Tuesday, August 10, 2010

The Farmer's Wife (1928)

Another oddity from the silent years of Hitchcock. This is both a very broad comedy about a farmer seeking a second wife out of the available women in his vicinity, and a sort of pastoral ode. Except for The Trouble With Harry, no film of Hitchcock really celebrates the beauty of a rural existence like this one. Like most silent films, there are several versions, all of different lengths, and the one I watched clocked in at 129 minutes, which is a lot of time to spend on essentially a one-joke comedy. The fact that it was well-made, or the fact that it starred the gorgeous tragic silent film actress Lilian Hall-Davis, or the fact that I was spending time in my air-conditioned office during the tenth heatwave of this summer, didn't really justify the hours spent.

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