In an appearance on the French talk show Le Cercle de Minuit in the late '90s, Jean-Luc Godard lamented how rarely filmmakers performed simple exercises to practice their craft before embarking on more ambitious feature films the way athletes and musicians do. Keep this in mind when turning to the two short films, Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache, that Alfred Hitchcock directed for the British war office in 1944. In his 1962 interview with François Truffaut—only partially transcribed in the book-length publication—Hitchcock explained that he felt encouraged to produce the films as a way to serve his country. Though he had already portrayed the threat posed by the Nazis in films like The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Saboteur (1942), and Lifeboat (1944), here was an opportunity to directly contribute propaganda work. Both films were intended to be shown in Free France, since, he argued, “the French had been occupied and probably had not seen any new pro-French films since 1940.” In the end, neither film was given a release in his lifetime, nor was the film about the concentration camps supervised by him, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (1945/2014).
Yet Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache cannot be fully subsumed in the phenomenon of wartime patriotic pap. The British war office was likely correct in their estimation that the films offered little by way of propagandistic value. As two tales of the French Resistance—the former, a retelling of an escape from the occupied mainland; the latter, of the resistance in colonial Madagascar—neither of the main heroes are particularly inspiring, nor are the stories of considerable interest as thrillers. But taken together, the two are minor exercises with major implications for Hitchcock’s future work.
If Hitchcock’s greatest films tended to be drawn from rather forgettable novels, it’s because his films are less compelling for their stories than for his ability to innovate through their structures. Look closely and you’ll see that Bon Voyage already contains the idea for Vertigo (1958), repeating the same events twice in order to guide the protagonist toward the revelation that he’s been duped by a trick of mise-en-scène. Aventure Malgache contains elements of, among other things, To Catch a Thief (1955), with the same dramatic interplay of theater and reality. Taken together, these films have the beauty and roughness of sketches and drafts of ideas in the process of being worked out. For an artist of Hitchcock’s caliber, the value of such work should not be underestimated.
Bon Voyage + Aventure Malgache screen this afternoon, May 24, and on May 26, at The Paris on 35mm as part of the series “Hitch! The Original Cinema Influencer.”
