Stage Fight (1950) has a structural complexity, a narrative coherence, and a textual density that's missing from Hitchcock's 1930's films such as "Young and Innocent." In other words, it brings back in the 1950s the innovating aspects of Hitchcock's Hollywood aesthetic of the 1940s.
The acting fell a bit short, but as John Orr, the author of the article, says if one were to watch the film again for a second time, it appears that the plot and motive deepen. The stage becomes more clearly a metaphor for, "the drama of the film."
The film is about a man on the run for being accused of murder. He turns to his friend Eve for help. He informs her of the situation which is shown through a flashback of the murder which starts the film, but begins to take advantage of her assistance and innocence. The movie plays on the idea of recall and recollection, even furthermore the idea of a reliable and unbiased memory. While Hitchcock still has his familiar "sly and calculated" humorous antics in the works, he pushed his structural theme of lost identities in new and unexpected ways.
Now if one thinks about David Hume and the way he accounts reliable memory in "A Treatise of Human Nature," he puts it that the senses always depend on the force and vivacity of the evidence recalled and the mind applies its reasoning to them. Orr says "event-recall outweighs, therefore, the power of imagination or fancy, which invents things that did not happen at all."
Here, in Stage Fight with these ideas on the table, Hitchcock dissects the strangeness of the familiar, the evil within that we least suspect.
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Tyler - again, as with your last posts, I am not getting that much of you here. For your last posts, I advised, "Post about articles you have read _and_ connected with, as you are not telling me much so far - either about the work under consideration, or, as importantly, your thinking about the material you are reading."
Here in particular I am looking for your thinking about the material. This post here approaches a slippery summary of the article, but has no input from you. What are your thoughts on the article, on the discussion, on the application of Hume to Hitchcock, of the relationship of film to philosophy, anything? Would like to have heard more of you and form you here.
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