The Farmer's Wife

Hitchcock at cozy comedy, as colorful characters get all worked up and cartoonish in prettily pictured Dartmoor. A hit play at 1500 nights across England over the decade. One thing UK TV teaches is their love of curmudgeonly men making irascibly inept but eventually sincere goes at romance. And so our fatuous farmer makes the tour, proposing on sound financial principle to confirmed bachelorettes of means in his area, insulting all til a more natural thought occurs. Smidge long, but amusing.

It moves at an adequate enough pace to pass the time without becoming boring. But I’m not sure if the farmer’s insensitive marriage proposals are just totally outdated attempts at humor or meant to be taken straight and therefor even more cringeworthy. Either way he comes across as such a sour arse that the inevitable happy ending feels totally unearned.

Its fairly good for what it is, which is a light weight disposable romantic comedy.

A romantic comedy by Hitchcock. Now, there's a sentence I don't get to type out very often. It's a silent movie about a widower who wants to remarry and is a real ass about rejections. And a woman stuck in the friendzone. And it explains how Hitchcock ended up as the master of suspense. He made this, which not only has no suspense but actually a negative amount and this netted him a surplus of suspense to use in later movies. This was my rather roundabout way of calling this movie 'predictable'.

Should have been a one-reeler

Alfred Hitchcock #1

Forgettable, but with hints of genius flashing through, like most of his early work.

Not quite a black comedy, though The Farmer's Wife definitely has a mean streak. Sweetland is a bastard through and through, and most of the female cast come off as heartless shrews. Still, if you can look past that (and why shouldn't you?) there's laughs to be found from beginning to end.

Another forgettable silent from Hitchcock's early days. At least it's humorous, and is better told than most of his early works.

44.250