JAMAICA INN

I saw JAMAICA INN the 1939 movie before I read the 1936 novel. The movie, with young Maureen O'Hara and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is very, very loosely, too loosely, based on the novel and in my opinion badly told to boot. Novel's author Daphne du Maurier wrote to her publisher: "Don't go and see it, it is a wretched affair." ***Hitchcock's JAMAICA INN frankly depressed me. It was that bad and demotivated me for reading the novel. But, in the end, dutifully, I opened du Maurier's tale of Cornish smugglers and killers in the early 19th Century and was drawn in at once to an astonishingly good yarn. 23-year old recently orphaned Mary Yellan travels by coach to the barren, forbidding interior uplands of Cornwall. There, as she promised her dying mother, she moves in with her mother's older sister Patience and the latter's abusive husband of ten years Joss Merlyn. By trickery Joss had bought from an upright local squire real and still existing Jamaica Inn, perched on a desolate stretch of highway between two towns on the dangerous moors. Joss is nearly seven feet tall, a hopeless alcoholic and apparent leader and brains behind a 100 man strong gang of smugglers. The smugglers are also "breakers," men who lure ships to destruction on rocks of the wild Cornish coast, murder survivors and steal their valuables. *** Mary Yellan is that indispensable figure of every true "thriller," the isolated hero, utterly friendless, up against powerful persons but supported by no allies, at least initially. Like a good modern historian, Daphne du Maurier is careful to make Mary Yellan know no more about what is going on about her than she can learn for herself. The third person narrator's point of view is not godlike. It is realistic. Mary falls in love with her uncle's much younger and far less reprehensible -- but no saint -- brother Jem. Jem despises churches, vicars, religion nore is very fond of women and makes his money stealing, disguising and selling horses from his neighbors across the moors. ***A mouthpiece for du Maurier's own experiences with men, animal-wise country woman Mary Yellan is at a loss to understand why otherwise sensible women fall for objectionable men. Some of her musings: --(1) "Animals did not reason... There was precious little romance in nature, and she would not look for it in her own life"; --(2) Telling Jem why she thinks she loves him and will relunctantly go with him on Jem's terms: "Because I want to; because I must; because now and forever more this is where I belong to be." *** Keep your eye on seldom seen Anglican priest Francis Davey, albino vicar of Altarnun on the moors. He becomes Mary's only friend, hears with apparent empathy her tales of evil that she has seen through living at Jamaica Inn. He is the first person with any real power to show Mary kindness. Yet more than once the novel shows a suspicious Mary Yellan worrying about who and what sort of "freak" albino Davey really might be. Incredibly, his part was written out for the 1939 movie version. -OOO-