoyingly pathetic in the book. Laurence Olivier was, obviously, excellent, but again his portrayal creates some sympathy for Maxim. The two characters meet and marry in Monte Carlo, he’s a wealthy but emotionally distant widower charmed by Fontaine’s unnamed ingénue. When they return to Manderley, Maxim’s home, the girl discovers that memories of his late wife Rebecca are in every room and in every conversation, disrupting their marriage.

Ah, young love.

Whilst Rebecca is not a literal ghost who appears on-screen, glowing ominously and wearing a white sheet, she haunts the marriage. Fontaine’s character is completely out of her depth, young, innocent, unsure of how to act in such overtly upper class circles and too weak to assert herself, especially when her own husband starts to turn on her. The ominous Mrs Danvers, the servant who adored Rebecca, lurks, plotting, around the old mansion. She can barely face her new sister-in-law with composure, let alone the haunting presence of her husband’s old wife and the vicious poison of Rebecca’s beloved maid.

The ominous atmosphere is overpowering. When Mrs Danvers appears to hypnotise Fontaine’s protagonist almost into suicide and when Rebecca’s initials crop up all over the house I feel shivers down my spine. Look at that face below, Mrs Danvers means murder. This is a realistic ghost story, where the bogeyman is a fake projected by our own fear, and the true threat to our peace of mind lies in what we don’t know about the living, not the dead.

Mrs Danvers smelling hair. Yea, that’s definitely creepy.

I think most of the fear in the movie comes from Fontaine’s jittery nerves. Her vulnerability makes the viewer afraid, not just of what’s happening but also afraid of what will happen to her. She’s barely more than a teenager and a shy, rather helpless young woman who provokes affection in us and the desire to protect her. Olivier didn’t like her and didn’t want her for the role, which upset her. Hitchcock capitalised on this, telling her that everyone on the set hated her, thus exacerbating her nervy performance. So, yet another example of Hitchock being utterly awful to the actresses he directed. Not a nice man really. Still, it did work I guess. Her highly strung character really brings out the creep factor for me in Rebecca.

#2 Rope

Yet another Hitchcock (let’s be honest, who wasn’t expecting Hitchcock to dominate a list of thrillers?) Rope is another study in stretched nerves. Shot as if we were watching a play, the long takes (ten in total), the sense that we are watching a story play out in real time, the battle of wits between the murderers and their teacher, the claustrophobia of a movie filmed almost entirely in two rooms and the slow inexorable rise in tension makes Rope genuinely exhausting to watch.

It’s a bit like ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, we see a murder committed by two young men Brandon and Phillip, probably lovers, who then hide the body in a book chest and invite his family, friends and fiancée over for dinner. They unwittingly dine over their beloved David’s body whilst the two men congratulate themselves for being smarter, more sophisticated and better than other people. Brandon is arrogant, eloquent and smarmy, whereas Phillip’s agitation threatens to expose them both to their guests, including their suspicious old teacher Rupert Cadell (James Stewart).

They look so disappointed with poor Phillip. All his did was murder an old friend.

The most nail-bitingly, heart-stoppingly tense scene is after dinner when the housekeeper starts clearing the chest with David’s body in, removing the tablecloth and candlesticks, preparing the open the chest. A conversation is taking place between the actors off-screen. The camera is focused, as if, like us, engrossed, on the chest and Mrs Wilson as she removes dining paraphernalia. I know there’s a conversation going on about where David could be but I barely pay it any attention. I become transfixed with terror or excitement, I can’t tell which, that David’s body will be revealed. More and more is stripped of the chest and just as Mrs Wilson and Rupert Cadell prepare to open it and expose the horror within Brandon cuts smoothly across the room, dismissing her for the evening. We sit back, deflated and possibly relieved at the drop in tension.

Honestly, in the context of the rest of the movie this scene is really tense. Here it just looks like an old lady tidying up. Which I guess it is.

Rope is about power. Phillip and Brandon kill because they can and they enjoy it, believing that they deserve that power. Throughout the dinner party they verbally joust with their friends, enjoying the discussions of where on earth David could possibly be and the double meanings to their responses, but distracting their guests every time someone comes too close to asking the wrong questions. When their old teacher, played by Stewart, enters the film there is a power shift, as he quietly exercises his own authority as an old teacher, and an older, wiser and cannier man. It’s completely hypnotic stuff, so much so that I wasn’t hoping for Brandon and Phillip to be caught so much as for someone to win the battle of wits.

#1 The Third Man

The Third Man sneaks into the number one spot for 40s thrillers for me. The Third Man is not as scary as the other two films, but it’s just as absorbing. Plus, there’s the famous cuckoo clock speech, given by Orson Welles. This was the first film I ever saw Orson Welles in and, as you probably all know, he completely steals the entire film. Rumours have abounded that Welles wrote his own script for his role as Harry Lime. They’re untrue rumours but it’s understandable why people would think so, given Welles’s effortless, compelling delivery of his lines.

It’s so beautifully shot too

Joseph Cotton plays Holly Martin, a man who travels to Vienna to see his old friend Harry Lime. Upon arrival he learns that Harry tragically died and was buried only that day. However, the more he learns about Harry’s accident, the shadier everything seems, especially the disappearance of a ‘third man’ who possibly murdered Harry. Together with Harry’s girlfriend, played by Alida Valli, Holly decides to investigate.

And the last scene. Oh, the last scene. It breaks your heart. The cheery zither squeaks as the last good thing Holly hoped to have in life vanishes. That zither music seemed initially so out of place in such a dark film, but by the end the choice seemed much more appropriate. Like so much else in The Third Man, the music is unique, it’s a bit jarring but you get used to it.

It’s amazing how something so simple can break your heart

The most important element of the Third Man, and the two other films, is the absence in the film, an absence that is always present, if that makes sense. The missing third man, David, Rebecca, these absent people obsess our protagonists, and us, dominate the film and control people purely through their non-presence. They are horrible (a murder victim, a vengeful ghost, a murderer), mysterious gaps in the narrative. Rebecca is never shown, even during a lengthy monologue by Olivier that could very easily have been shown in flashback, and the horror is conveyed almost entirely by Olivier’s staring eyes and harsh voice. The eyes of the audience and the camera follow the chest in Rope, especially during the long scene with Mrs Wilson in which none of the speaking characters are on screen. The third man emerges from the shadow of a doorway, briefly illuminated by a window light before vanishing into darkness, ghostlike. His arrival on screen raises many more questions and exposes gaps in the narrative.

Welles went missing when they were supposed to be filming this scene so this might just be some other guy stuffed to make him look fat. Oh the trials of working with capricious actors.

The limited special effects of the time may explain why filmmakers chose to have implied horror in their movies rather than expose their creations to ridicule for unconvincing gore. Here, however, filmmakers consciously decided that mystery and vanished persons were going to be the focal point of a movie. I suppose it’s so effective because we can project our own fears and fascinations on these spaces, the imagination is often capable of conjuring up far scarier creations than most horror movies, and when having places or ideas described to us we create visions far more brilliant with just a few words than from exhaustive detail. When we finally see the monster in a horror film we’re never as scared as when a character was just about to discover them.

These gaps we watch in these three films are what, I think, make them so memorable. So these three films, Rebecca, Rope and The Third Man use our imaginations to create tension and drama. That’s why I love them so much. That’s why so many people have loved these films over the years. I’m not saying these are the best thrillers, everyone’s taste is different, but these old films chill me, thrill me and move me, they’re not just good thrillers, they’re good films.