Synopsis
Jamaica Inn (1939) is Alfred Hitchcock's adventure thriller based on Daphne du Maurier's novel — watch it online on iFILM. It was the last British picture Hitchcock completed before sailing to Hollywood; within a year he would be shooting Rebecca with Laurence Olivier.
Mary Yellan, newly orphaned, travels to Cornwall to stay with relatives who run a remote inn on the windswept moors. The place turns out to be a base for a wrecking gang — criminals who use false lights to lure ships onto the rocks, then strip the wreckage. Mary is trapped: nowhere to run, no one to trust, and the gang's real patron is far more dangerous than the roughnecks she can see.
Charles Laughton plays the local magistrate whose surface respectability hides something much colder, and a teenage Maureen O'Hara makes her film debut as Mary. Hitchcock reportedly lost final cut to Laughton's ego, and the film shows it — less tightly wound than his sharpest work of the era. But the coastal atmosphere is genuinely bleak, and Laughton's performance is unlike anything else in the director's filmography. Stream Jamaica Inn online on iFILM.
Starring
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