Young and Innocent

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Year Released: 1937
Rating: 3.0

Buoyant, brisk picture features a fundamental Hitchcockian dilemma: there's a dead broad floating in the ocean, the murder weapon is nearby and an innocent man is wrongly accused of the crime, forcing himself to go on a mission to reclaim his good name. Hitch's early films are an auteurist's wet dream, and various shots and elements in this would get re-used much later, most obviously Grand Hotel sequence that ends up with the actual murderer having a nervous breakdown while drumming in a band. Even though he was still incredibly young when he filmed this, the end result - though hardly as crisp and developed as his more famous movies (and lacking in the star power he thought so highly of) - shows a director completely comfortable with the medium.