This year, a Leytonstone-born Londoner born 113 years ago has been all the rage. The subject of two biopics, “The Girl” (which aired on HBO a few weeks back) and “Hitchcock” (which premieres at AFI Fest on Thursday), and the director of the newly named greatest film of all time “Vertigo,” he’s a man who’s been endlessly homaged, ripped off, and paid tribute to for decades — of course, we’re talking about Alfred Hitchcock.
The son of a greengrocer in East London, Hitchcock began working at an advertising company as a teenager, and submitted a number of twisty, witty short stories to the in-house magazine. This soon led to him moving into film, designing title cards for silents, and within five years he was directing. After a faltering start, with films that were cancelled, lost, or flops, the director had a major hit with thriller “The Lodger,” and it was that genre that would provide him with his greatest successes over the next 50 years or so.
This week sees a sparkly new Hitchcock Blu-ray box set released featuring a number of the director’s best-loved films, and to commemorate the occasion, we thought it seemed like the perfect time to go back and cast an eye over the (nearly) complete Hitchcock filmography. Being about as prolific as you could ask for, Hitch made over fifty films over the years, and as such, we’ve split the feature into two. Part one, today, takes a look at the director’s work in silents, and his early British talkies and his career before he crossed over to Hollywood debut. Tomorrow, we’ll kick off with “Rebecca” and track the films that saw him achieve global success, become a household name, and pick up five Best Director nominations at the Academy Awards (but, famously, never the win) Take a look at those prolific early years below, and check back tomorrow for much more. By the way, here’s part two of our Alfred Hitchcock retrospective.
“The Pleasure Garden” (1925)
Essentially the director’s feature debut (previous efforts “No. 13” and “Always Tell Your Wife” were, respectively, unfinished or uncredited, and have since been partially or wholly lost), had 1925’s “The Pleasure Garden” not been made by Alfred Hitchcock, it’s unlikely it would be of particular interest today. However in retrospect there is always the desire to comb through these early works to find glimmers of future genius and to trace the evolution of those preoccupations with which he would later became associated, and in this regard the film doesn’t completely disappoint. It’s a competently handled melodrama with some comedic and romantic elements, and one macabre murder sequence that will have amateur Hitchcock analysts nodding sagely and scribbling into their notebooks. The story is slight: Patsy, a goodhearted chorus girl befriends Jill, an out-of-luck performer who, as her star rises, reveals herself as unworthy of both Patsy’s friendship and the love of her trusting fiance. Patsy and Jill’s nice fiance are clearly destined from their initial meet-cute (they fall over one another in one of the film’s looser, more spontaneous-feeling scenes), even if their good natures prevent them from seeing that, until Jill marries someone else and Patsy’s husband turns out to be a deranged, murderous adulterer. It’s nicely performed, if occasionally marred by silent-movie histrionics and a sort of casual imperialist racism that was unremarkable at the time, but is ugly to a contemporary eye. So undoubtedly, a solid directorial beginning, but we shouldn’t overstate its importance either — you may be surprised by its watchability for a silent film made over 85 years ago, but then this was the also the year of “Battleship Potemkin” and Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush” — silent cinema, or, indeed “cinema” as it was known then, had already reached a pitch of sophistication and artistry elsewhere, and compared to those bona-fide milestones, “The Pleasure Garden” is but a trinket. [C]
“The Lodger: A Story Of The London Fog” (1927)
“The Lodger” was the first feature to put Hitchcock on the map. And what makes the film stand out now is the extent to which it feels like the arrival of the director, fully-formed, with many of the stylistic tics and thematic links that would come to play over the next half-century or so already in place (right down to the first appearance of his soon-to-be-trademark cameo, which came about only because an extra failed to show up). Based on the novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, it’s set in a London plagued by a serial killer known as The Avenger, who’s picking off blonde women around town. Model Daisy (June — yes, just June) is unconcerned, more interested in the curious, but dreamy new tenant Jonathan Drew (original heartthrob Ivor Novello) in her mother’s house. The pair are soon drawn to each other, but could Jonathan be the killer? Fresh from his time in Germany, where he spent time observing Murnau and Lang, Hitchcock had picked up an expressionist trick or two. The gorgeous sepia fog is, as the title might suggest, as much a character as anything else in the film, shadows come into play in a big way, and he’s starting to experiment with the camera, pushing in on the characters, and filming directly down staircases in a way that directly prefigures “Vertigo.” Perhaps most interesting of all is his use of casting. Novello (played of late by Jeremy Northam in “Gosford Park“) was a clean-cut star of music, stage and screen, and Hitchcock is immediately toying with the audience’s expectations by placing the actor in such an ambiguous part. He couldn’t possibly be a killer, could he? He’s much too handsome for that… One suspects that if he had free rein (the shoot wasn’t a happy experience), the ending might have been more ambivalent, but even so, this remains the foundation on which the rest of the director’s career was based on. [B+]
Hitchcock Cameo: 0:03, sitting at a desk in the newsroom.