A College Boy's Disgrace
It's been a long while since I viewed a never-before-seen-by-me Alfred Hitchcock film. I had seen forty-two of his feature films before I watched the forty-third, Downhill, a British silent from 1927. This was his fifth film. Due to the title I assumed it had something to do with skiing. Instead, it's about a young university man named Roddy (Ivor Novello) who's aces in his class, popular and well-liked by his teachers and the Head Master. He likes a woman who works in a shop. He brings his best friend to the shop. They both dance with her, Roddy kisses her, the friend wants her, too. Later, the friend goes there and scores with her. She takes her problem, or what she says is her problem (pregnancy, if she's telling the truth, for these students have parents with piles of money) to the Head Master. She identifies Roddy, who had rebuffed her, as the culprit, when it was actually the friend who got it on with her. Roddy's expelled, his father kicks him out of his house, thus beginning the descent.
He works as a backstage theater worker, falls in love with an actress, and out of the blue receives an inheritance of 30,000 Pounds. He marries the actress, she cheats on him, spends his money, takes advantage of him, he goes further downhill. He's in Marseilles, a defeated bum. Two dockworkers figure out where he's from, take pity on him and send him back to England in an affordable but crummy little shithole of a chamber inside a cargo ship. Roddy hallucinates, sees people from his past in everyone he sees, but makes it home and is welcomed, Prodigal Son style, his father admitting his wrongdoing in jumping to conclusions. Roddy returns to university, the film completes a circle, and he's made it in time to enjoy some of his father's wealth until the Stock Market Crash of 1929.
If I make this sound like a potboiler, that's because it's really nothing remarkable, except that Hitchcock made it. It therefore has curious elements and moments. The narrative, driven almost entirely by images, has only a few intertitles, a remarkable practice for silent movies. One of Hitchcock's first jobs in the British film industry was designing intertitles for dialogue and description inserted into narratives. In this film, he mostly eschews intertitles, indicating that as early as 1927, only two years after his film debut, Hitchcock was thinking about the communicative power of imagery.
The film's femme fatale, the actress Roddy marries, is a graceful blonde with a figure made for lovely clothes, played by the gorgeous Isabel Jeans. Is she an early manifestation of what came to be known as the Hitchcock Blonde? Not really, because there's no dwelling on Roddy's obsession with her. She's a beautiful woman he sees a lot because of his job at the theater. Once he receives the convenient plot device inheritance, she's suddenly fascinated by him. Due to the film's medium, we don't get to hear Roddy's words to her or her vocal reactions. She takes advantage of him, he's a chump, there's nothing special about their relationship. The kind of romantic fascination seen between James Stewart and Grace Kelly in Rear Window is here absent. The blondness of Isabel Jeans' character is incidental, although I suspect Hitchcock had a longtime thing for blondes, even floozy characters like the one played by Jeans.
The film's main problem lies in its expansive length at 106 minutes. The "downhill" theme, presented several times in visuals, makes the movie's thrust quite clear. Many scenes play for too long. It's story could be told effectively with twenty or so minutes cut away. It's an endurance test, I found, although it didn't help that I was tired when I watched it.
There is no skiing in this film, but there is psychologically meaningful downhill skiing in Hitchcock's Spellbound.
Vic Neptune
Comments
Post a Comment