if you don’t like Marnie (the film), you don’t really like Hitchcock; and if you don’t love Marnie (the woman), you don’t really love cinema Robin Wood
These pictures are from the opening sequence of Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964). Actually, I’ve put them in a slightly different order. In the film, we’re on the railway platform and following the girl! Just when when we catch her up, she slips away; and there’s a shout of Robbed! It turns out that the girl is not what she seems.
The film is generally recognised as Hitchcock’s last masterpiece. Marnie is a romantic melodrama (that fits into the Hollywood genre of Douglas Sirk etc) that investigates the emotional power of images. It’s like a continuation of Vertigo or The Birds…But the film is also made in an expressionist style that draws attention to the emotional power of its images. In the course of the story, nearly all those images are revealed to have been illusions.
As usual, the film involves identity issues and the havoc these play in relations between people. Basically, the film is an extended psychoanalytical investigation into the cause and effect of Marnie’s behaviour. She’s certainly got a full deck of complexes…relating to money and men.
My own feeling is that, you should never look in a lady’s handbag…
There a number of excellent blogs about Hitchcock, cinema and psychoanalysis…
These pictures of the railway, across the American mid-west, are by the photographer Dorothea Lange. The pictures were part of a project to document the real-life conditions of the American poor during the great depression of the 1930s.
Photography has been used by social reformers as a way of confronting critics with the reality of the situation on-the-ground. There’s a kind or irrefutable quality of photographic evidence that makes it very useful for these kinds of struggle.
The terrible economic conditions that followed the Wall Street Crash (1927) were exacerbated by a series of political choices and natural disasters. The great drought of the 1930s created a dust bowl that destroyed the viability of many small-holdings. The result was a human exodus towards the west.
For many people, the railway was the only option. If the cost of a ticket was too great; people simply jumped on a freight train.
The HoBo is the migratory worker associated with this peripatetic search for work. The figure of the HoBo is distinguished from that of the tramp or bum in American popular culture by the desire to work and the willingness to up-sticks and move towards employment.
The mobility of labour is a key characteristic of the American economy.
The train was the flagship modernisation project of British Rail at the end of the 1960s. The Intercity 125 replaced the messy old combo of engines and different carriages with a rake of unified rolling stock and with a power unit at each end.
The Intercity 125 was designed by Kenneth Grange. The speeds made possible by the new train transformed the shape of Britain.
Early in the film, Peter Parker, the chairman of BR, makes the point that the railways take a long view. That’s certainly the case with the 125. Many are still in service and some are expected to keep going until 2035!
ITV’s new crime thriler, The Bletchley Circle, ticks all the boxes for me…
You can watch it, here
http://www.itv.com/itvplayer/video/?Filter=324058
The story is set just after WW2 and against a backdrop of general austerity – it shares the visual style, colour palette, and fashion-sense of Foyle’s War. Tweedy coats, cardigans, wild-garden bombsites and railway trains are right-up-my-street.
The main, female, protagonists of the story were previously colleagues in the secret stuff at Bletchley Park during WW2. They use their data processing skills, pattern recognition and super-memory to solve a series of murders in the London suburbs.
One of the best things about the story is that it refutes the idea of random. The killings seem to have no rhyme or reason – in terms of location and victim – except that the girls are all sexually assaulted, after they have been murdered!
It’s really important to refute the idea of random in life. It’s especially important if you are involved in solving crime or preventing violence. Very little is random – the modern usage of the word is just a lazy way of saying that we haven’t thought about it and worked out the connections. In fact, it’s an admission of ignorance.
Bletchley Park was the code-breaking centre of the British war effort. Nowadays, it is famous as the location where Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers built the first electronic problem-solving machines. Google are supporting Bletchley as the birthplace of modern computing! Incidentally, it’s well worth a visit.
Of course, the women aren’t taken seriously – it’s not their place – and they aren’t allowed to mention how amazingly intelligent they are to their male partners and bosses (official secrets). There’s a consistent theme of condescending patronisation towards the women throughout.
There’s a clear sense of social tension as the women of WW2 reposition themselves for ordinary life, its frustrations and numbing routines. To be fair, this is evident for the male characters too. But the women are especially frustrated by the limitations of their various roles as wives, mothers and home-makers.
A few people have suggested that this problem is at the heart of the drama. I’m sure that’s right. The difficulty is dramatising this problem of post-war frustration within the limits of prime-time TV genres. I thought the murder mystery genre worked pretty well.
In fact, it’s difficult to think of another genre that would have worked so well. The whole point is that the historical context was all about women being forced back into the home and their traditional roles. The world of work was much more limited, for everyone, back then and the idea of these women setting up some kind of commercial enterprise wouldn’t have worked in relation to their home lives and partners.
Even the off-piste sleuthing in the film is problematic enough in relation to the Police and to the men at home.
The women work independently and on the edges of the usual police procedural. That’s OK, we’re familiar with the form from Agatha Christie, where Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple do the same; and from Conan Doyle, where Sherlock Holmes lends a hand to the police.
The amateur sleuth, private investigator and retired police officer are staples of the crime mystery genre. There’s a perception that the police are institutionally corrupted by the political interference of city hall etc, and that’s without all the usual “bent copper” malarky.
The women quickly find that the connecting thread which provides the pattern, that will reveal the killer, is the railway timetable. Specifically, the slow-train out of St Pancras!
The film didn’t really go into detail about how they managed this. There just seemed to be a lot of brain power and tea. Nevertheless, the connections between railways, train timetables, murder and code-breaking was just too good to be true. In the film, the connection was made evident as they traced the line of the railway with a borrowed red lipstick.
In case you think all this is a bit far-fetched, you should remember that murder and the railway have been connected from the beginning. In London and as recently as the 1980s, the North London line provided a backdrop to the vile attacks of John Duffy and David Mulcahy.
One of the sub-plots here is the danger that accrues to women being out-and-about on their own. The railway carriage was, from the first, understood as a place were men and women could meet and talk beyond the usual controlling mechanism of society. This made travelling exciting; and potentially dangerous.
Of course, the mere suggestion of danger has usually been a simple ruse to keep people at home. A modern re-iteration of “here be dragons.” The reality is that the most horrible things often happen at home. my advice is to get out more; but to keep your wits about you.
You can read my previous posts, if you’re interested, about the connections between railways, murder, timetables and so on. Just scroll down the blog.
We watched the first episode of BBC TV bench-mark autumn drama yesterday evening. It’s a dramatisation, by Tom Stoppard, of Ford Maddox Ford’s four-volume set, Parade’s End. It’s got an all-star cast and everyone has those distinctive bee-sting lips. No expense has been spared.
The story covers the same sort of territory as ITVs Downton, but in a more complex, intelligent and adult way – they get out of the house more. There’s the backdrop of WW1, the politics of female emancipation and all the upheaval that follows. It’s clear, from the first, that the class distinctions of Edwardian society are so rigid as to be stuck…from then on, things will have to change!
Maddox Ford was a member of the literary avant-garde and a fully paid-up member of late 19C London bohemia. You can find out about the films and about Maddox Ford on-line.
The books provide an early example of stream of consciousness writing and belong firmly in the modernist camp. Quite a lot of the story is set on Romney Marsh and surrounds in Kent and East Sussex. Later, we’ll get to the western front.
It’s always exciting to recognise local places…in fact, Maddox Ford lived locally to us and was friends with HG Wells, Joseph Conrad and Henry James etc. He probably knew Paul Nash, the artist, who lived down the road. The books, in their contemporary and paperback form, have covers with reproductions of Nash’s famous WW1 paintings on them.
The history of London’s bohemian elite during the 19C is linked to the development of new houses and new ways of living – Holland Park, Chelsea, Bedford Park and Hamstead have all had their moment. East Kent was colonised by the the actress Ellen Terry and her entourage. They chose this part of the world because it was within easy reach of London by train.
I noticed that, this morning, the Daily Mail had made a bit of a song-and-dance about how the BBC film began with two sexually explicit scenes in the first six minutes (who’s watching the clock?) In fact, these were important scenes that established the emotional instability of the female lead. This instability expressed itself in a variety of ways, including through her blatant promiscuity.
I was interested that, for the purposes of the film, the major protagonists first meet in a railway carriage. The smouldering potential of their encounter is set up with a number of shots of the train – including steam and pumping engine!
Just like in La Bete Humaine. Similarly, it’s understood that things that begin in this way will always end in tears.
The film also used a broken mirror in a number of shots. This produced a very effective fragmentation of image and reflection. This conjured up all sorts of connections to cubism, movement and dynamism. Like the hall of mirrors scene at the end of Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, this kind of visual dislocation is a sure sign of trouble ahead!
It was rather encouraging, nevertheless, to see my various posts about the psychoanalytical interpretation of railways made explicit in images of Parade’s End.
The first is that the BBCTV Christmas drama will be a re-make of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. I’ve already posted about the original film and about the potential of trains in relation to thrillers in literature and cinema. So, it will be interesting to see how they do it…
It’s about time I had a different Christmas railway film to The Railway Children!
Virgin have lost the franchise for the west-coast mainline to Glasgow…it looks like First Group are overpaying…. it will all end in tears.
Virgin deserve credit for introducing tilting trains to Britain.
This is a post about murder and trains. It’s also a post about Hitchcock, and the design of railway carriages.
Strangers on a Train is a Patricia Highsmith literary thriller that Alfred Hitchcock turned into a film in 1951. The story is about two strangers who meet on a train. A plan is hatched whereby they will each commit a murder on behalf of the other. The fact that they have met, arbitrarily, on the train will cover their tracks and allow them to pull off the perfect crime!
Needless to say, things don’t pan out quite a tidily as planned…
It’s intriguing that writers and film makers have so often chosen the train as a crime scene. In some ways, this just reflects reality. The first railway murder was recorded in 1864 when Franz Muller murdered Thomas Briggs. A train driver spotted the body by the side of the tracks.
The case was notorious as it reflected a wide-spread anxiety about the risks of travelling on trains. The development of the railway allowed people, more or less for the first time, to travel about in large numbers. This mobility began to unpick the social segregations afforded by wealth, class and taste. For the first time, it was possible for the magistrate to sit next to the murder and be none the wiser.
The design of the first railway carriages exacerbated these anxieties. The early carriages were designed as slam-door compartments with no through-corridor. This meant that passengers could be stuck with each other for long periods of time. Also, there was no way that other passengers or the guards would be any the wiser…
It was obviously an improvement for passengers to sit in open cars saloon style cars. Nowadays, passengers sit in an arrangement of seats like that found on an plane and watched over by train managers and CCTV.
My favourite type of railway carriage is the corridor-express type. This is a lovely combination of compartments with six or eight seats, depending on class of ticket, and with sliding doors. The compartments mean that passengers can sit in comfort, facing each other and in relative privacy; whilst the corridor means that they can explore the train! Perfect.
Of course feelings of anxiety are always associated with adventure, excitement and pleasure (Freud). In these circumstances, it’s hard to get people to stay at home. Luckily, bad things don’t happen very often. Indeed, bad things mostly happen at home. My advice is to get out more.
All these themes combine, with the obvious adventure of travel, to distinguish the train as a perfect setting for romance, intrigue and murder.
Nowadays, the railway murder even provides the basis for re-enactment games on heritage steam trains.
It was made to give to workers at the London and North Eastern Railway. The LNER was one of the “Big Four” regional companies created in 1923. The railway was famous for running the east-coast mainline, “Flying Scotsman” and “Night Scotsman” sleeper service to Edinburgh out of King’s Cross.
The badge is numbered on the reverse, 98827. Presumably, there’s a list somewhere that would tell us who this particular badge was awarded to.
The beginning of the Olympics has reminded me about the difference between training and practice. The development of athletes depends on a structured timetable of activities and preparation. Practice is just something you do to maintain a standard; not to improve.
The schedule and timings are obviously redolent of train timetables…
The Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway is a light railway that runs between Hythe and Dungeness in Kent. It was built in the 1920s. Karen found this charming book of photographs of the railway. It probably dates, by the look of the children, from the mid 1950s.
The railway has an eventful history and played an important role during WW2: moving men and materials about and providing a first line of defence against potential invaders.
If you ever take the train from Hythe down to Dungeness, you should watch out for strange looking concrete structures. These are the sound-mirrors designed to detect the sound of potential enemies across the water. In the end, this kind of early-warning systems were superseded by electronic RaDaR systems. The structures were allowed to disintegrate until quite recently. Now they have been restored and are pleasingly mysterious and surrealistic.
