Jamaica Inn (1939) - film review

After the death of her mother, a young Irish girl named Mary Yellen travels to England to stay with her aunt Patience, who lives at an inn in Cornwall.   Little does she know that Jamaica Inn is the meeting place for a band of ruthless ship wreckers, led by Mary’s Uncle Joss.  When she sees the wreckers about to lynch one of their group, a man named Trehearne, Mary risks her own neck to save his.  The two escape and head for the local squire and magistrate, Sir Humphrey Pengallan, to report what they have discovered.  Unfortunately for them, Pengallan is not only in league with the wreckers, he is also their mastermind...

The last film that Alfred Hitchcock directed in England before moving on to bigger and better things in the United States was this creaking adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel Jamaica Inn.  It is by no means regarded as one of Hitchcock’s better film from this period – the pace is uneven and the studio exteriors far from convincing – but is has a certain charm and novelty value in that it is one of the director’s few period dramas.   Du Maurier loathed the film, which only approximately resembles her novel, although Hitchcock would quickly redeem himself in her eyes with his next film, his masterful adaptation of the same author’s Rebecca.

If Jamaica Inn lacks the Hitchcock touch, this is partly down to the director’s bad working relationship with his lead actor, Charles Laughton, during the making of the film.  Laughton was also the film’s producer and it was at his insistence that the screenplay be rewritten to give his character a much greater part in the story.  Hitchcock was unimpressed by Laughton’s excessively camp portrayal of Pengallan, which shows the actor offloading enough ham to service a chain of delicatessens.  The film’s lead actress Maureen O’Hara would accompany Laughton to Hollywood for their next film, in which she played Esmeralda to his Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939).

© James Travers 2008

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