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Jamaica Inn (1939)

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19 out of 21 people found the following comment useful :-
For once Robert Newton as a HERO!, 29 August 2001
Author: countryway_48864 from United States

Most people tend to remember Robert Newton as Long John Silver, a role he perfected long after he gave up as an actor.

Jamaica Inn is an early film and here you see a fine looking Newton with the longest, darkest eyelashes I have ever seen on a man.

A side note: Not too long before Jamaica Inn was made, a scout for Sam Goldwyn spotted Newton in London and thought he would be perfect for the role of Heathcliff in the up-coming Wuthering Heights. Newton tested for the role and everyone but Goldwyn was thrilled. Goldwyn though Newton was "too ugly" to play Heathcliff, although everyone else thought he combined the emotional intensity and the black gypsy look that was perfect for that role. Eventually, Laurence Olivier was cast. He admitted that he always believed, his great friend, Newton would have been better, darker and more naturally dangerous as Heathcliff. I often wonder how Newton's career would have changed had he been given the role of Heathcliff.

Hitchcock takes advantage of the dual danger/kindness elements of Newton's personality to create a memorable hero. A young and lovely Maureen O'Hara is cast as the woman who comes to live with her Aunt after the death of her mother, only to discover she is in a den of cut-throats. She witnesses Newton being hung and just manages to save his life. Charles Laughton lends his special talent for seeming to one sort of person while actually being something quite different and Hitchcock rolls all these characters and a marvelous Leslie Banks, into a fine tumble of thievery and honor, love and loyalty, crime and punishment.

There are many of the familiar Hitchcock touches to move things along.

The climax is a bit over-the-top, but it affords Laughton a marvelous few moments.

Jamaica Inn has been re-made several times, but no one can replace Hitchcock, Newton, O'Hara and Banks.

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20 out of 23 people found the following comment useful :-
No Bad Clergymen in America, 9 January 2006

Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York

According to Maureen O'Hara's memoirs, Alfred Hitchcock never liked to do period costume pieces, he felt those were not suitable to his particular talents. But he did this one for Daphne Du Maurier because he wanted to film Du Maurier's Rebecca later on. Which as we all know Hitchcock did and was very successful.

There are elements of Jamaica Inn that certainly might have appealed to Hitchcock. Maureen O'Hara arrives at the Jamaica Inn on Great Britain's Cornwall coast to stay with her aunt. The Inn however is the headquarters for a gang that wrecks ships on the coast, kills everyone on board and steals the cargo. Leslie Banks is the head of the group there. We also have a Georgian dandy in the person of Charles Laughton who has a lascivious eye for Maureen O'Hara. He's not what he appears to be. The whole idea of this innocent among the cutthroats not knowing who to trust would definitely have appealed to Hitchcock.

The original novel had Laughton's character as a hypocritical parson, but for American distribution his character was changed to a local nobleman. The Hays office forbade a man of the cloth be shown in such a light.

Parson or nobleman unfortunately Hitchcock did not rein in Laughton. In this particular film, he's just too hammy. Then again he was the co-producer of this so no one was in a position to tell him anything.

O'Hara credits Laughton for launching her career. He brought her to America right after this and had RKO sign her to play Esmerelda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. A far better film than Jamaica Inn.

Robert Newton and Emlyn Williams have roles of substance here as well. Jamaica Inn might be worth a look.

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16 out of 18 people found the following comment useful :-
It May Not be Psycho, But ...., 15 January 2003

Author: richard-mason from Sydney, Australia

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

After years of hearing that this was one of, if not THE worst Hitchcock picture, finally seeing it was a pleasant surprise.

Sure, it's an unfamiliar genre for him (Under Capricorn would have to be the closest, and it really IS one of his worst), but it is a rollicking, exciting adventure romp, if you stop expecting it to be a Hitchcock masterpiece.

In the famous interview with Truffaut, Hitchcock dismisses the film very quickly, blaming its failure on Charles Laughton, who was co- producer and star, and brought in J B Priestley to build up his part. But it is SUCH an enjoyable performance --- over the top yes, this is Laughton we're talking about --but absolutely relishing his role as the hypocrotical magistrate who is secretly head of the smuggling gang. (Not really a SPOILER, it's revealed early in the picture .... too early for Hitchcock's liking.) And the delight he takes in tying up his female prisoner must surely be equally a reflection of Hitch's obsessions, as much as the character's.

Maureen O'Hara, making her debut, looks ravishing, but is far too healthy and robust and ACTIVE (and brunette) to be considered your typical Hitchcock heroine.

But you only have to watch the cutting in the opening scene of the first shipwreck to know that this is certainly the same man who gave us the shower scene in Psycho.

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13 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-
Rich cinematic flourishes and a realistic atmosphere on screen, 17 April 2006

Author: Jugu Abraham (jugu_abraham@yahoo.co.uk) from Trivandrum, Kerala, India

Even though it is one of the weakest works of Hitchcock, the film surprisingly provides rich cinematic flourishes. For a 1939 film, it captures on screen the atmosphere and dark mood of the novel quite vividly—the stormy scene, the cave, and the inn (with the name board flapping in the wind). It is another matter that the albino parson of the book is transformed into a squire (with an unbelievable eyebrow make-up) in the film who commands his steed to be brought inside his dining hall. Daphne du Maurier's novel was adapted for cinema by the trio of Sidney Gilliat, Joan Harrison and J.B. Priestley, and reportedly the author did not approve of the end-product.

As in many Hitchcock films there is a recurring reference to marriage. Here a good woman remains faithful to her boorish and cruel husband through thick and thin.

As in most Hitchcock films there is a lot of sexual innuendo without any sex on screen, especially when Pengallen (Charles Laughton) makes the young girl (Maureen O'Hara) his prisoner. (The only film where Hitchcock showed sex on screen was "Frenzy.") And as in many a Hitchcock film, a bad guy turns out to be a good guy. This is one of the rare films of Hitchcock where the director does not make a cameo appearance.

The best cinematic flourishes were—-the focus on the thin hands of the 17 year old who cannot be shackled by the soldiers as the handcuffs are too big, the opening "prayer" that serves as a grim introduction and finally the last scene of the film: Chadwick, the squire's butler, who thinks he can hear his dead master calling him for help in death.

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26 out of 39 people found the following comment useful :-
Not really "Jamaica Inn"... We're in The Charles Laughton Picture Show here!, 18 January 2004

Author: Tom May (joycean_chap@hotmail.com) from Sunderland, England

(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.

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13 out of 14 people found the following comment useful :-
Um... I disagree with most of the comments here..., 30 January 2005

Author: seanahalpin from Australia

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

My wife and I had not heard of Jamaica Inn at all prior to buying a DVD collection of Hitchcock's works. We decided to watch the film as the Jamaica Inn is near where my Cornish ancestors lived.

We actually found the film gripping. Yes, the acting is stagy at times, but we always enjoy the "old style" acting. Apart from the dodgy special effects, we found the film quite gripping. Others have said that the Squire was clearly the villain from the start. That is true. The tension comes from us being aware that this is so - and watching as the hero and heroine become ensnared by him. Similarly, the almost constant night time scenes and the howling gales are oppressive and eerie...

Critics may say that the film is not as good as Psycho or The Birds. However, this film was made 20 years prior to those films. I think that it was a good effort, considering that it was made on the eve of WWII.

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13 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :-
...OK until you read the book, 28 September 2004
Author: gnb from Berlin

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!

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5 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
A classic for Laughton fans, 24 May 2001
Author: Bruno Morphet (Bruno.Morphet@tequila-cape.co.za) from Cape Town, South Africa

While this picture is not one of Hitchcock's more memorable pieces, it is nevertheless well worth a look simply to view the acting genius of Charles Laughton. The man is larger than life as the revolting yet oddly fascinating Sir Humphrey and provides the audience with far more insight into the character than a lesser actor might have done. This is not simply a one-dimensional villain that we are so used to seeing in British movies of this period. In addition to a superb reading of the script, Laughton is clearly ad-libbing in various scenes, further breaking down hitherto scrupulously maintained boundaries between audience and actor. I urge anyone who is weary of today's usual line-up of blockbuster big names to observe a true master at work and wonder where it all went wrong!

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9 out of 14 people found the following comment useful :-
Classic Hitchcock, classic Maureen O'Hara, 24 June 1999
Author: Troy Whigham (troyair@aol.com) from Florida, USA

If ever there was a movie begging to be remade, this is it. Set on the rocky shore of the Cornwall coast of England (one of the more treacherous shorelines in the world)in the 1800's, this film tells the tale of deceit and treachery among thieves and noblemen.

A ship is spotted off the coast, making its way to England on a stormy night. A man covers the warning light on the bluffs (this was before the period of formal lighthouses and coast guards) and a band of men wait on the shore for the inevitable shipwreck. As the frigate grinds itself to death on the rocks, the men kill the unfortunate sailors and loot the cargo.

Maureen O'Hara plays a young woman who's parents have passed away and so she goes to live with her aunt and uncle at the Jamaica Inn, a small tavern on the storm-swept coast. The stagecoach refuses to stop at the inn, a foreboding of the danger that awaits there. Instead, O'Hara is deposited at the home of the local lord, played magnificently by Charles Laughton (did he ever play any other types of characters?). Struck by her beauty, he orders a servant to prepare a horse and take her to the inn. There, O'Hara mistakes the grungy man who answers the door to be a local scrub, when it is actually her uncle. Reunited with her aunt (a kindly woman bullied by a husband she loves), she goes upstairs to get settled into her new home.

In the rooms below, dirty men are drinking and singing loudly as the uncle joins them in the merriment. Seems that her uncle is the leader of this band of thieves, and that they have smelled a rat in their midst in the form of Robert Newton. They set about to hang him, but O'Hara hears the raucous men and spots the unfortunate Newton through a hole in the floor. As the men fit a rope over a beam and prepare to string Newton up, O'Hara cuts the rope. O'Hara then flees the room as the men charge up from below.

Joining up, Newton and O'Hara make their escape to the caves along the shoreline below the inn. Unfortunately, their small row boat is spotted by the thieves, who drop a dead body down a small hole onto the pair. Distracted, the row boat slips off the shore and floats away, leaving O'Hara and Newton stranded in the cave. As the pair's boat drifts off with the tide, the thieves ready a boat themselves. Slipping into the water, the pair hide behind a rock near the surfzone some distance from the cave as the thieves' boat passes by. They eventually make their way to shore, where O'Hara suggests they flee to the lord's home for assistance.

At the lord's house, O'Hara is led away to be given dry clothes. When she has gone, Newton reveals that he is actually a lawman, an officer in the Royal Navy, who has been dispatched to uncover the thieves and bring them to justice. He suspected that there was another man behind the capers, someone who was sending the thieves information about what ships to lure and at what time, but he hadn't learned who that was. The nobleman, played by Charles Laughton, offers to help, and they both grab their pistols and charge off to the Jamaica Inn to arrest O'Hara's aunt, uncle, and the theives for piracy. Hearing this, O'Hara flees the house to warn her aunt and uncle, so that they may escape the hangman's noose. Unbeknownst to Newton, the man who is giving the thieves the crucial shipping information is none other than Charles Laughton!

There you have the basic outline to the plot, as each character acts and reacts in a web of treachery and deceit, with O'Hara caught between the love for her aunt and her love for Newton. As with most Alfred Hitchcock films, the plot turns with each moment.

If I were a young filmmaker looking for a solid project, I'd re-make this film, casting Anthony Hopkins as the nobleman. I'm not sure who I would want to play Maureen O'Hara's character. O'Hara was a treasure who isn't easily matched, even in the 60 years since this film was originally released!

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4 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Not a real Hitchcock, more like a real Laughton, 22 August 2005

Author: max von meyerling from New York

JAMAICA INN is one of the Hitchcock films which might be said not to be a Hitchcock film. Its not that one or two 'Hitchcockian' elements are missing but almost all are missing. JAMAICA INN is adapted from a Daphne Du Maurier novel and was his last English film. Hitchcock's next film and his first American film would be REBECCA also from a Du Maurier novel. He would later go on to direct another film from a Du Maurier original, THE BIRDS, so there is no incompatibility there. The writers were the usual Hitchcock suspects from his English period. Frequent collaborator Sidney Gilliat and long serving Joan Harrison, later the producer of Hitch's TV show, as well as wife Alma Reville, were credited along with J.B. Priestly who gets an additional dialogue credit.

The villain of the piece, Charles Laughton, as the unlikely Sir Humphrey Pengallan, the local magistrate on the Cornish coast, is revealed almost immediately. The hero however is obscured for the first reel. The film is built around Laughton and he chews the scenery most wonderfully. It is essentially his picture, the producer, Erich Pommer, a German refugee and one of the founders of famous UFA studios, was Laughton's house producer. Priestly must have been brought in to goose up Laughton's dialogue. Another factor making this film sort of the anti-Hitchcock is the lack of humor whether provided by the situation or the mixing of classes. Laughton is funny, in a way, though he could have been funnier if he had gone completely over the top. As such there is a bit too much naturalism in Laughton's portrait of a Regency rake straight from the Hellfire Club, gone to seed and off his head with greed, rather like the last panel in a Hogarth series of etchings. While Hitchcock villains could be unspeakably cruel they always had a modicum of wit to go along with it.

Think of Otto Kruger in SABOTEUR and most especially James Mason in NORTH BY NORTHWEST issuing the foulest threats is the most cultured and dulcet tones. Laughton never gets this type of exchange going : (from NORTH BY NORTHWEST) Roger Thornhill: Apparently the only performance that will satisfy you is when I play dead. Phillip Vandamm: Your very next role, and you'll be quite convincing, I assure you.

For all his facial gymnastics Laughton is pretty straight forward a villain, with only his position to throw people off the scent, something else the real Hitchcock would have found very amusing.

Hitchcock even uses terrible screen clichés without even a special twist or variation on them. Usually Hitchcock will use the audiences expectations to his own advantage. There is the one where some one is about to mention the name of the murderer/villain-in-chief and just as they are about to speak the name a shot rings out and they fall over dead and mute forever. In this case it doesn't even make sense as everyone knows who the villain is but its used anyway because it is always used in this sort of picture. In Charlie Chan pictures it's usually preceded by Number one or number two son exclaiming "Look pop, the lights are flickering" and then blam! the stoolie doesn't get to spill the beans after all and we have another twenty minutes of film for sure. Its as if Hitchcock really just doesn't care.

There is one moment where the film is lifted into the territory rare and wild that bears the special attentions of Hitchcock. I'm sorry to say that it concerns bondage and sadism. The scene has Laughton first gaging Maureen O'Hara and then tying her hands behind her back. It is so effective not because of its graphic nature but because Laughton tells O'Hara what he is going to do before he does it. With the white silken gage pulled taught in her mouth he drapes a hood over her head so that she begins to look like the Virgin Mary bound and gaged. The photography is particularly Germanic here (Pommer and Hitchcock had made THE PLEASURE GARDEN, his first complete film, together in the silent days) and I was reminded not only of the Virgin, but as a Munch like Virgin with her face frozen in anxiety and also the Good Maria from Metropolis. It is a scene which pops out from the rest of the hectic goings on of the rest of the film.

Since its not very good Hitchcock it is rarely shown. Even in this sub genre it is outclassed by Fritz Lang's MOONFLEET or even De Mille's very silly REAP THE WILD WIND. JAMAICA INN was just, as John Ford used to put it, a job of work and Hitch was off to America. Seeing this film made me want to dig out one of my copies of Truffaut's extensive interview with Hitchcock to see what he had to say on the matter. He was usually brief when discussing terrible failures like JAMAICA INN. In sum, it is not a Hitchcock film but a Laughton one.

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