Jamaica Inn was produced by Erich Pommer, whom Hitchcock had first worked with at the famous UFA studios in Germany on the 1925 film The Blackguard, which Hitchcock wrote, designed sets, and served as assistant director for. Jamaica Inn was produced through Charles Laughton’s company, Mayflower Pictures, and the great actor’s powerful presence is felt throughout the film. This is largely due to Laughton’s over-the-top performance as Sir Humphrey Pengallan, a squire of Cornwall. Hitchcock had a tough time working with Laughton, whose personality and presence battled with Hitchcock’s own for supremacy on the set. But make no mistake about it, this is a Hitchcock film, and a vastly underrated one at that.
The film opens with a montage of the waves and swirling waters of the sea near Cornwall. These dreamlike images foreshadow the same swirling shots of breaking water that Hitchcock utilized in Rebecca, only a year later in Hollywood; and the unstable waters serve as a portent of death in both films. In Rebecca, they signify the demise of the title character, who is always evoked, but never seen, like a ghost. In Jamaica Inn, the turbulent waters serve as a locale for murder by an unruly band of criminals who hold court at the Jamaica Inn and spend their time trapping, robbing, and killing seafaring men.
Jamaica Inn is run by a man named Joss, to whom the criminals report. Joss has a wife named Patience. A fitting name, because their marriage is as turbulent as the dangerous waters of the coast they live near. Yet and still, no matter what, Patience perseveres. An interesting feature of Hitchcock’s work is that married couples are often depicted in troubled relationships. Ironic, given Hitchcock’s lifelong dedication to his own wife, and the profound romanticism of some of his best works. Joss and Patience recall the couple in The 39 Steps, featuring a religious fanatic of a husband who exhibits extreme cruelty and abuse towards his submissive and equally patient wife. The films Sabotage (1936), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Dial M for Murder (1954), and numerous others also feature troubled marriages. Patience in Jamaica Inn is one of the more dedicated spouses though. She goes all the way to the end of the line for her brutish husband, being complicit in his murderous schemes and even taking an active part in them by the end of the film. But, Patience also dies by the same gun her husband lived by at the end of the film. It’s a price she’s willing to pay for the love of her life. As she mentions in the film, “I love him. People can’t help being what they are. Joss can’t, I can’t. There’s nothing to be done.” Hitchcock, like Patience, runs with this premise to its logical conclusion, and his characters often die as a result of the manner in which they lived. And maybe this is the way it should be.
This film is full of signature Hitchcock touches that we’ve come to know and love. Note the high angle and also voyeuristic shots depicting the attempted hanging of Officer Trehearne. They recall similar high angle shots taken from the mast of a ship looking down on the shipwrecked and victimized crew earlier in the film. Patience’s orphaned niece Mary, played by Maureen O’Hara, witnesses this attempted hanging through a peephole in her room. It’s no secret Hitchcock was fascinated by voyeurism, as it is a theme that runs central to many of his works. Truth be told, cinema as an art form is inextricably linked to voyeuristic tendencies. Hitchcock explores this premise most exhaustively in the seminal film Rear Window (1954).
The structuring motif of Jamaica Inn is bondage, and its overriding symbol is rope. Everyone from Trehearne to Pengallan to Mary to the land pirates are tied up at one time or another in the film. Of course, this bondage is linked to sexual connotations, as Hitchcock was also fascinated by sexual deviance. Most explicit when Mary is abducted, tied up, and gagged by Pengallan in a very tender and almost erotic manner. He’s infatuated with her, so this act hovers between the murky borderline of criminality and perversion. It’s actually both. Also, in the closing scenes where the outlaws of Jamaica Inn are captured and handcuffed by the authorities, there is one criminal on whom the handcuffs won’t fit. He’s a young and effeminate scoundrel who wears a frilly bandana in his hair, and he complains passionately when the officers tie him up with a rope as opposed to the handcuffs that are afforded his comrades, and what he prefers.
Jamaica Inn is chock full of vividly realized supporting characters. In addition to the gang member just mentioned, there is one called Salvation who is a religious fanatic; one who is overly superstitious (especially when his looking glass is shot and destroyed by Trehearne, which he feels marks his doom, and actually does); also, there’s a black-shirted and defiant radical who confronts the privileged Pengallan in his home with the socialist notion that he is a man no different from and equal to him (a notion Pengallan suppresses forcefully); and Chadwick. Chadwick is Pengallan’s tortured butler who has served the family for multiple generations, and who witnessed Pengallan’s grandfather go crazy. Pengallan himself ends up a raving lunatic by the film’s close, as Chadwick says he saw coming some time ago. But Chadwick never saw his own insanity coming, as he himself is driven mad and haunted by Pengallan’s demanding voice after he witnesses him die at the film’s conclusion. This is a haunting he’ll suffer the rest of his life.
Like most Hitchcock conclusions, this one is a fantastic spectacle. Pengallan even says so, as he perches himself atop the mast of a ship not unlike the ones he chartered for destruction, and announces that the gathering crowd of looky-loos shall indeed be treated to a spectacle. He then mentions that the crowd should watch closely, and tell their children how the great age ended. Hitchcock’s characters were often obsessed with the past as an idyllic state of being, a paradise of sorts. But a paradise lost. Think of characters like the murderous and insane Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), or the duplicitous husband Gavin Elster in Vertigo, who keeps a framed picture of 19th century San Francisco on his wall to gaze at longingly. All of these characters have an unhealthy attachment to the past, and Pengallan is no exception. Earlier in the film, he mentions to Mary that she must be strong, for the age of chivalry is gone. What Pengallan fails to realize is that he is a big reason why that age is no more. This lack of self-recognition, brought on partly by the insanity he has inherited from his forefathers, is the reason for his demise.
Pengallan then leaps from the mast of the ship to his death on the deck below. Suicide by dementia. And of course, falling from high places is perhaps the key predicament in Hitchcockian cinema. Hitchcock must have surely been afraid of heights, which isn’t unthinkable when one considers how nervous, obsessive, and frightened a man he was (his neuroses, like Pengallan’s, inherited from his forefathers). An extremely large number of Hitchcock characters find themselves on a ledge, often hanging by their fingertips, usually tumbling to their deaths. It’s a metaphor for life, and the multitude of disastrous endings in this manner in Hitchcock’s films reveals his own cynicism. But more importantly, his own fears. And most of all, and even more importantly, his own persona. Like the great critic Jean-Luc Godard said, I only like films which resemble their creators.
Other Alfred Hitchcock films discussed that you may also enjoy:
HITCHCOCK: The Lost Masterworks
HITCHCOCK: The Lost Masterworks – “Secret Agent” (1936)
HITCHCOCK: The Lost Masterworks – “Jamaica Inn” (1939)
HITCHCOCK: The Lost Masterworks – “Lifeboat” (1944)
HITCHCOCK: The Lost Masterworks – “The Trouble with Harry” (1955)
HITCHCOCK: The Lost Masterworks – “Topaz” (1969)
HITCHCOCK: The Lost Masterworks – “Frenzy” (1972)
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS: “Frenzy” (1972) – Part 1
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS: “Frenzy” (1972) – Part 2