The Farmer's Wife

Dir. Alfred Hitchcock

1927 | Black & White | 40mins | Silent

Cast: Jameson Thomas, Lillian Hall-Davis, Gordon Harker

*Available for booking from November 2012 as silent DCP*

Hitchcock was worried that the stage roots of The Farmer's Wife (a hugely popular play by Eden Philpotts) might show through in his film adaptation. It was a needless worry. This semi-comic story of a widowed farmer's attempts to find himself a new wife is shot, as Truffaut observed, 'like a thriller'. The camera, on occasion handled by Hitch himself, observes the action cinematically, not from the perspective of a stage audience. Each prospective wife - the horsy one, the hysterical one, the high-spirited one - is presented as a comic stereotype. Rejected by each, the farmer ultimately discovers what has been literally staring him - and the audience - in the face all the time: his young, attractive and devoted housekeeper.

A restoration by the BFI National Archive in association with STUDIOCANAL.

Available on: DCP