2 out of 5

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

After a half-step towards talkies proved – to this viewer – that Hitchcock still needed some time to adapt, the director’s next full length talkie, Juno and the Paycock, displays a better command of acting + sound… by cheating. And the movie becomes quite the chore as a result.

Cheating is a pretty slanted take, of course: Juno and the Paycock was based on a play by Seán O’Casey, and you can very much tell. That is the cheat: by going for a (mostly) faithful adaptation of the source – up to the point of casting the play’s actress, Sara Allgood, as bedraggled wife Juno – Hitchcock can stick to sets designed to project to an audience, and allows his actors to bunch together for easy readability, essentially filming a dialogue-delivered story. While already having established himself as a visualist within the first decade of his career might make the proclamation to film a play as-is seem novel, it’s also an incredibly safe way to test out the sound realm. There are some subtleties at work here with foregrounding and backgrounding characters, and decisions when not to pan and leave things off frame – and unlike some of Hitch’s more overt visual tricks, these decisions feel thematic to the film, and our central family’s tunnel vision way of living. But once the movie gets past the comedy part of its tragicomedy, we no longer have the mugging of “Captain” Boyle (Edward Chapman) and his layabout buddy “Joxer” (Sidney Morgan) to marry the pantomime of silents to some flavorful sound-enriched acting: the story drags through inevitabilities of things falling apart for the Boyles – lessons of film pacing and structure learned over Hitchcock’s last few movies ditched for sticking to the play’s acts. From afar, perhaps we can appreciate how the movie’s last third is steeped in less life, and more darkness, but this is in service of…? There is essentially no evolution in the story after a certain point. Things happen, but only to reinforce a life-sucks narrative time and again, and get us to a Life Sucks zinger delivered by Allgood, at which point the film still goes on, meta driving this point home. Tragedies are a thing; not asking for a happy ending. But, alas, you’ve gotta work for your medium, and what might’ve had more resonance with an actor on stage is very tedious in this moving-pictures version.

Juno and the Paycock are nicknames for Ma and Pa Boyle; she works hard, he drinks hard, and we watch some humorous aw-they’re-a-shitty-couple-who-love-each-other hijinks for a bit that, as described above, are generally visually stiff, but can be entertaining thanks to screen-filling performances. The family comes in to some “easy” money which leads to amusements of the yokels leaving to excess, but easy-come-easy-go and the tragedy sets in.

With the film set atop the Irish War of Independence, there’s some commentary weeded in that informs character and story motivations, but for a modern viewer, it feels very much like a background element; it’s hard to pick up on some of the particulars that may’ve been more apparent to a contemporary or perhaps Irish audience, or those more closely affected by events either way.