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In early 1925, Alfred Hitchcock was engaged by Michael
Balcon's fledgling Gainsborough Studios, where he was completing his
third film as assistant to Gainsborough's star director, Graham Cutts.
The ambitious Hitchcock - still only 25 - had, in three years, performed
almost every role on the film set, and his tireless energy was breeding
resentment in the older Cutts, who complained that his assistant was
spreading himself too thinly. Balcon sensed it was time to give his
protégé a chance to direct alone, and dispatched Hitchcock to Germany
(his second visit in a little over a year) for his first assignment, The
Pleasure Garden, adapted by Eliot Stannard from a now forgotten novel
by Oliver Sandys.
Stannard would collaborate on all but one of Hitchcock's silent
films, and his script included many of the elements that would preoccupy the
director over the next half-century, including the theatre, voyeurism, murder
and male violence against women. A striking opening features the chorus girls of
the nightspot of the title descending a spiral staircase, with the camera fixed
on their legs. We then observe them dancing, watched with evident glee by a
largely male audience. One elderly man leers through opera glasses at his
favourite girl, who is first flattered, then appalled, as she realises his
attention is directed at her legs. This approach, forcing the audience to
recognise its own voyeurism, was to become a distinguishing feature of
Hitchcock's work.
Balcon gave Hitchcock a largely American cast, led by the
Universal star Virginia Valli as the over-trusting Patsy. But Valli is
upstaged by the Englishman Miles Mander as her malevolent and ultimately
murderous husband, Levett.
In an unusual display of confidence for a first time director,
Hitchcock included his own signature in the titles. It was an early sign
of his high profile. "Actors come and actors go," Hitchcock told the
Film Society in 1925, "but the name of the director should stay clearly
in the mind of the audiences."
Completed in 1925, The Pleasure Garden was hated by
Gainsborough's financier, C.M. Woolf, who, despite very favourable
advance reviews, was convinced the film had no commercial appeal and held up its
release until early 1927. The same fate awaited Hitchcock's next two
films The Mountain Eagle (1925) and The Lodger
(1926).
Mark Duguid
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1. Opening sequence (4:14)
Production stills
