The Hitchcock 9 - 1



The Pleasure Garden (Mar. 1926)

The Pleasure Garden, the earliest extant Hitchcock silent film, is a conventional love melodrama of the period that focuses on two chorus girls, one frivolous and one serious. As has been pointed out Hitchcock shows visual flair from the start in the way he uses closeups of the chorus girls' legs, and a striking image of a thin stairway. However, the unrolling of the story is often obvious, starting with the combination of a show business beginning and an exotic end. The most memorable actor is the rail-thin Miles Mander as Levett, the duplicitous philanderer who marries a girl and goes off to the tropics where he lives with a native woman (Nita Valdi). To excuse his long silence he sends his wife Patsy a note saying he has a fever. Deeply concerned, she borrows money for boat fare and as a "pleasant surprise," arrives unannounced. She resultingly discovers him with his local mistress, and in a state. He's apparently a raging alcoholic now and in every scene shivers and shakes. Watching Mander in these latter moments is certainly creepy, and quite strange. Meanwhile the "nice" man who went to "the East" with Levett really is ill. Things sort out so the bad guy gets his and the girl can be united with the nice guy instead of her duplicitous husband.

An innovation for the time was that American actresses were brought in to play the two chorus girls, Virginia Valli as the virtuous one, Patsy, and Carmelita Geraghty as the self-serving one, Jill, who links up with a bearded Russian prince (Karl Falkenberg) after Patsy has gotten her work at as a chorus girl at The Pleasure Garden when she was down on her luck. As Patsy starts getting involved with Levett, her pet dog always growls at him, as he didn't at her previous boyfriend. The dog knows Levett is no good. Patsy does, too late, when their relationship sours during their honeymoon on Lake Como. Nonetheless once Levett is off to the East, Patsy desperately longs to hear from him and almost goes mad with worry until the fake letter comes declaring that he's not been able to write because he's unwell. Levett is continually mean to the native girl too. After Levett has left, Jill becomes less important and there is a focus on the humble couple whose house Patsy lives in, rather like the humble couple, Mr. and Mrs. Bunting, who rent the room out to the suspicious man in The Lodger whom the police wrongly suspect in the serial killer.

Michael Walker, in his piece on "Hitchcock's Motifs," points out the startling moment in the film when it rapidly cuts from a closeup of Levet's hands drowning his native mistress to Patsy's hands offering comfort to Hugh (John Stuart), the "nice" cohort of Levett's out in the tropics who really is sick, and who will become the good man Patsy will switch to caring about when she discovers Levett is evil, duplicitous, and disloyal. Everything turns out very neatly -- for Patsy and Hugh, though Jill seemed like a parallel character, but has been dropped.

There are some good moments in the film, some arresting if outlandish ones, and a few that are awkward. This is even true of The Lodger, which, though it is a true Hitchcock story, has a few closeup shots that are poorly integrated with the sequence of which they are a part. One has to admit that in The Pleasure Garden, Hitchcock shows flair and fluency, but he is not quite working on his own kind of film. It's also arguable that he was never quite a truly great silent filmmaker, and that he did not come fully into his own at all till he made talkies. But as we go through the nine extant Hitchcock silents, there are increasingly impressive displays of his extraordinary cinematic talent, and at times he is making very much his own kind of film and dealing with what were to become favorite themes using techniques that were to be refined and repeated. In the last Hitchcock silent film, Blackmail, he is clearly himself, and in top form, throughout.

Though The Pleasure Garden was shown early to the press and received enthusiastically by some critics, it was regarded by the Gainsborough Pictures studio, for whom he was working up until The Ring, with suspicion as a bit too arty, and consequently was held it back, not released in England until after The Lodger had been released and proved a big hit. As the BFI notes about the new restored version point out, The Pleasure Garden is in a series of different tints, sepia, reddish, bluish, never simply black and white. These avoid monotony and also outline different sequences, though they do not seem to relate to different moods as contemporary use of tints might today. They also might be seen as somewhat distracting; but if this is how the film was originally made, that's how we ought to see it.

Note: on the screener DVD of the restored version, there was no added music. However, a 3-minute YouTube video of the stylish opening sequence is accompanied by the equally stylish new music composed for the restoration by Daniel Patrick Cohen.

Reviewed as part of the US premiere of The Hitchcock 9 BFI-restored silent films by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, shown at the Castro Theater June 14-16, 2013. Screener DVDs provided by Larsen Associates.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.