Rich and Strange (1931)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

I’m going a bit on a limb for our Film of the Week, with what I believe is the second earliest film we’ve recommended, one that’s just on our side of the divide between the silent movies and the talkies. And it’s really a film for adults, we think, because of the content of the story line. It’s called Rich and Strange, though for some unaccountable reason it’s also known by the unremarkable title East of Shanghai. Or maybe that second title is meant to be ironic, since there’s nothing east of Shanghai but the sea, a part of our “Figuratively Speaking” in Word of the Week, sea change. In any case, the crucial scene in the film occurs on the sea, in a tempest, and in fact in a shipwreck — a real shipwreck, and not the apparent one that begins Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. And sure enough, the title Rich and Strange comes from Ariel's song in that same play, as the director Alfred Hitchcock knew very well. Ferdinand fears that his father, King Alonso, is dead, and the song he hears in the air or from the waters seems to confirm that fear. “Nothing of him that doth fade,” Ariel sings, “but doth suffer a sea change / Into something rich and strange.”

I think that the title is crucial for this film. We hear “rich and strange,” and we should think of the situation in The Tempest, and of what looks like a terrible disaster, but what really provides the opportunity for King Alonso, who is morally guilty of intending a double murder, to die inside and to be reborn, casting himself upon the grace and the providence of God. So, please, as you watch, keep that in mind as the touchstone for interpreting the events and the actions of the two main characters. They aren’t at first either rich or strange. They are two lower middle class people, a young married couple named Fred and Em (Emily). They have no children yet. Fred works in the city, and that’s a harried place — everybody’s herded like mice in a laboratory maze or something. He wants to get away, and when his uncle, who really is rich, decides to give them the money to go on a world cruise, rather than to have them wait till he dies to get the chance, Fred quits his job and he and Em embark on what they hope is going to change their lives, lifting them up out of the doldrums. And it does change their lives, but in a way that neither one expects. For they will fall into sin, their marriage appears to be dead forever, and their deliverance happens only by several incidents that can only be called wondrous, though they depend also upon a change in the will, as in Shakespeare’s play.

Pay attention, then, to the ordinariness of these two people, and to how unworthy they are that the Lord should care for them, the Lord whose eye is on the sparrow. Hitchcock shows in Rich and Strange many of the features of his later greatness as a director. Some of these are cinematographic, especially in the sea-shots. But I have always thought that people have paid a bit too much attention to that, while forgetting that Hitchcock was a moral philosopher in film, while never being too ham-handed about that. What does the good man do when he is placed in an impossible situation, one that is tearing his family apart, as is the poor musician who is mistaken for a killer, in The Wrong Man? Or the priest who hears the confession of a murderer, when the murderer has actually framed things so that the priest himself will be suspected of the crime (I Confess)? Or the doctor on vacation with his wife and son, when he gets unwittingly tangled up in international espionage and an assassination plot (The Man Who Knew Too Much)? And these questions often aren’t matters of practical strategy. The situations may call you to turn about from the kind of life you have lived; they thus put everything on the line.

So then, go on the cruise with Fred and Em — and tell us what you think!

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Our film is available online at no charge from Internet Archive. Click on the poster above to view the film.

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