Always Tell Your Wife (1923)

 

It may surprise some that Alfred Hitchcock's earliest completed film as a director was a two-reel comedy. However, for his whole career, comedy would remain an important element of Hitch's films. Try to think of North by Northwest (1959), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941) or Frenzy (1972) without their comedy. He even directed some all-out and out comedies like Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) and The Trouble with Harry (1955). And of course, comedy would play an important role in his television work. Yet Always Tell Your Wife is not a Hitchcock film in the traditional sense. That is because it was never intended as a Hitchcock film. In Francios Truffaut's famous book length interview with Alfred Hitchcock, Hitch would state, "... I worked on a picture called Always Tell Your Wife, which featured Seymour Hicks, a very well-known London actor. One day he quarreled with the director and said to me, 'Let's you and me finish this thing by ourselves.' So, I helped him, and we completed the picture." Different sources have debated whether Hugh Crosie (the film's original director) had rough words with Hicks or fell ill. It has also been debated just how much Alfred Hitchcock had to do with the completed picture or what parts of the short he had directed. It is believed that he was probably an assistant director before becoming a full director for this film. Always Tell Your Wife was actually a remake of a 1914 comedy short by the same name that also starred Seymor Hicks. 

Seymour Hicks, though little talked about today, was one of the most respected British stage actors of the time. He first acted professionally at only in the age of 16 when he performed in In the Ranks at the Grand Theatre in Islington. By the age of 18 he was touring America with Dame Madge Kendal and her husband W.H. Kendal's popular acting troupe. In 1898, he became a successful playwright as well with the play The Runaway Girl, which was followed by a series of light comedies he co-authored with Charles Frohman. However, the most famous role for this respected actor was Ebeneezer Scrooge. He had first played this character on stage in 1901 at only the age of 30. The great actor later recounted that he must have played this character in over 2,000 performances. As well as playing the character on stage, the actor also played him in a 1913 silent film version and the talkie movie adaption, Scrooge (1935). By the 1935 film he was well seasoned when it came to playing this role and at the age of 64, he had grown into being the age of the character.

His co-stars include Stanley Logan (who would appear in many uncredited roles in Hollywood movies of the 1940's), Gerturde McCoy (who played Light in Maurice Tourneur's The Blue Bird (1918)), Ellaline Terriss (an accomplish stage actress and Hick's wife) and Ian Wilson (whose career would last until the 1970's with his last movie being The Wicker Man (1973)). 

This short is a martial farce about two couples and an affair that arose between them. 

Only one reel of this two-reel comedy is known to survive. Unfortunately, I was not able to watch this short. 

This short was intended as the first in a series of 10 comedy shorts to star Hicks. However, the other 9 films were never made, and it has been questioned whether this film ever received a proper release. However, this film did a world of good for Hitch's filmmaking career as producer Michael Balcon took notice of him at this time and would make him an important part of his new movie studio. Under Balcon, Hitch would at first work as a writer, assistant director and/or art director on a few movies, as well as directing his earliest feature length films. 

Though this is the first completed film that Alfred Hitchcock directed it was not his first attempt at directing a film. He had been the director on a movie entitled Number 13, which was never completed. This movie was to be written by Anita Ross, who claimed to be an associate of Charlie Chaplin. Hitch said about this, "In those days anyone who worked with Chaplin was top drawer: She had written a story, and we found a little money. It wasn't very good really." The movie was to star Clare Greet and Ernest Thesiger. Little is known about the story, except that it was about a low-income couple living in a building funded by The Peabody Trust, which offered affordable housing to those hard on their luck. Hitch's uncle John Hitchcock was to fund them film but eventually these funds ran out. Afterwards, Clare Greet helped fund the movie until that funding also ran out. However, Hitch's movie career started with him as an intertitle designer on various silent films such as The Great Day (1920), The Call of Youth (1920), The Princess of New York (1921), Three Live Ghosts (1922).

Resources Used

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1422787/index.html

Hitchcock by François Truffaut