The late-night/early-morning spot for Cubs fans asks which Cub were you most thankful for this year.
Welcome back to BCB After Dark: the coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Please have a pre-holiday drink with us. There’s no cover charge. It’s warm inside and cold out there. We still have a few tables available. Bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Last night, I asked you if the Cubs should have matched or beaten the deal that left-hander Yusei Kikuchi got from the Angels, which was three years and $63 million. An overwhelming 81 percent of you said “no.”
Here’s the part where I talk about music and movies and we’re going to start our BCB Winter Hitchcock Classic tonight. So hopefully you don’t want to miss that. But if you do, you won’t hurt my feelings.
Here’s a little jazz to brighten up your holiday tomorrow. It’s “Giblet Gravy” by guitarist George Benson. It’s from 1968.
So tonight I’m starting the BCB Winter Hitchcock Classic. If you were around for our noir or Western classics the past two years, you know how it works. If you don’t, I’ll give you two movies to vote on and the winner advances in the tournament. NCAA basketball-style, until one is named the winner. You don’t have to have seen the movies to vote—I mean, how would I know if you had or not? But presumably it’s more fun if you have.
The bracket for the tournament is:
Today we’re starting with a matchup of the number-nine seed, Rebecca and the 24-seed, Foreign Correspondent. Both films were from 1940 and they were the first two films Hitchcock made in America. I didn’t plan for the two of them to match up like this, but it does work out nicely.
Rebecca (1940) Starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson.
The first thing we need to get out of the way about Rebecca (1940) is that it’s not an “Alfred Hitchcock” film. Oh, it’s a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and Hitchcock certainly put his personal stamp on the film here and there. But Hitchcock’s first American film can much more aptly be described as a David O. Selznick film. It shares a lot more DNA with Gone with the Wind than The Lady Vanishes.
Despite that, Rebecca is a very good film. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1941, the only Hitchcock-directed film to ever win the Academy’s top honor, although Hitchcock himself lost the Best Director award to John Ford and The Grapes of Wrath. It also justifiably earned Oscar nominations for Best Actress for a then-unknown Joan Fontaine and Best Supporting Actress for Judith Anderson. It’s gothic crime melodrama at its finest.
One thing that marks Rebecca as not being a “Hitchcock film” is its faithfulness to the Daphne du Maurier novel on which it is based. Hitchcock filmed three du Maurier works—The Birds and Jamaica Inn were also based on her writings—and Rebecca is the only one that actually follows the plot of its source material. Hitchcock tended to read a book once and get an idea from it. He would then throw the book out, never consult it again and tell his own story. But Selznick had paid as much for the rights to Rebecca that he had paid for Gone with the Wind and as he explained to Hitchcock, he was going to get his money’s worth. With one small alteration to the plot to get it past the censors at the Production Office, Hitchcock was ordered to stick to the plot of the book.
Another thing that marks Rebecca as not a “Hitchcock film” is that there is almost no humor in it. Hitchcock managed to sneak one small sight gag in the film, but that’s it.
Hitchcock had actually tried to buy the rights to Rebecca while he was still in the UK, but they were too expensive for his minor British budget. After the success of his UK films The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) in the US, Selznick convinced Hitchcock to come to Hollywood to direct a film about the sinking of the Titanic. By the time he got to the US in 1939, Selznick told him there was a change of plans and that he’d direct Rebecca instead of the Titanic film, which never got made.
Fontaine plays the unnamed heroine of the film, a woman who not only doesn’t have a name but doesn’t even have a past. All we know is that she’s a poor woman with no family who is traveling through Europe as a companion to a thoroughly repulsive older woman, Edythe Van Hopper (Florence Bates). While in Monte Carlo, they encounter the debonair and aristocratic widower, Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier). Maxim blows off Van Hopper—seeing her for the greasy social hanger-on that she is—but becomes infatuated with her young and innocent companion. While Van Hopper is laid up in bed with a bad cold, Maxim courts our narrator (who again, doesn’t have a name) and offers to marry her before Van Hopper can take her back to America.
Maxim takes the now second Mrs de Winter back to Manderley, his palatial estate in the English countryside. The second Mrs de Winter quickly feels inadequate to the task of being the mistress of a giant estate and feels very inferior to Rebecca, the first Mrs de Winter who died in a boating accident the year previous. She is constantly told of how smart and beautiful Rebecca was, especially by Mrs. Danvers (Anderson), the head housekeeper who was devoted to Rebecca. Mrs. Danvers hates our protagonist for taking Rebecca’s place. She recognizes the second Mrs de Winter’s insecurities and constantly preys on those feelings to drive her mad and to the brink of suicide. Maxim also has a temper and is much colder to his new wife in England than he was in France. But then the body of Rebecca is discovered and the truth about her comes out.
Fontaine turned 22 while filming Rebecca and she looks about 15. She’s far too pretty to play the supposedly-plain and simple protagonist, but they make her down and dress her simply. Her extreme youth also goes a long ways toward convincing the audience of her feelings of inadequacy towards Rebecca. She also turned in a great performance that fit in perfectly with what Hitchcock wanted out of his actors. Anderson is also perfectly diabolical as Mrs. Danvers. Olivier is Olivier, and he may have been a bit cold to the protagonist because he was upset that Fontaine got the part over his soon-to-be wife Vivien Leigh. Still, it could also have been a direct choice portray Maxim de Winter as a cold and distant man with only small touches of warmth.
In many ways, Maxim probably reads quite differently today than he probably read to 1940 audiences. Rather than seeing a dashing but emotionally-damaged aristocrat who found love with a plain commoner, modern audiences probably see Maxim as a domestic abuser who found a woman he could control and dominate in the second Mrs de Winter in a way he couldn’t with Rebecca. She’s such a blank slate that they don’t even bother to give her a name! That’s actually probably what du Maurier was going for in her original novel, but readers and audiences were probably too swept up in the rags-to-riches romance to notice that at the time.
Hitchcock’s influence on the film can mostly be seen in the way he shoots the film, with a lot of establishing high shots and the way he edited the film to heighten the suspense. Mrs. Danvers, for example, almost never walks on to the screen. The protagonist will simply turn her head and the next shot is of Judith Anderson just standing there as if she had just magically appeared to haunt her.
Hitchcock said that for his first American film, Rebecca was pretty British as it was set in England and the cast was entirely English. That’s not entirely true—Anderson was Australian and while Fontaine had British citizenship thanks to both of her parents being English, she had actually never lived in the UK, spending her entire childhood in either Japan or California.
Still, Hitchcock said Rebecca’s American character came out in the way that Selznick allowed Hitchcock to set Manderley as an isolated place out of time and space. He said that had he made the film in England, he would have been forced to place the film in a specific time and place and outline the characters roles in English society. Instead, Hitchcock felt that Rebecca was allowed to have a more universal quality under Selznick. Heck, we don’t even know if the second Mrs de Winter is English or American or where she’s from. Her accent says English, but her general unfamiliarity with the rules of English social class was common in stories about Americans in Europe at the time.
Rebecca is unlike any other film in Hitchcock’s collection of works, but it shows that when he was given a task to do by a producer, he was as skilled as any other director in the Hollywood studio system to get it done. Rebecca demonstrates that had Hitchcock wanted to, he could have succeeded with the prestige melodramas that would have earned him more acclaim than the suspense thrillers that he did do. Although Hollywood didn’t need another George Cukor. They did need an Alfred Hitchcock.
Here’s the trailer for Rebecca. Seriously, Joan Fontaine looks 15 next to Olivier.
Foreign Correspondent (1940). Starring Joel McCrea, Laraine Day and Herbert Marshall.
If Rebecca isn’t a real “Hitchcock film,” Alfred Hitchcock’s second American picture, Foreign Correspondent (1940), has everything that we expect out of a film by the master of suspense. There’s a story of a ordinary man getting caught up in an espionage plot. There’s a silly MacGuffin that the characters care intensely about but is, in actuality, meaningless. There’s a case of misdirection and body doubles. There are chases and other action sequences, including a thrilling plane crash on the water. There are also jokes. Foreign Correspondent really only suffers because Hitchcock made several better versions of the same movie later in his career. (North by Northwest immediately comes to mind.)
Joel McCrea stars as John Jones, a crime reporter for the New York Morning Globe. This is a stock character of movies of the time—the gritty, cynical city reporter who doesn’t follow the rules yet who is nonetheless terrific at his job. His editor decides to make him a foreign correspondent because he is unhappy with the pro forma reports he is getting out of Europe as war approaches. (Did I mention that it’s late-August, 1939?) His editor feels “John Jones” is a bad name for a foreign correspondent, so he gives him the pen name “Huntley Haverstock,” a name Jones hates but accepts because it comes with a big expense account. That’s one of the running jokes in the film.
Jones/Haverstock heads to London with instructions to interview a Dutch diplomat named “Van Meer,” (Albert Bassermann) who is involved with the Universal Peace Party, a group of pacifists who are trying to avoid World War II. He meets Van Meer in a taxi cab on the way to a UPP meeting where Van Meer is supposed to be the speaker. Upon arriving at the event, he becomes infatuated with Carol (Laraine Day) who won’t give him the time of day after Jones mocks the Peace Party.
For some reason, Van Meer doesn’t show up at the meeting. Instead, Carol speaks, as Jones discovers she’s a peace activist and the daughter of the head of the UPP, Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall).
Jones finds out that Van Meer is scheduled to speak at another UPP conference in the Netherlands, so he heads off to Amsterdam to meet him. On the continent, Van Meer doesn’t recognize the man he shared a cab with. He is then seemingly assassinated on the steps of outside the conference building. I say “seemingly” because when Jones chases the fleeing assassins, he discovers Van Meer very much alive in a windmill that is serving as a spy hideout. But when he brings the police, Van Meer and the spies are naturally all gone.
The rest of the film is Jones trying to prove that Van Meer is still alive and that Carol’s father is the head of a German spy ring. He’s also on the run from the German spies who are trying to kill him to keep their secret. Oh, and he and Carol fall in love, of course. There are lots of chases and, in a Hitchcock staple, a visit to a famous landmark. In this case, the landmark is Westminster Cathedral. Robert Benchley, who co-wrote the screenplay, appears as comic relief as a cynical but jovial fellow foreign correspondent. George Sanders, who was the lesser villain in Rebecca, comes back as the heroic ally Stephen ffolliott, and yes, that last name is spelled correctly and the films makes a point of the correct spelling with no capitalization. Again, one of those little aside jokes from Hitchcock.
There’s also a famous airplane crash on water scene that may not seem like a lot to us today, but was very, very difficult to shoot under the technology of the time.
So whereas Rebecca was a film out of time and place, Foreign Correspondent is definitely a comment on the recent outbreak of World War II and the foolishness of the “peace advocates” in the face of Nazi aggression. The film opened just as the Battle of Britain was underway, and Hitchcock replaced the original ending with Jones/Haverlock giving a radio report that was the fictional equivalent of Edward R. Murrow’s “This is London” reports that brought the war back home to American audiences.
Hitchcock was still under contract to David O. Selznick, but Selznick didn’t have anything for him to direct at the time so he lent him out to Walter Wagner Productions for Foreign Correspondent. Unfortunately, Selznick wouldn’t lend out Joan Fontaine, whom Hitchcock wanted to play Carol. Laraine Day isn’t terrible, but she certainly doesn’t do as good a job as Fontaine would have. Hitchcock wanted Gary Cooper to play the lead, but as he explained in Hitchcock/Truffaut, Foreign Correspondent was a “thriller” and under the conventions of the time, thrillers were “B-movies” and Cooper was an “A-list” star. Hitchcock said that Cooper came to him later and told him he should have taken the part. McCrea is good and he was a quality actor, but his vibe was completely different than Cooper. Hitchcock said that McCrea was good but “too easygoing” for a spy thriller like this. Modern audiences, however, that are used to action stars that combine the action with a wink and a smile are not likely to find McCrea lacking. Still, it would have been a different picture with Gary Cooper in the lead.
Once again, Hitchcock makes an “American” movie where most of the action takes place in his more familiar Europe. That would change shortly.
Foreign Correspondent was also nominated for Best Picture in 1941, losing out to Rebecca. It also got nominations for Screenplay, Cinematography and Best Supporting Actor for Albert Bassermann. I really don’t get that last one. Bassermann really didn’t speak English and had to learn all of his lines phonetically. I guess they were rewarding him for trying. Probably also for fleeing Germany in 1933 rather than work for Hitler.
Foreign Correspondent is a good, solid thriller about an ordinary man who gets caught up in an elaborate plot that he doesn’t really understand. If that sounds familiar, it’s only because Hitchcock would do it many more times more successfully. But it was Hitchcocks’ first American “Hitchcock film,” if you understand what I mean.
Here’s the trailer for Foreign Correspondent. A bit of the famous plane crash scene is included.
Now it’s time to vote:
Foreign Correspondent can be screened on Max and Criterion, or free on Tubi with ads. Rebecca isn’t on any streaming service, but there are several copies on YouTube and the one I watched was of very good quality for YouTube.
Because of the holiday and because I don’t know how many of you will read this tonight, I’m going to give you until Tuesday to vote. But we’ll start with Lifeboat (1944) and To Catch a Thief (1955) next week.
Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.
Since it’s Thanksgiving, I thought it would be time for us to count our blessings as Cubs fans. Yes, I know I’d get more engagement if I went on an angry rant about everything that’s wrong with the Cubs, but I’d also raise my blood pressure and take another year off my life.
So tell us which 2024 Cubs player are you the most thankful for? It can be for any reason. What they did this year. Their entire career. Because they tossed you a ball in the stands or stood for a selfie. Because of their charity work.
Because this is about 2024, you can vote for Kyle Hendricks if you want. Maybe you weren’t thankful for his results, but you were thankful that he went out on a high note. Or thankful for all the memories that he brought to mind when he pitched.
Obviously I can’t list every player in the poll, so if I missed yours, just vote “other” and tell us in the comments.
Thank you for stopping by this evening. Have a great holiday. Don’t eat too much. Oh heck, eat too much if you want. Get home safely. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again for more BCB After Dark.