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The Informer is one of a number of British films made during the period of
transition from silent to talking pictures. The most celebrated of these is
Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929), but numerous other films included sound
sequences to varying degrees of artistic success. Like Blackmail, The Informer
was released in sound and silent versions, with significant differences between
the two.
The first half of the sound version is shot as silent, with German director
Arthur Robison fully demonstrating the level of technical sophistication that
this style of filmmaking had reached by its twilight years. Without the
constraints of cumbersome sound equipment, Robison's camera roams freely, with
one particularly accomplished long take following Gypo as he pushes his way
through a crowded street, halting with dreadful finality at the door of the
police station where he intends to betray his best friend. Cinematographer
Werner Brandes' lighting is imaginative and atmospheric throughout, and the
film's numerous chases and shoot-outs are exhilarating and rapidly edited by
Emile de Ruelle.
The use of a synchronised (non-dialogue) soundtrack is also creatively used
in the first part of the film. The jaunty jazz record Katie plays to mask the
sounds of McPhilip's escape incongruously persists throughout her confrontation
with Gypo. It is eventually and dramatically silenced with Gypo's smashing of a
glass, and replaced by the rising swell of the film's orchestral score that
accompanies his subsequent exit, intensifying the emotional fallout of the
quarrel. The film's pace briefly falters early in the second half, with two
rather stilted dialogue sequences, but picks up again with Gypo's exciting
escape into the path of an oncoming train and Katie's final betrayal.
While the European personnel and stars of The Informer demonstrate the
international nature of much late 1920s British cinema, contemporary critics
felt that the film consequently lacked the atmosphere and political
preoccupations of Irish novelist Liam O'Flaherty's original story (qualities
later successfully captured in John Ford's (US) 1935 version). It's true that
there is little to locate the film geographically (except the occasional Irish
accent and the availability on tap of Irish stout) and that the political is
subsumed to the personal (the cinematic Gypo's betrayal is explicitly due to
sexual jealousy, not political rivalry), but what the film lacks in local colour
and political topicality, it makes up for in style, particularly in Robison's
fluid direction and Brandes' use of expressionistic light and
shadow.
Nathalie Morris
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