[ April 24, 2024 ]
Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema is very early Hitchcock. So early it’s silent – an underappreciated art-form that few have the patience for. More’s the pity. Hitchcock finds visual invention everywhere. Thanks to FilmStruck and the Criterion Collection, we finally get a chance to see decent prints of Hitchcock’s earliest available works, and discover that there was much more to the Master than his murderous masterpieces.
Hitchcock’s style is very much in evidence here, especially the early influence of German Expressionism. Brief scenes, as when Roddy goes down into the Underground after being cast out from his father’s house, and again as his shadow casts across the stairs as he ascends to his apartment, recall images from Nosferatu and Metropolis, while the club scene owes a debt to The Last Laugh. There’s no doubt that this is a young filmmaker experimenting with what the camera and the frame can do, but there’s an assuredness to the images that reminds us that Hitchcock never used flourishes without a purpose. (SASRO)
Downhill (1928): Hitchcock’s Fourth Film, Based on Play by Ivor Novello and Constance Collier
November 11, 2012 by Emanuel LevyShot in the U.K., Hitchcock’s fourth feature, “Downhill,” was based on sketches by two actors, Ivor Novello, who had starred in the director’s former film, “The Lodger,” and Constance Collier, adapted to the screen by Eliot Stannard.
Story continues below advertisementIn the .U.S., the film was released as “When Boys Leave Home,” though “Downhill” is more appropriate because it is literally an exploration of downward social mobility and moral decline.
The film introduced a theme that would recur in Hitchcock’s future work, the shared guilt, or the transference of guilt from one person to another. An opening title states: “two boys made a pact of loyalty—and one kept it at a price.”
Downhill
by Douglas Messerli, World Cinema Review:
David L’Estrange (Ivor Novello and Constance Collier) (screenplay), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Downhill / 1927
Alfred Hitchcock’s 5th movie, the silent film of 1927 Downhill, strangely enough is one of his very best. I characterize this as somewhat “odd” simply because several later films, far better known and admired by his audiences, are simply not as innovative and cinematically brilliant as this early work.
The story, based on a play by the film’s star, the beautiful Ivor Novello and Constance Collier under the shared alias David L’Estrange, is far less important than Hitchcock’s cinematic telling of it.
Roddy Berwick (Novello), his school’s star Rugby player, has a flirtatious relationship with a local waitress, Mabel (Annette Benson). On one such visit Roddy brings along his school friend, Tim Wakely (Robin Irvine) who takes the relationship with Mabel much further than the dances Roddy engages her in; and soon after the boys are called into the office of the school’s head, where Mabel sits, explaining that she is pregnant and that the father is Roddy, a lie told, in part, because she suspects she can get more financial support from Roddy’s wealthier parents. Tim must get a scholarship if he is to go to Oxford.
Roddy accordingly takes the blame, although he knows the truth, and is not only ousted from his school but his family as well.
As the title suggests, the rest of this film portrays his “downhill” progress, as he works, first, in Paris as a bit actor, marries one of the major actresses of the day, Julia Fotheringale (Isabel Jeans),
suddenly receives a financial windfall from a relative, and loses it through Julia’s extravagant spending. She has also continued her affair with her former sleazy boyfriend, matinee star Archie (Ian Hunger).
Psycholocially broken and mentally and physically ill, Roddy ends up in a Marseilles fleabag hotel room, pitied by sailors who agree to “throw him to the rats,” in this case, shipping him back home.
In the interim, his parents have discovered the truth, and have been desperately searching for him, so all ends well.
But the director tells another story, filming his images in sickly colors of pea-green, yellow, brown and blue to help us perceive the nauseous journey that our hero must undergo. More importantly, Hitchcock,
particularly in the later nightmare scenes, overlays images, focusing on machine parts and other mechanical devices that might make even Fritz Lang envious, creating a generally vertiginous sense of reality that he would not return to until the middle of his career with Vertigo and North by Northwest.Finally, the casting of pretty gay-boy Novello as the hero is brilliant because, just as in The Lodger of the same year, it makes the audience totally sympathetic with a character who otherwise might simply be seen as a spoiled schoolboy, or in the other film as a dangerous murderer. Here he becomes a tortured beauty who we hardly can take our eyes away from. Hitchcock was brilliant in this, often using handsome gay actors—Montgomery Clift, Cary Grant, Farley Granger, and Anthony Perkins to name only a few. One might argue that by using gays as potential or actual villains the great director was simply playing into the prejudices of the day; but I’d argue that he chose these beautiful figures in order to challenge and make us question our easy assumptions. And the many subtle homosexual relationships that Hitchcock concocted in his films help also to force us to query assumptions. Are Roddy and Tim, in Downhill, more than simply “friends,” and mightn’t help explain why Roddy allows himself to become the guilty figure; after all he is later betrayed yet again by his wife; he is clearly a weak man who nonetheless attracts all those around him.
Betrayal is, in fact, the common theme of this work. To the outsider Roddy has betrayed his school, his sport, his family; and he, in turn, is betrayed by his best friend, his school, a local girl, his parents, and his theater-star wife. Even though the Marseilles sailors ultimately save his life, they too are ready to present him with whatever fate might await, why they describe it as “throwing him to the rats.”
It is not a happy tale, despite its restoration of the hero by the film’s end to his loving family. It is perhaps already too late in Roddy’s now ruined life to allow him to return to normality. As in so very many of Hitchcock’s works, life after accusation, mistaken identity, inexplicable assault, or, especially, actual criminal involvement, can never be the same again. In film after film, Hitchcock presents us with figures whose lives are forever altered by accident, chance, or simply involvement with the wrong people at the right time. And it is almost always a journey, by train, plane, or simply through the courts and conscience to a world you will never wish to return to.
Like a “downhill” skier, the good-looking kid of Hitchcock’s 1927 masterwork will probably never be able to be lifted to the top of the mountain again.
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9 Comments
4 years ago
What a sorry bunch of characters, so common, so typical, why should I want to watch them? They not inspire me at all. Think I’ll watch The Longest Day instead.
4 years ago
When what to my wondering eyes should appear ! ?…. ? But a minature sleigh and
TRUMP 2020.
4 years ago
“Hitchcock’s style is very much in evidence here, es-
pecially the early influence of German Expressionism.”
Btw., was mainly two German Jews to whom we owe our food wealth.
Without their discoveries 7 billion people would not live on earth now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_von_Sachs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Bosch
Bosch (co-founder of IG Farben, which later
became notorious under Hitler) wasn’t Jewish:
“He, a critic of many Nazi policies, was gradually
relieved of his high positions after Hitler became
chancellor, and fell into depression and alcoholism.”
4 years ago
Reply to
Marc
“In your book, you describe the work of the founder of
plant physiology, Julius Sachs (1832–1897) and explain
the importance of his work. However, science progresses
at a high pace, so why is Sachs still being discussed today?”
https://www.mercatornet.com/features/view/are-plants-intelligent/22014
https://www.mercatornet.com/conjugality/view/an-evolutionary-biologist-dissects-gender-theory/21707
The trial against the Kassel biology professor Kutschera collap-
sed on Wednesday after more than six hours of negotiations.
Kutschera’s defender filed 14 petitions for evidence. The hea-
ring of various scientists and a paediatrician was intended to
show that Kutschera’s statements were scientifically proven facts.
https://www.hna.de/kassel/mitte-kassel-ort248256/prozess-kasseler-uni-professor-geplatzt-ngz-12355070.html
4 years ago
Reply to
Marc
Jewish Julius Sachs’s book in the courtroom. Kutschera is an
admirer of Sachs, and has dedicated one of his books to him.
4 years ago
“The film is interesting because of the use of several typical Hitchcock motifs: the innocent suspect, the trans-
fer of guilt and the play with religious motifs, in this case that of the prodigal son. Hitchcock regarded this film
mainly as a finger exercise, and so there are also various stylistic elements recurring in his later work.”
The English critic and Hitchcock biographer John Russell Taylor wrote in 1978: “When Down-
hill was created, no one in the whole of British film worked with such a cinematic imagination,
no one else told a film with this gripping and fascinating mastery of cinematic possibilities. Yes,
one had the feeling that Hitch couldn’t help himself, not even to a subject he didn’t like at all.”
At that time, silent movies in the cinema were usually accompanied
acoustically by a piano player. They’re a world cultural heritage.
Infantile postmodernist nihilistic playstation consumers need “macrophallic heroes” with
whom they can “identify”, a lots of art blood, sound- and 3D-effects, many corpses and
explosions. This distracts them from their inferiority complexes and the lack of success.
4 years ago
Reply to
Marc
Found something interesting
http://b1ff5939f6.nxcli.net/2019/06/firefly.html/#comment-4495986394
4 years ago
Here is a good enjoyable comedy
The skipper of a tatty coastal ‘puffer’ boat cons an American into letting “The Maggie” carry a cargo to a Scottish island. The American soon realises he’s been conned but can he stop them?
High and Dry (1954) The Maggie
https://hdbest.net/watch/high-and-dry-1954.html
4 years ago
Here is a good enjoyable comedy
The skipper of a tatty coastal ‘puffer’ boat cons an American into letting “The Maggie” carry a cargo to a Scottish island. The American soon realises he’s been conned but can he stop them?
High and Dry (1954) The Maggie
https://hdbest.net/watch/high-and-dry-1954.html
