La taverne de la Jamaïque

Some have ranked Jamaica Inn among the worst of Hitchcock's films, including Hitchcock himself, but I don't think it's that bad. The story is interesting, and I think Maureen O'Hara does a great job as the plucky protagonist, while Charles Laughton holds my attention whenever he's on the screen. I don't understand why this film is so disliked.

I was pleasantly surprised when I first saw Hitchcock's 'Jamaica Inn'. I had heard so many bad things about the movie and the fact that it seemed to have been made on the cheap and in a hurry so Hitch could do a runner to Hollywood. I really liked this movie - I thought the lovely Maureen O'Hara made a very spirited Mary Yellan and Leslie Banks was great as her hulking bully of an Uncle, Joss. While not as technically inventive as some of Hitchcock's other work before or since, I felt it was made with care and presented a realistic, gloomy atmosphere of doom with its endless night time scenes and constant soundtrack of howling winds and crashing waves.

And then I read the book...

Du Maurier's novel was so different as to bear no relation whatever to Hitchcock's film. The book was intense, gritty, dark and very moody. Mary Yellan was written almost as she is presented on screen with her sharp, Irish wits but Joss is a much more tortured, boorish animal than he is in the film. Also, the character played by Charles Laughton is absent in the book - or at least Laughton's incarnation is. The squire in the book is one of the good guys and features very little. The film of 'Jamaica Inn' may as well be called the Charles Laughton Show so as to give the actor every chance to overact.

See the film if you are a Hitchcock fan and enjoy it for what it is but if you've read and enjoyed the book, my advice would be to steer clear!

If it weren't for the cinematography we wouldn't recognize Hitchcock. He must have liked Daphne DuMaurier, using the Birds and Rebecca later. This is just a pretty confusing, pedestrian film, with some great actors. The story is, however, quite bland. It involves the arrival of a beautiful young woman at the evil Jamaica Inn. The inn is the hiding place for a band of pirates who lure ships unto the rocks, murder the crew, and pillage. The head of the organization is Charles Laughton at his pompous, Henry VIII best. He is in control of every scene, overacting and winking at the audience. The young woman is caught up in her trust for this man, and finds herself in his clutches by the end of the movie. The rest of the band, including Robert Newton (A-a-a-r) from Treasure Island are quite photogenic. It's an OK movie but just a little too much to swallow. I had always been curious with it and am investigating the Hitchcock films I had never seen.

While Hitchcock's adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's "Jamaica Inn" has some interesting features, overall it deserves its reputation as one of the great director's lesser efforts. While it has some good moments and a good performance by Maureen O'Hara, it is rather clunky and often implausible.

The story holds some possibilities. At the beginning, we find out that there is an old inn along the coast of Cornwall, which serves as the meeting place for a gang of criminals, who deliberately cause shipwrecks and then rob and kill the survivors. O'Hara is the niece of the innkeepers, who comes to stay with them and then gradually discovers the inn's sinister secrets. This gives rise to a melodramatic series of chases, escapes, and showdowns in the inn and along the nearby seacoast.

Unfortunately, the pacing is quite irregular and often too slow, and some of the more fast-paced scenes sometimes seem implausible. Just as one example, there are too many times when someone slips away solely because whoever is doing the chasing forgets to look in a rather obvious place. There are also not enough interesting characters. O'Hara is good, and Charles Laughton is entertaining as Sir Humphrey. But Laughton over-plays his role for all it is worth, and he swallows up most of the other characters. There are some pretty good actors in the rest of the cast, who just don't get very much to do.

There are still some interesting developments, and a couple of decent twists. Hitchcock fans will probably still want to see "Jamaica Inn" at least once. But it is hardly one of the director's better films, and not really good enough to be of more general interest.

(Spoilers possibly inherent)

I had no idea this film would prove such a curio and nigh-on almighty hoot to watch. I settled back on a familiar settee, late one night - after a meal at the finest Indian restaurant I know, Ocean Rd., South Shields, and after watching the heartening second "Office Christmas Special" - to play this film on DVD, a Christmas present from a good friend. Ironies are even in that; I bought him a DVD of the 1962 Robert Mulligan-directed "To Kill A Mockingbird": both that Harper Lee novel and Daphne Du Maurier's "Jamaica Inn" were texts we studied at school in our English lessons. They were by far the most enjoyable of the texts we studied in those five years - though I admit a partiality for "Cider With Rosie" and "Jane Eyre".

It was all for the better that I knew little of what this film was like; I knew only that it was directed by Mr Hitchcock, and differed quite a lot from the book. Oh, and how it does differ!

Quite frankly, Hitchcock's "Jamaica Inn" is a different thing altogether to that utterly splendid, barnstorming tale of smuggling. This misses the uncanny, eerie quality of Du Maurier's plotting and characterisation. Here, Joss Merlyn is only a slight reprobate; he is softened and thoroughly reduced in size and dimensions compared to Du Maurier's conception of him in her novel. There Joss was a towering, bullish, walking-talking threat of a man. Leslie Banks sadly fails to capture any of the preposterous, swaggering bravado of the Joss Merlyn forever etched into my mind.

That is really the biggest failing in writing, casting or such like. The more general approach too fails to ignite; the conceptualisation of a desolate Cornish coast is reasonable but unspectacular. there's never quite enough misty, frightening (or frightened) atmosphere; one does not get enough sense of things being at stake as they were in the novel: life and death, hell for leather. A further bone to pick is certainly the strangely wimpy portrayals of the crew of cutthroats and local degenerates; another failure of conception.

Maureen O'Hara... well, the damsel is feisty to an effective degree and acquits herself well, though is oddly over-mannered at times. It is an odd performance, that is half very effective, and half ineffectual. Now, Robert Newton; that wonderfully hammy actor of renown is excellent here as the dashing Jem Merlyn figure. He is one of the few performers to seem as if he is on anything like the same wavelength as Charles Laughton.

Charles Laughton? Well, he absolutely strides away with this film, and that is no understatement. This is so, to such an extent that his own vision overwhelms whatever there may have been of Hitchcock's, or indeed Du Maurier's. He plays Sir Humphrey Penhalligon - standing in effectively for the novel's eerie albino vicar, Francis Davey - a thoroughly sneaky, grandiose aristocrat, who is quite wonderfully playing the people of his county for outright fools. He doesn't so much as administer justice as pick and choose allies and inevitably seek to further his own ends. Sir Humphrey's condescending, subtle contempt for those around him sublimely passes the other characters by, while the audience is in on it. One feels entirely complicit in the seemingly jovial fellow's gleeful tricks and crimes; Laughton almost tangibly winks at the audience with his every sideways glance and jocund intonation. What Victorian Melodrama villainy is in the man here; implicitly sending up the limitations of all that is around him by claiming the centre of attention and having so much comedic fun from his privileged position. It completely unbalances any chance of us finding the wrecking *that* serious, as he is an obvious villain from the start, and unlike the otherworldly Francis Davey, Penhalligon is someone we can relate to. His intentions are selfish, but born of a paternalistic High Toryism; the character is manifestly a cultural and social elitist. He does not want to destroy the existing world, but to be happy in it. Only of course, his methods and complete disregard for others are 'not the way to go about it', tut-tut!

The ending simply lives up to what has become a Laughton picture; the narrative of the novel has been almost wholly jettisoned by this juncture, and our - or mine, anyway - interest in solely in hoping that the wicked Sir Humphrey will get away with his arrant, errant audacity. Suffice to say, Mary Yellan is not in our minds in the final frames, which are beautifully melodramatic and distinctly odd.

I can only conclude by saying just how much I enjoyed watching this film, late that night, recently... It was glorious fun, entirely due to the magnificent Charles Laughton. It is awful overall, if one is looking for a "Jamaica Inn" close to Du Maurier's great original; but one actor manages to steal the fairly creaky show and catapult it off onto a higher stage. Oh, there's no internal consistency here, but that's part of the delight! A part-marvellous fudge of a film; at least never dull, due to Laughton.