alr

The Secret Agent

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Rich and Strange

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Screening on Film
  • The Secret Agent

    Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
    With Madeleine Carroll, John Gielgud, Peter Lorre.
    UK, 1936, 35mm, black & white, 83 min.

Musing over the disappointing box office of Secret Agent, a film he otherwise liked, Hitchcock told Truffaut,“There was too much irony, too many twists of fate.” Those same qualities make it one of the most enduringly complex features of his Gaumont-British years, a film that Raymond Durgnant saw as anticipating the “eerie and unwelcome alloy of freedom and guilt” found in the auteur’s best films. Based on Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden stories, the film serves as a veritable compendium of Hitchcockian motifs: from a fake funeral to a falsified marriage, a spy ring operating out of a chocolate factory to a murder observed through a telescope, a seemingly telepathic dog to an expired organist. Two English agents played by John Gielgud and a curly-haired Peter Lorre track their target by a telltale missing button, but in this case the irresistible Hitchcockian premise proves gravely misleading. Madeleine Carroll is the phony wife whose eagerness to play detective curdles just as quickly as the plot’s farcical tone.

  • Rich and Strange

    Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
    With Henry Kendall, Joan Barry, Percy Marmont.
    UK, 1931, 35mm, black & white, 83 min.

Fed up with the evening commute and steak-and-kidney pie, Henry Kendall complains to his wife that he wants more from life. Rich and Strange may be relatively free of conventional suspense, but Hitchcock gives the characters plenty of reason to watch what they wish for: an exotic cruise instigates a prolonged crisis of faith. Initially a box office disappointment, the film’s steely-eyed study of a relationship under pressure now seems to directly anticipate later triumphs like The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and Marnie. Hitchcock deftly interweaves his protagonists’ blinkered emotions and cultural values in crafting the cautionary tale about the moral danger of pursuing life in fantasy—a peculiar message to find delivered in a film entertainment, to be sure, but one close to the heart of Hitchcock’s knotted art.

Part of film series

Read more

The Complete Alfred Hitchcock

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Psychedelic Cinema

Read more

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

Read more
sepia photo of Artie Freedman in silhouette with a video camera at show

Boston Punk Rewound / Unbound. The Arthur Freedman Collection

Read more

The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957 – 1988

Read more

From the Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection

Read more
a mausoleum that looks like a miniature Spanish cathedral, next to a variety of others, against an evening sky

The Night Watchman by Natalia Almada

Read more
a double-exposed image that includes a 16th century Russian man being fed grapes by another amid decadent decor

Wings of a Serf

Read more
a close-up of a Bissau-Guinean woman wearing a scarf on her head and looking directly at the camera with a slight smile

Le Dépays + Sans soleil

Read more
Peter Sellers wearing a large hat with "ME" embroidered on it, and gripping a Pilgrim-like collar

Carol for Another Christmas