|
Originally a stage vehicle for Gerald du Maurier and first performed in 1920,
The Prude's Fall was announced in the spring of 1923 as the latest film by
Graham Cutts, then completing Woman to Woman (1923) at the Poole Street studio
in Islington. A 23-year-old Alfred Hitchcock, who served as Cutts'
assistant director, art director, and scenarist, was said to be at work on the
adaptation. In the event, however, Cutts and company made The White Shadow
(1924) instead, and The Prude's Fall was held over for almost two years,
eventually going on to the floor at Islington in February 1925 after a
reportedly disastrous location shoot in Switzerland and Italy.
Cutts' and Hitchcock's relationship was at a low ebb after the production of
The Blackguard (1925) at the Ufa studios outside Berlin the previous autumn.
Hitchcock and his not-yet-wife Alma Reville, who served as something akin to
second assistant director, claimed to have 'carried' the badly behaved Cutts
through the later stages of the shoot. The Blackguard's American star Jane Novak
was retained for The Prude's Fall, and it was probably rushed into production to
minimise the cost of keeping her on. At any rate, the film was completed in
haste and tinkered with at leisure. Cutts completed a subsequent film - The Rat
(1925) - before The Prude's Fall was shown in public.
At the start of April 1925 producer Michael Balcon passed the film to Adrian
Brunel, owner of a Soho 'film hospital', to direct re-shoots, pad out with
intertitles, and edit. A few months later, writing from the Munich set of his
directorial debut The Pleasure Garden (1926), Hitchcock told Brunel he had heard
it had emerged "a new being". Yet it was barely released in Britain, and was
described by Variety as "film junk".
To film historians, however, the surviving fragments of The Prude's Fall will
never be 'junk', but a valuable piece of Hitchcock prehistory.
Henry K. Miller
|
1. 'Long life and happiness' (2:23)
