- I'll fully admit that I expected Alfred Hitchcock's Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache to be little more than standard propaganda pieces. I knew nothing about them except that they were short and in French, both of which seemed like a strange departure for England's most talented and famous director. After watching them, I'll admit that these are not great films. That they arrived one year after Shadow of a Doubt and two years before Notorious makes them seem all the worse. And yet, there are some distinct Hitchcockian signatures present despite the inherently suspicious medium. The Master of Suspense was at a point in his career where he simply couldn't bring himself to make a completely uninteresting film.
- In Bon Voyage, the message is a simple one: trust your commanding officers. The justification for this notion is presented in the form of two complementary stories, one related by an R.A.F. officer (John Blythe) and the other delivered by his commander. In both cases, the pilot is helped out of occupied France by a member of the Resistance who gives him a letter to deliver in London. Naturally, the enlisted man believes it is a personal letter for a loved one, while the commanding officers suspect it to be a spy communique from a dastardly secret agent. One could imagine Hitchcock engaging in a Rashomon-style examination of the truth in happier times, but in this case it is clear that the French agent really is a spy. If you were hoping for an exciting wrong man scenario, looks elsewhere in Hitch's filmography.
- Aventure Malgache, on the other hand, focuses on a veteran's memories of the liberation of Madagascar. In this case, the interesting suggestion is that the soldier (Paul Clarus) is having trouble distinguishing the present from the past, especially given how much his fellow actor (Paul Bonifas) resembles a despicable gangster and occupation sympathizer. The story itself, implying that Vichy co-conspirators were inconstant traitors, is much less interesting than the moment when the veteran nearly turns on his companion, forgetting temporarily that the two men are not the same person. A simpler propaganda film would have dropped the flashback format entirely, but this one is helped out tremendously by it. Thankfully, the war only had one more year to go, so that these short films and the overly ponderous Lifeboat served as atonal anomalies in a filmography that generally excelled at hitting all the right notes.
