Hitchcock Journal Entry #1: Easy Virtue

Hitchcock Journal Entry #1
“Easy Virtue” (1928)

Prelude: I'm taking a course on Hitchcock, and every Wednesday we have a screening of one of his films. Then we write our thoughts in a "journal," which we turn in the next day. These definitely won't be very well-written essays, but I thought that I'd share them anyway.

There are some minor spoilers, and a major one concerning "Psycho," below.

“Easy Virtue” (1928) is a very flawed, early Hitchcock film that encompasses a number of aspects that I have noticed in his later work. There is his brief, trademark cameo. There are a number of point-of-view, or subjective, shots, particularly in the memorable opening sequence, in which a bored magistrate needs to put on his monocle to clearly see his courtroom. Which leads me to the topic of Hitchcock's portrayal of authority figures. They scared Hitchcock, so he dealt with his fear by either ridiculing them – as seen in the grotesque close-up of the near-sighted magistrate – or by crafting incredibly terrifying figures, like the police officer in “Psycho.”

In this film, there is a suspicious, jealous mother figure who has an unusually large presence – she is much taller than our protagonist, Larita, and nearly as tall as her new husband; and she, through bullying and innumerable cold stares, manages to convince her son that Larita isn't the right woman for him. This very controlling maternal figure, who is very similar to Hitchcock's real-life wife, is a character that appears in “Notorious” and “Psycho.” (SPOILER: On a parenthetical note, I just realized that in “Psycho,” the mother turns out to be a skeleton, which is perhaps Hitchcock's grim outlook on what lies beneath this controlling figure – a rotten soul. But that's just my guess.)

Anyways, there are two other interesting aspect here that I also noticed in “Notorious.” One: Hitchcock's focus on important objects. In “Easy Virtue,” a champagne bottle is presented as evidence in the court, and then used to provide a smooth match cut to the scene of the crime. Larita's abusive husband is an alcoholic; so the bottle serves as both a narrative tool and a defining, harmful feature in Larita's life. Two: We see how Hitchcock tended to “torture” his women protagonists. According to Spotto, “the idea of rehearsing and transforming a woman so that she takes another social identity is central to the films of Alfred Hitchcock.” (283) In “Easy Virtue,” Larita tries to run away from her notorious past by marrying an unsuspecting young man – she tries to transform herself into a new individual. But ultimately, she can't escape from her past.

As for the the film itself, the overall quality leaves much to be desired. The acting can be terrible; it reaches surprising levels of unintentional hilarity during the sequence where the painter murders Larita's husband. The second half of the film is very dull. The dwindling love between Larita and her new husband feels undeveloped and predictable. Even though there are some interesting aspects at play here, and some similar techniques and themes that are better tackled in his later work, this is far from Hitchcock's best film.