As Hitchcock admits to interviewer Francois Truffaut, “I did one thing in that picture that I never should have done; I put in a flashback that was a lie” (p. 189). If he did err, it was to assume that his 1950 audience could accept the conditional tense in a film, without an alert. Apparently they couldn’t. Reviewers claimed Hitchcock had duped them.
In fact, that very extension of cinematic narrative provides the heart of the film’s exploration of the seamless interweaving of theatre and real life. That is, we constantly shift between modes of being and modes of performing, in our daily lives. This film’s brilliance lies in how a simple whodunit so richly explores that theme.
Indeed the life-theatre confusion provides the narrative frame. The film opens on a theatre’s “Safety Curtain.” But when it rises it reveals not a theatre stage but a bustling London street scene. That’s a fluid movement between theatre, film and the “real” life that all art pretends to portray. That curtain closes the narrative when it falls down, slicing the justly suspected Jonathan (Richard Todd) in half. So much for the “safety” of that curtain.
To keep that curtain in our mind, the Safety Glass label on Jonathon’s car is impervious to the policeman’s battering but takes a bullet hole. Similarly, the ornamental figures on the Safety Curtain reappear in Charlotte’s (Marlene Dietrich) apartment, both on the wardrobe that holds her getaway dress and the doors that admit/bar the police.
In the first scene Eve (Jane Wyman) is driving Jonathan in urgent getaway. This conventional noir image is the film’s “real life” — the film level of performance presentation — but the scene’s falseness registers in the car’s blank back window and in Eve seeming to drive out at us. This “real” drive is openly staged. So is what happens here. Jonathan tells Eve — and us — that Charlotte killed her husband and has come to Jonathan for aid. In helping her he has made himself a suspect.
In the parallel scene at the end. Eve and Jonathan are hiding in a prop carriage when she learns he has killed before. He decides to kill her in order to be acquitted on grounds of insanity. While the madman is shot in shadowed light, Eve is shown with a mask-like strip of light across her eyes, in the dark, as she arrives at a new understanding, i.e., vision.
These framing scenes are precisely reversed parallels. Jonathan produces his false tale as Eve drives them through the putative street reality in a car. The truth emerges when they cower backstage in a theatre prop room carriage. Truth derives from artifice. Indeed a rigged mike has Charlotte’s confession to Eve (playing dresser “Doris”) boom out at the cops in the empty theatre. Eve lured her there with “Let’s go somewhere where no-one can hear us.” In sum, we find our life truths through the artifices of our fiction, whether on the page, stage or celluloid. Conversely, to get through life we consistently draw on our fictionalized lives.
In the living representation of Jonathan’s lie there are additional layerings of realities. He imagines the maid telling the police of his flight — a fiction within the lie. Later, to flee the police he breaks into Eve’s rehearsal, forcing an embrace, a played hug interrupting the rehearsal of a play, which itself is an artifice depicting an imagined reality.
And so to the true romantic climax. In a taxi scene Eve and Detective Ordinary Smith (Michael Wilding) inexorably fall in love. That intense connection happens through but despite each character’s quite detached “performance.” Eve is unsubtly trying to make Smith suspect that Charlotte killed her husband, not her friend Jonathan. Smith pretends to listen. But he is more single-mindedly playing the suitor sinklng into infatuation. Here the intense emotion breaks through the characters’ respective “performances.” The detective played an earlier romantic role when he submits to Eve’s insistence he play their piano at tea. That romantic overture comes to represent him in her later reveries. The film closes on Smith lovingly walking the weakened Eve away out of the darkened theatre, presumably into their brightened life together. Not just the lovers but their roles/beings have been harmonized.
When aspiring actress Eve accepts boyfriend Jonathon’s lie/fiction she assumes a variety of roles to help him. That is, to play out his story. To engage Detective Smith she pretends trauma. She pretends to be a reporter to bribe Charlotte’s dresser to replace her. Amplifying this malleable identity, Charlotte misaddresses Eve’s “Doris Tynsdale” character, first as Phyliss, then Elsie, then Doris, and finally Mavis.
Ultimately Eve’s father, the Commodore (Alistair Sim), advises her to retreat with her acting from life to the safer theatricals of the stage: “The best thing you can do, my girl, is go back to the Academy; practice your soul-shaking antics in surroundings where they can't do any harm.” She will later struggle to balance her performances as herself and as Charlotte’s new dresser. When her remake as the real maid fails, Eve settles upon just wearing a simpler dress and hat. At that point, when Wyman’s Doris appears more like Wyman’s Eve, her Maker Hitchcock makes his cameo appearance — a passerby pausing to study the semi-transformed character. As usual, Hitchcock’s appearance has a pointed function. He’s arrested by the Eve/notEve.
The dialogue also abounds with the confusion between life and theatre, between being and performing. The Commodore calls Eve “a murderer’s moll.” Charlotte affirms that “The murderer returns to the scene of the crime, not the theatre.” Smith rejects the family’s “infernal amateur meddling” and Eve tries to assure him: “I wasn’t acting in the taxi.”
Marlene Dietrich’s Charlotte is less a local character than a visitation by a celestial persona. Hitchcock let her work out her own Sternbergian lighting. By admitting her full musical numbers he empasized her distinctive languor and sensuality. Yet her dialogue is the most honest and frank, refusing decorum: “Oh, darling, don't confide in me. Pour some tea will you.“ “I hope you're not going to turn into one of those explicit people who always tell you exactly how they feel when you ask them.“ “I had a dog once. He hated me. At last he bit me and I had him shot!” Her rumination over her widow’s weeds exults in elegant hypocrisy.
The star has the best lines: “You can stand just so much of detectives! After all, they are only policemen with smaller feet!” “Stop acting like a silly school girl! The only murderer here is the Orchestra Leader.” Here her role is wrong: the killer is indeed in the wings.
That division by performance also defines Eve’s parents. They are separated for their obvious incompatibility. Commodore Gill is a warm, insightful, mischievously open man. He’d “rather flattered myself that there was” something wrong with his reputation. He’s proud to be a “unique” father and a brandy smuggler. His wife (Dame Sybil Thorndyke) is chilly, ignorant, so starched that she takes his factual statement of the situation to be an absurd fiction. Which, of course, being a Hitchcock film, it is — to our reward and delight. Eve’s parents were obviously miscast in life, however perfect their present casting in the film.
Life and art. Whatever their borders, they are permeable. Hitchcock's "mistake" was actually a brilliant layering of the traditional flashback.
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