STAGE FRIGHT (1950) ** Alfred Hitchcock was well on the way to becoming Alfred Hitchcock, that's the story. The brief and subtly crazy random shots of exuberant eternal genius are there, but neither force nor magnitude. The plot twists a bit from time to time, but never with much confidence, even though he's assembled the elements to really put something together. His facial portraiture, however, is complete: the most definitive shot ever of Marlene Dietrich can be found in this film, well worth watching it for that alone. But that's far from the only one-the toadman in the bar, incredible...you could always tell what the actors were thinking once Hitchcock discovered his secret, even if they themselves had no idea. The film doesn't work all that well for me, in large part because of Jane Wyman. She wasn't a terrible actress, at all, but she didn't have an interesting enough face to linger on for an entire film, and she did not conduct that unique Hitchcock suspense well. In fact, no one does here, which makes you wonder if the problem wasn't more at the source than Jane. But it couldn't have been his fault, right, I mean, he was almost Hitchcock! Watch the stuff with Alastair Sim closely, it's all so fully realized and fully developed-so ulterior, so profound, so in transitive, so Hitchcock-that you have to wonder who was on the learning end.
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