RICH AND STRANGE (1932) B/W 91m dir: Alfred Hitchcock

w/Henry Kendall, Joan Barry, Betty Amann, Percy Marmont, Elsie Randolph

A strange, semi-humorous early Hitchcock where the title really tells it all. A discontented young couple suddenly come into a large sum of money and decide to take a trip around the world.

Be forewarned: the following contains information you may not want to know before viewing the film:

From The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock or The Plain Man's Hitchcock by Raymond Durgnat: "Rich and Strange was a throwback to Hitchcock's romantic period, and, apparently, a box office flop in its time. In retrospect, it appears as one of his most thoughtful films. It centers on a suburban couple (Harry Kendall, Joan Barry), who are calmly bored with their life's routine and with each other. They come into a small inheritance and go on a world cruise, to taste a little high life and adventure. She is courted by an English gentleman (Percy Marmont) whom she doesn't treat too kindly (the meanness of the 'innocent' towards the more worldly provides another variation on the waif-bitch heroine in The Pleasure Garden, and, perhaps, the stabbing of the seducer by the virgin in Blackmail). The too complacent husband has a romance with an exotic Princess (Betty Amann). But she's merely an adventuress exploiting the gullibility that goes with his vanity, and runs off with all his money. His wife, offended rather than hurt, is easily able to forgive him. They're shipwrecked, menaced by Chinese pirates, confronted by death, and, while confronting it, find something more than companionship: comradeship. They return at last to their familiar sitting-room in their cosy semi-detached. They settle in their armchairs by the open coal fire once more, and switch on the wireless. The gale warning reminds them of the shipwreck, and they briefly shiver reminiscently. But that's all. They have settled again into their cosy old rut, a little more disillusioned with each other, but just as bored, and certainly no wiser about life, love, death, existence. They've gone round the world in a grey flannel bathysphere.

"The same story, with the characters suffering from, rather than expecting nothing other than, this meaninglessness, would bring one right into the [director Michelangelo] Antonioni world: The Ship Wreck instead of Blow-Up. As was suggested in A Mirror for England, a book whose themes, this, for obvious reasons, intermittently approaches, English entertainment shows an early awareness of the absurd, and it isn't difficult to moralize over Rich and Strange (as, later, Vertigo, North by Northwest, etc.) in a Sartrian way. The couple are immured in the bad faith of 'invincible indifference', the iron curtain of complacency lifting in an extreme situation and dropping imperceptibly and hermetically once more. And each will die without having 'suspected what the other is'.

"One can imagine a film which saw such realities, without melodrama, in the exotic, or perhaps even without it; in which the world's cruelty found, as scapegoat, not a cat skinned and eaten by Chinese pirates, but something more diffuse and nearer home. Yet the comparison of contentment's grey blur and alternatives which, by implication, exist beneath as well as beyond, is effective, and the mean vanities of the denizens of semi-detachdom are only one-tenth of the iceberg. It's a thousand pities that the critical consensus fastened on a minor amusement like The Thirty-Nine Steps, rather than this, as their notion of a good Hitchcock movie."