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"The Farmer's Wife", a Hitchcock film from 1928, is a real revelation. It's beautifully shot, peppered with the
bold, eccentric compositions, the subtle, seductive camera movements, one associates with the mature Hitchcock style. But
its subject matter and tone are totally uncharacteristic, more in the vein of Griffith's bucolic silents than of Hitch's sound-era
thrillers.
The pace is slow, the drama utterly domestic, the mood lyrical, the sensibility Victorian. For Griffith, simple domestic
virtue was exciting, glamorous, sexy -- as it was for many of the great Victorian artists, like Dickens and Tolstoy . . .
as it is for Hitchcock in this film. The attitude is so foreign to us today that we need to enter an altered state of consciousness
to appreciate it -- to understand why these artists devote so much attention to the orderly running of a home . . . why images
of a hearth, a dinner table, a parlor resonate with the intensity of a battlefield or a courtesan's boudoir.
The story of "The Farmer's Wife" is slight and simple. An unsophisticated country squire loses his wife to illness,
his daughter to marriage, and suddenly feels incomplete -- realizes he needs a companion in life. He courts, in a ham-handed
way, the local prospects, each wildly unsuitable, until he realizes that his housekeeper, the true mistress of his home, is
also the mistress of his heart.
It's a drama that would make no sense if we did not feel the warmth and ceremony of the farmer's household -- standing
in bold relief against the coldness or tension or impersonal joviality of the worlds inhabited by the unsuitable prospects.
The film concentrates on making us feel this contrast, by an accumulation of mundane details which only very slowly and subtly
move us towards an emotional climax.
The film has its tedious moments -- mostly connected with the character of a rustic handyman who supplies an overly broad
and uninspired element of comic relief. It falls short of greatness because the final coming together of the farmer and his
wife is undercut by a labored coda in which the miraculous denouement is witnessed by the farmer's neighbors.
What connects it to Hitchcock's later work is a kind of morbid fascination with moments of social embarrassment and a
sense that fate hinges on the slightest of contingencies. One could also argue that Hitchcock's failure to drive home the
emotional climax of "The Farmer's Wife" prefigured the emotional distance he cultivated in his later films through
a reliance on the mechanical devices of the thriller genre.
But there is heart in all of Hitchcock's work, however repressed or sublimated, and it's on frank display in "The
Farmer's Wife".
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