The Farmer's Wife

The Farmer's Wife (1928) is an early Alfred Hitchcock silent comedy — watch online on iFILM. Widowed farmer Samuel Sweetland draws up a shortlist of women he could marry and pursues them one by one, each encounter landing somewhere between embarrassing and farcical.

His quiet housemaid Minta is the one who sees through the whole enterprise. She keeps the list, she keeps the house, and she says nothing. Running 112 minutes, the film plays as a stage farce adapted for the screen, but the mechanics of self-deception that Hitchcock would later put to much darker use are already visible here. Watch The Farmer's Wife (1928) online on iFILM.