Alfred Hitchcock | The Pleasure Garden / 1925

the innocents

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eliot Stannard (screenplay, based on Oliver Sandys’ The Pleasure Garden), Alfred Hitchcock (director) The Pleasure Garden / 1925

 

The silent film The Pleasure Garden of 1925 represents Alfred Hitchcock’s first work as a film director, and although there are some quite remarkable moments in this film that might remind us of the best of the numerous good-girl / bad-girl roommate movies, of a female version of The Flesh and the Devil (1926), and even call up elements of William Wyler’s The Letter (1940), this early work has very few of true Hitchcockian moments, despite critic Dave Kehr’s arguments that it serves as a “clip reel of Hitchcock motifs to come.” Kehr sees Vertigo even in the radial procession of young chorus dancers descending a staircase, but such a reference appears more to me as a sort of art-historical like imposition upon a scene played out dozens of times in movie musicals. And the fact that a man raises his opera glasses to get a better look at a chorine’s shapely ankles does not, for me, immediately call up Rear Window.

 

     On the other hand, one might argue that Hitchcock is far more successful than many other directors of the day in turning melodramatic moments into truly high, almost tragic theater, particularly in the last scenes when the nice chorus girl Patsy Brand (Virginia Valli) travels to Burma to visit her sickly husband Levet (Miles Mander) only to discover him in the arms of a native girl who serves his colonial needs as a lover. His sudden pushing away of the beautiful and subservient child (Elizabeth Pappritz) may be highly melodramatic, but when, soon after, she wades into the ocean with the intent to drown herself and he follows in order to make certain that she suffers her fate with a strangled neck, we recognize that from the very beginning of his filmmaking Hitchcock was utterly fascinated by true evil, often unperceived by innocents such as Patsy and her ex-roommate Jill’s fiancée Hugh Fielding (John Stuart) who is Levet’s business partner in Southeast Asia.

      And in that scene alone Hitchcock reveals the horrors of which Joseph Conrad (to whose work Hitchcock would later be attracted) and so many others had warned about European colonialization.

      Jill Cheyne, Hugh’s sweetheart, certainly begins the film as a kind of innocent, her money and references all stolen almost the moment she gets off the train. And Patsy, just as we are encouraged to, clearly perceives her that way, offering up a small room and half of her bed for the displaced newcomer. But by the next morning we realize that Jill can twirl even the most hard-hearted men such as Oscar Hamilton (George H. Schnell), the theater director, around her lithe body. Within a week, so it appears in Hitchcock’s compressed cinematic tale, she is being offered a plush suite by the director and a possible marriage to Prince Ivan (Karl Falkenberg), playing off one against the other.

      As quickly as that, Jill moves out of Patsy’s chorine poverty and into the lap of 1920s luxury, forgetting all about her handsome dog-loving boyfriend, Hugh. And it takes the entire movie and Hugh almost losing his mind in a fever before Patsy realizes that it is he—who she first met in her dreary apartment while Jill was out having a costume fitted—who she truly loves, and not Levet whom she married out of sheer loneliness.

       Basically, however, the few paragraphs summarize the entire 90-minute narrative, except perhaps to mention Patsy’s kind and caring landlords, the Sideys (Ferdinand Martini and Florence Helminger) who, when Jill refuses her a loan so that she might travel to Burma, offer her out of their life savings. There are some beautifully composed scenes of Levet and Patsy, moreover, at Lake Cuomo during their honeymoon.

       The problem is that the rest of the film is made up of long pauses, the way so many late silent films behaved, as if they were waiting to fill the empty frame with words they had yet discovered how to successfully convey, yet knew would soon be on their way.       

       Some of the space was filled up with short dancing numbers and costume poses, neither of them being Hitchcock’s forté. Yet even in his very first film the great director showed his commitment to representing homosexual figures, something he would do in numerous of his movies in a manner that few other major directors of early cinema—with the exception perhaps of G. W. Pabst and William A. Wellman—chose to. 

      In the beginning, clearly, they were part of his presentation of the dark and dangerously worldly environments into which his innocents seldom ventured. In this case, he presents an unnamed and uncredited dress designer as a sissy much in manner of the endless parade of pansies of the early 1930s movies. But he gives him two long sessions in which to wave his arms about, throw his head and shoulders into frustrated perturbation, and generally reveal just how fed up he is with his woman customers who never fully recognize his genius.

      In the 1920s cinema, when the code had not yet begun to close down on all homosexual representation and in which crossdressing as still fairly popular along with the far more complex explorations of LGBTQ figures that were beginning to appear—in films such as F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Mikaël (1924), Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), Louis J. Gasnier’s Parisian Love (1925), Clarence Brown’s Flesh and the Devil (1926), William A. Wellman’s Wings (1927),  John Ford’s Upstream (1927), Wellman’s Beggars of Life (1928), William Dieterle’s Sex in Chains (1928), Frank Capra’s The Matinee Idol (1928), Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher) (1928), Jean Epstein’s Finis terrae (1929), and G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929)—the stereotyped role of the sissy, with a few noted exceptions, had not yet come to dominate cinematic gay depiction.

     Within a year, even Hitchcock in The Lodger (1927) and in later films of decade such as Downhill (1927) and Murder! (1930) would explore gay sexuality in a more complex manner. All of those early attempts to represent non-heterosexual behavior were, of course, thwarted by even the early threats of the Hays Code, forcing US film directors and continental filmmakers interested in the US market to join in what has been called as the “pansy craze,” evidence of which we have even in this early British film of Hitchcock’s.

 

Los Angeles, April 8, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).