Jamaica Inn

Alfred Hitchcock’s last U.K. film before coming to Hollywood, Jamaica Inn (1939) was based on the Daphne du Maurier novel published three years earlier. The film stars Maureen O’Hara as the Irish orphan Mary and an over-the-top Charles Laughton as Sir Humphrey Pengallon, the corrupt country squire of the Cornish coast. Set during the 1820s, the film takes place in the isolated “Jamaica Inn,” a hideout for smugglers and pirates run by Mary’s aunt and uncle. O’Hara (Rio Grande, Our Man in Havana) and Laughton (Mutiny on the Bounty, Witness for the Prosecution) are fantastic, and the film provides an early look at the English actor Robert Newton, who played the unforgettable, visionary, and drunken artist in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947). Featuring a hero dressed as a villain and a villain dressed as a hero, the film involves shipwrecks, double-crosses, hangings, sailor tattoos, eavesdropping, and meddling women, and also offers an implicit critique of the “public spectacle” of modern death on the eve of WWII, in which his native England will almost fall. The film involves many recognizable Hitchcock touches, from the lady with the goose to the gagged and bound heroine at the films denouement to lines like: “Take off your clothes off or I’ll do it for you!” O’Hara and Laughton later starred during the war in the French Resistance film This Land is Mine, directed by Jean Renoir in 1943.