The Manxman (1929)

(On Cable TV, September 2022) I would not have watched The Manxman if it wasn’t part of Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography: I’m not that fond of silent drama films, and it takes a conscious effort to dig into silent filmographies. But Hitchcock is Hitchcock, and The Manxman reflects that he wasn’t strictly a thriller specialist during the first decade of his career. A melodrama set on a small island off the coast of Britain (putatively Manx, but shot in Cornwall), it features a drawn-out multi-year love triangle between two very different friends (a fisherman and a lawyer) and the woman they both love and who loves them both. Despite some rough directorial choices from a then-young Hitchcock, it’s all very drawn out in the way most silent dramas are—dialogue cards, endless emoting, hesitant visual pacing and so on. It doesn’t help that the romantic plotting consists of one thing after another without much progression. I mean—The Manxman is not bad, especially by the standards of the time, but it’s not worth seeking out unless you are, like me, trying to slowly claim completion on Hitchcock’s entire feature-length filmography.