This early talkie suffers from the fact Hitchcock was rather hemmed in by the John Galsworthy play it's adapted from. He wasn't allowed to influence the script it as much as he was later in his career, and so it's not quite as human as you'd expect. And of course some of the characters' attitudes (especially towards women) are very much of their time.
As a grim drama, it's not bad at all. It's a decent story with a good old-fashioned moral at the end of it. Edmund Gwenn is an actor I would loved to have seen on stage in his heyday, and his performance is excellent here - it's just a shame it's all-but-ruined by his horrendous Generic Middle Class Industrialist Regional Accent, which seems to be half Yorkshire and half Brummie.
There are a couple of interesting moments in terms of filmmaking - the hectic market scene; a cut from what we think is a view out of the window to a poster on a wall; and of course the rather daring (for the time) whip pans in the auction scene. Hitchcock also chooses to have several large chunks of dialogue delivered off screen, too, another in the long list of Voyeuristic Hitchcock Moments.
Verdict: If you're looking for classic Hitchcock, look elsewhere.
yetanotherfilmreviewblog.tumblr.com
As a grim drama, it's not bad at all. It's a decent story with a good old-fashioned moral at the end of it. Edmund Gwenn is an actor I would loved to have seen on stage in his heyday, and his performance is excellent here - it's just a shame it's all-but-ruined by his horrendous Generic Middle Class Industrialist Regional Accent, which seems to be half Yorkshire and half Brummie.
There are a couple of interesting moments in terms of filmmaking - the hectic market scene; a cut from what we think is a view out of the window to a poster on a wall; and of course the rather daring (for the time) whip pans in the auction scene. Hitchcock also chooses to have several large chunks of dialogue delivered off screen, too, another in the long list of Voyeuristic Hitchcock Moments.
Verdict: If you're looking for classic Hitchcock, look elsewhere.
yetanotherfilmreviewblog.tumblr.com