Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!

Diagonaldi Very well executed

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

Syl If you loved Sir Alfred Hitchcock and his contributions and services to the film industry, you should see all of his films for study and preservation. This is one of his early silent films. If you have the patience to watch a two hour silent film, it's not that easy. We're so used to speeches and conversations that we forget to watch and see their facial reactions in the early age of cinema. This film is more comedic than dark and dramatic. While the story is more farcical, it is nice to see Hitchcock have a sense of humor since he became more known for the macabre in his films. It is not hard to believe that film audiences didn't laugh and enjoy this film in the cinema in 1928 long before the Great Depression. Still, I would watch it again if I had too. It's not a bad film. You wouldn't know Hitchcock directed it.

KlutzyGirl I've always been a huge fan of Hitchcock's early works, especially "The 39 Steps" and "The Lady Vanishes." I especially love the glimpses of country life--the cruel Calvinist husband, the Swiss speaking Romansche. But I hadn't realized that even earlier he made comedies. Now with new DVD releases I can discover them, and I recommend you do too. So far I've also seen "Rich and Strange," which was slow, but a fun precursor to "Mr. and Mrs. Smith."The Farmer's Wife is my favorite so far. The opening...was there ever a more idyllic farm? A more amusing death scene? Cuter puppies? A more curmudgeonly farm hand? These little touches set the scene and kept me interested in the progression of a story whose ending we know from the start. It can be slow, and I really appreciated having it on DVD so I could FF x2 through the long scenes, but overall I enjoyed the whole package very much. My enjoyment was often overwhelmed by the sad story of Lillian Hall-Davis's tragic death and her son's involvement. Very sad. She was perfect in this role. Jameson Thomas (King Westley in "It Happened One Night") was very good, and all the supporting players were terrific. 8/10.

Steffi_P This early Hitchcock silent, his first for British International Pictures, is a simple romantic comedy adapted from a stage play. A far cry from crime and suspense, but at this point Hitchcock had neither the influence nor the realisation of his true forte to select his projects.As with all but one of the Hitchcock silents, the screenplay was by Eliot Stannard. Stannard, with his typical understanding of the visual medium, dispenses with the wordiness of a direct stage-to-screen adaptation. He allows time for the characters to reveal their feelings in reaction shots and point-of-view shots, and replaces verbal gags with visual ones. The Farmer's Wife is thus as devoid of unnecessary intertitles as, say, The Manxman.Given its rural setting, Hitchcock was more or less obliged to include some shots of rolling hillsides. Hitch doesn't seem to have liked the countryside much – in most of his later films if it appears at all it's as a functional back-projection – but he doesn't do too badly here as far as pure photographic beauty goes. Other than that the shooting style is typical of Hitchcock. There is a growing use of fluid camera movement, and we can see that Hitchcock technique, whereby the camera appears to be leading the audience, gradually revealing to us or drawing us in.Whether it comes from Stannard's script or Hitchcock's head I don't know, but there is a massive tendency here towards point-of-view shots during dialogue scenes, in which the other speaker looks straight into camera. The majority of these are rather pointless, with the exception of several appropriately ghastly close-ups of the Farmer's bridal candidates.To say the conclusion of The Farmer's Wife is predictable would be a grand understatement. A shortsighted person could see it coming through several miles of fog. Not a bad thing in itself, but rather than play upon its obviousness (which Stannard and Hitchcock must have been aware of), the picture simply becomes a tedious game of waiting for the inevitable. The Farmer's Wife is only quite funny, and is altogether too long.

Robert J. Maxwell You know what Hitchcock's early movies make me think? That the quondam artist who painted fancy title cards began almost by chance to direct films and underwent some kind of A-HA! Erlebniss somewhere along the way, between, say, 1925 and 1931. It is said that Archimides got into his bath tub one day and it occurred to him as he watched the water level rise that a body displaces its own volume in water. "Eureka!" shouted Archimides. (Or "Heureka" or whatever.) I get the impression that something like that happened to Hitchcock.If at first his movies were straightforward and of a kind with others of their period, well -- they still were, but every once in a while, in a wanton mood, he would throw in some experimental technique or some strange shot that indicated more than just story-telling was going on. I mean, for instance, in "The Lodger," the scene where the ceiling becomes transparent and we can see the lodger's restless feet on the floor above. Or here, when two big-eyed doggies nestle their head together and look mournfully at the camera while the farmer's wife is dying. Or, when sound was introduced, his toying with the word "KNIFE" in "Murder." If the films and the plots were a little banal, they were often juiced up by one or another director's trick.This one, "The Farmer's Wife," is a genteel romantic comedy with some touches of genuine warmth. It's a little slow, it's long, and it's not slapstick. The funniest scene, to me, only lasts a few seconds. A doctor comes to a party and finds himself seated next to a plump woman who begins to complain about her symptoms, inviting him to examine her teeth and her knee, while the doctor fiddles nervously and tries to find someway out.The plot, briefly, involves the widowed farmer's search for a new wife. He makes up a list of suitable women and visits them one by one. They all turn out to be wrong for him. One rejects him because she's too independent. The next is so excessively shy that when the farmer proposes she trembles all over, blinking constantly, and tells him she'll seek no shelter in a man's arms. The third rejects him because she feels she's too young for him, though she's far from it. He insults her extravagantly -- "You try to dress up your mutton as lamb" -- and she throws an hysterical fit. Finally he realizes that his soul mate is his housekeeper, 'Minta, who has been quietly pining for him too. 'Minta is not gorgeous in any conventional sense, but as Randolph Scott said of one of the leading ladies in his Western, "She ain't ugly." She's plain but honest, and she's thoroughly devoted to the farmer.Anybody could have directed this -- anybody who was already a competent professional. Hitchcock's idiosyncratic style -- full of POV shots and spectacular swooping crane shots -- was to become manifest later in his career. This one is, as I said, a little long for its message but it's easy to watch and despite the chuckles, it's at times rather touching. Hitchcock was to use comic interludes often in his later movies. Some of them were very funny indeed. (My favorite is Alec MacGowan trying to eat his last gourmet meal in "Frenzy.") But comedies, as genre, were never his forte. "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" is immeasurably dull.By the way, I'm not so sure about that Archimides in the bath tub business. I'm sure he discovered the principle but I'm not sure he did it in a bath tub, any more than I'm sure Isaac Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head. It's too good to be true, like a Parson Weems tale. On top of that, Archimides was said to be so excited by his discovery that he ran through the streets of Syracuse naked. Now that's not only implausible. It's disgusting.