The Pleasure Garden (1925)

Director:

Alfred Hitchcock

Writers:

Oliver Sandys (novel)
Eliot Stannard

Release Date:

1926 (USA)

Genre:

Crime | Romance

Plot:

Patsy Brand is a chorus girl at the Pleasure Garden music hall. She meets Jill Cheyne who is down on her luck and gets her a job as a dancer...

Plot Keywords:

Honeymoon | Chorus Girl | Melodrama | Extramarital Affair | Murder

Cast

Virginia Valli	...	Patsy Brand
Carmelita Geraghty	...	Jill Cheyne
Miles Mander	...	Levett
John Stuart	...	Hugh Fielding
Ferdinand Martini	...	Mr. Sidey (as Ferd Martini)
Florence Helminger	...	Mrs. Sidey
Georg H. Schnell	...	Oscar Hamilton (as George Snell)
Karl Falkenberg	...	Prince Ivan (as C. Falkenberg)
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Lewis Brody
Nita Naldi	...	Levet's Native Lover (unconfirmed)

Directed by
Alfred Hitchcock

Writing credits (in alphabetical order)
Oliver Sandys		novel
Eliot Stannard

Produced by
Michael Balcon	....	producer
Erich Pommer	....	producer

Original Music by
Lee Erwin		(music composed and performed by)

Cinematography by
Gaetano di Ventimiglia

Art Direction by
Ludwig Reiber

Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Alma Reville	....	assistant director

Other crew
Alma Reville	....	continuity

Production Companies

• Bavaria Film
• Gainsborough Pictures
• Münchner Lichtspielkunst AG (Emelka)

Distributors

• Wardour Films (UK)
• Aymon Independent (1926) (USA)
• Network (2008) (UK) (DVD)

Also Known As:

Runtime:

75 min

Country:

UK | Germany

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Silent

Certification:

Argentina:13

Filming Locations:

Alassio, Savona, Liguria, Italy

Company:

Bavaria Film

Trivia:

Although shot in 1925, and shown to the British press in March 1926, the film wasn't actually released in the UK until after The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) was a massive hit.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Pleasure Garden theatergoer:That's an exquisite chorus line, Mr. Hamilton.
Oscar Hamilton:Meet Patsy Brand.
Pleasure Garden theatergoer:I had to meet you because I was charmed by that lovely curl of hair.
Patsy Brand:[detaches the curl and presents it] Then I give it to you and hope you have a nice time. Now that wasn't a very clever line, was it?

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Paul Merton Looks at Alfred Hitchcock (2009) (TV)

"Charmed by that lovely curl of hair"

Compared to the industries in Hollywood and Germany, precious few British films from the silent era have been preserved and deemed worthy of study. The Pleasure Garden would probably have been consigned to the dusty bin of obscurity, were it not for its being the debut of one Alfred Hitchcock.

Hitchcock was of course destined for greatness, so this picture inevitably gets scrutinised for hints of said greatness, or at least traces of Hitchcockiness. A point-of-view shot of the legs of a chorus line in the opening scene is often referenced as an example of such, a bit of pure voyeurism that is at odds with the moralist plot line. A slightly more story-orientated point-of-view shot occurs when a pickpocket eyes up Virginia Valli's handbag. Hitchcock was clearly interested from the beginning by the idea of putting the audience in the place of a character, and the latter example helps to tell the story visually, but it is of little long-term value. Neither the thief nor the leg-viewer become established characters, so there is really no need for us to "become" them.

The way these early scenes are shot may be aimed to cut down on the intertitles by conveying the story visually. You see, during his apprenticeship Hitchcock had done some art direction work on Der Letzte Mann, a picture best known for containing no intertitles whatsoever except one at the beginning and one near the end. While the resultant excess of technique is in fact more distracting than title cards, the idea obviously fired the young Hitch's imagination. To avoid having to "tell", he goes to somewhat forceful lengths to "show". Then again, it could just be because the 26-year-old director really liked to look at women's legs.

But after those showy opening sequences, The Pleasure Garden gets bogged down in a series of "talking" scenes. By contrast the interaction here is shot rather flatly, and there are suddenly lots of intertitles. This middle section of the picture is incredibly slow and boring. The plot is muddied by a lack of well-defined, memorable characters and the fact that the two female leads look very similar is especially confusing. In the melodramatic climax there are some vague attempts at psychological manipulation, with a few close-ups of a menaced Valli, but it's too little too late.

The Pleasure Garden is full of tricks, many of which can be seen as corresponding to the technique of the later Hitchcock – "God" shots, point-of-view shots, close-ups to focus us on a particular object. But these are all things any monkey could pick up after hanging around a few film sets, and the director does not yet know how to put them to best use. The Pleasure Garden may pique the interest of Hitchcock completists, but other than that it is simply dull.