Jamaica Inn is an eighteenth century coaching inn on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall. It is said to be one of the few old Cornish inns not to have been used by smugglers; it is about as far from the sea as it is possible to be in Cornwall, and its exposed position on open moorland by a main road would have made it easy to detect any suspicious movements of goods. Nevertheless, its atmospheric setting appealed to the novelist Daphne Du Maurier, who used it as the backdrop to her novel "Jamaica Inn", which deals with the activities of smugglers and wreckers in early nineteenth century Cornwall.<br /><br />Period costume drama was not really Alfred Hitchcock's forte, so he was not the most obvious choice to direct the film version of Du Maurier's novel. (According to some accounts he only did so in order to secure the rights to another of her novels, "Rebecca", made into one of his most famous films the following year. A third Hitchcock film, "The Birds", was also based on her work). The film is set in the 1820s. Jamaica Inn, which in the film is closer to the sea, closer to Truro and further from Bodmin than it is in reality, is the headquarters of a gang of wreckers, led by the innkeeper Joss. The wreckers conceal coastal beacons in order to cause ships to run aground. Then they loot the wrecks and kill the surviving sailors.<br /><br />The main character is Mary Yellan, the orphaned niece of Joss's wife Patience, who comes to stay with her aunt and uncle after the deaths of her parents, but who flees from the inn after discovering her uncle's criminal activities. In the original novel Mary was herself Cornish, but here she is made Irish, presumably to accommodate Maureen O'Hara's accent. Another change to Du Maurier's plot concerns the main villain; in the book he was a parson, but in the film he becomes the local squire, Sir Humphrey Pengallan, who is in league with the gang. He uses his powers as a magistrate to offer them legal protection in exchange for a share of their loot, which he needs in order to fund his lavish lifestyle. This change was made in order to comply with the American Production Code, which forbade unsympathetic portrayals of clergymen. Even in the thirties America was the main export market for British films, which meant that the Hays Office could exercise its influence on both sides of the Atlantic.<br /><br />Pengallan was played by that old ham Charles Laughton, who also acted as co-producer and insisted on rewriting the script to give his character greater prominence. Most of the blame for the failure of the film must be laid at his door as it was he, rather than Hitchcock, who had the final say on these matters. Laughton was often prone to overacting, and his performance in "Jamaica Inn" is one of his hammiest. The ending, rewritten to give him a dramatic death scene, is particularly melodramatic and implausible. Laughton was also responsible for the casting of O'Hara, even though Hitchcock had not wanted to use her after a poor screen test. Her performance in the film itself is a wooden one; Laughton overacts badly, but she underacts equally badly. (Surprisingly, the film was good for O'Hara's career. Laughton was, unaccountably, so taken with her performance that he invited her to play Esmeralda opposite his Quasimodo in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame").<br /><br />The critic Michael Medved included "Jamaica Inn" in his "Fifty Worst Movies of All Time". I suspect that Medved was being deliberately provocative; he must have realised that he could not fill his book with fifty examples of Z-movies like "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" and that nominating a minor work of a major director for a "golden turkey" would be a good way of generating controversy. Nevertheless, the film is one of Hitchcock's weakest, lacking not only the drama and suspense we have come to associate with Hitchcock but also the touches of humour he often used to lighten the mood. (Any humour in the film is inadvertent). It is hardly surprising that Du Maurier disliked the adaptation and that Hitchcock left Britain for Hollywood as soon as possible after completing it. Today it is of interest to Hitchcock completists only. 4/10