Hitchcock’s British Films

The Pleasure Garden (1925)

Hitchcock’s first complete feature film—The Pleasure Garden— was made by an already experienced hand. Hitchcock began as a title designer and writer when the American Famous Players–Lasky company opened an office in London in 1920. From his typically unpretentious remarks on this work to Truffaut, we can infer that Hitchcock’s work was already expressing his personality. “Very naive” he calls one of his effects, where he used a candle burning at both ends to illustrate that “George was leading a very fast life by this time.”1 The joke may seem naive today, but in the early 1920s it must have been fresh to find a title that played its pictorials lively against the words instead of flatly repeating them or—more commonly—neglecting the title card’s potential. In 1922 Hitchcock directed a two-reeler with Clare Greet and Ernest Thesiger, Number Thirteen, but it was not completed. When Hugh Croise fell ill during the production of Always Tell Your Wife, Hitchcock finished it with the star Seymour Hicks. Then for five films directed by Graham Cutts—Woman to Woman, The White Shadow, The Passionate Adventure, The Blackguard, and The Prude’s Fall—from 1922 to 1925, Hitchcock worked as writer, assistant director, and art director . He “was even sent out to turn the camera now and again.”2 Then The Pleasure Garden 1925 Hitchcock’s British Films 10 Michael Balcon sent him to Munich to direct an Anglo-German production based on Oliver Sandys’s novel The Pleasure Garden. Any suspicion—or hope—that we may be in for an Arabian Nights delight is dispelled by the credit sequence. A single spotlight shows a nightclub dancer convulsively dancing for an unseen audience. The title’s Pleasure Garden is a nightclub. The film has the glamour of the club romance but with the moral rigor we might expect of a young, working-class director. Hitchcock sharply details the moral laxity of the Pleasure Garden patrons. The men are hot, leering, lip-smacking, however elegant. The women doze. One man turns binoculars on the line of dancing legs. To focus on his favorite, he shifts to the more intimate monocle. Both visual aids detach the man from the woman. With the Hitchcock touch, the man’s leering devotion to the ladies is expressed by his ire when a passing customer steps on his foot. The dozing lady deflates the impression of hilarity that the hot faces of the men might suggest. Already there is the Hitchcock leg shot— glamorous, alluring. There is even a spiral staircase down which the girls clamber in the first shot. Hitchcock masks off the sides of the screen, as if the whole world were shrunk to that staircase. For the men of binoculars and monocles, all asteam, the world is that narrow. But not for Hitchcock. He develops four contrasting settings, each with its own character and moral values: the Pleasure Garden, the showgirl’s modest flat, the honeymoon setting at Lake Como, and the jungle proper. The Pleasure Garden is a false image of the jungle, as the Lake Como scenes will provide a false romantic harmony, and as the ambitious showgirl’s palace is a false parallel to the modest girl’s homey flat. The plot reverses the story of the worldly city mouse and the naive country mouse. Patsy Brand (Virginia Valli) is a worldly nightclub dancer. When the monocle man tells her he has fallen in love with her blonde kiss-curl, she removes it and hands it to him. She’s no blonde, but events will prove her to be both a patsy and a brand. Patsy takes under her wing an ambitious hoofer from the country, Jill Cheyne (Carmelita Geraghty), who is robbed on her arrival in the city and is saved by Patsy from the various fates worse than death. By a kind of moral hydraulics, however, or by what Hitchcock scholars 11 The Pleasure Garden came to discuss as the transference of guilt, the contamination of innocence, or the improbability of unadulterated virtue, the sophisticated Patsy shows herself to be increasingly warm and sincere, while the supposedly innocent Jill develops airs, greed, and callousness. When Patsy rescues her from the predatory stagedoor Johnnies, Jill flashes a smile back at them. Is she a flirt or just gullible? The country mouse proves cunning. Offered a job at five pounds a week, she immediately holds out for (and gets) twenty. She throws Boss Hamilton (George...