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Throughout Hitchcock's films, shots and scenes of kissing play a critical role, dramatically, thematically, and structurally. On the one hand, the centrality of the kiss, for Hitchcock and other directors, may seem perfectly natural and predictable. Even if we do not go as far as Raymond Bellour in assuming that the underlying purpose of conventional films is to manufacture conventional couples, sealed with a kiss, one can easily understand why films gravitate toward kisses, allowable and pleasurable but still somewhat titillating and problematic sexual actions and signifiers in the spectacle and language of film from its very beginning. But for Hitchcock, a kiss is often unusually unnerving, a moment of extreme tension as well as release, and an opportunity to explore a characteristic range of images, themes, and issues: sexuality, intimacy, merging, separation, dominance, and voyeurism among others. A kiss is often a metonymic moment for Hitchcock, literally and figuratively embodying the dynamics of an entire film. Kissing is telling: a highly charged mode of expression, narration, and analysis. And not surprisingly, a kiss is often an opportunity for technical and stylistic excess, flamboyance, expansion, intensity.
In short, for Hitchcock a kiss is rarely just a kiss, and even though we might think first of particularly memorable examples from Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo, and Mamie, kisses are centrally inscribed in nearly all his films. (I take this metaphor, by the way, not from postmodern critical theory, Foucault or Barthes, but from Mae West. In My IMtJe Chickadee she notes that a kiss is a man's signature, and a sure way of distinguishing contenders, like the dashing and romantic masked bandit, from pretenders, like the smooching imposter played by W.C. Fields.) Even such an early and unheralded film as Easy Virtue (released in 1927) provides a fine example of how Hitchcock's films revolve around and anatomize kisses.
But although I want to discuss the role of the kiss in Easy Virtue, I would like to do this in the context of a more comprehensive analysis and appreciation of what Gene D. Phillips rightly calls this "unjustly neglected Hitchcock silent," a film that "indicates as much as any of the preceding films Hitchcock directed that he was gaining an increasingly firm grasp on the tools of...