Strong and Moving!

Sadly Over-hyped

Great Film overall

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

The tendency to see greatness in the earliest extant work of a true master is understandable yet not entirely merited in this, the first feature-length film directed by Alfred Hitchcock.We arrive upon a stage production of "Passion Flowers," a dance-hall revue where pretty girls kicking up a storm seems the main attraction. One of our "Flowers," Patsy Brand (Virginia Valli) keeps the lusty patrons at a wry distance. She opens her arms only to a new girl, Jill Cheyne (Carmelita Geraghty), who seems an innocent but quickly shows she's a woman with an agenda, and little time for friends after they serve their purpose. This includes a "dewy-eyed" fellow named Hugh Fielding (John Stuart) who is engaged to Jill but finds a truer friend in Patsy.A dinky period melodrama with overplayed sentiment and silent-cinema quirks galore, "The Pleasure Garden" benefits from a smooth opening sequence that shows our young director in splendid form. We begin with a shot of dancing girls rushing down a spiral staircase to perform, followed by a shot of a row of male spectators, each individually expressing voyeuristic delight, capped off by the one woman in the row, who has nodded off.I felt a bit like her well before the business of "The Pleasure Garden" had concluded. Not that "Pleasure Garden" is ever bad. It offers decent central performances and some delightful bits of business courtesy of Patsy's middle-class landlord couple and a cute dog, named "Cuddles" in the film. But the story lacks the depth and engagement of Hitchcock's better films to come.Hitchcock does a nice job early on playing with audience expectations. Patsy's opening moments show her in a blond wig, and when one patron clumsily compliments her on her "lovely curl of hair," she takes it off her wig with a smirk. "Then I give it to you and hope you have a nice time," she says, cutting him off.But it's Jill who turns out to be the film's heel, something anticipated in the way she pushes Cuddles off Patsy's bed in a moment no one else sees but us. Hitch loved these sort of designing women, and made much of them in other movies, but here he just trots Jill through her paces until she upstages Patsy 11 minutes in and then proceeds to shake her off once she gets herself established with the same sleazy patrons Patsy wisely avoids.The story is much the same with the other duplicitous character in the film, a friend of Hugh's named Levet (Miles Mander, the only actor here who worked in another Hitchcock film, "Murder!"). Levet is entirely too sly and one-note to make us understand why practical Patsy jets off with him after he tells her sob stories of a lonely life on a tropical post. No surprise we find him a few minutes after marrying Patsy in the arms of a tropical-island girl he treats like a maid.The story does nothing with Jill after establishing her true nature; we watch her coldly cut off Patsy a couple of times and wonder what made Patsy into such a victim when she had smarts and looks to spare. Valli, like Geraghty an American actress in this very British film, plays her part with too much fluttering vibrato, even if it is what the story requires. The resolution of Patsy's unhappy marriage is done in a particularly utilitarian style, Hitch showing his screen economy but not the shadings or textures of his later work.I liked "The Pleasure Garden" more for the hints of later greatness, though the symbolism here is too often on-the-nail for its own good. When Levet is done with Patsy, he casually throws a rose he gave her into the river and tells her "Had to - it wilted." Meanwhile, her relationship with Hugh just sort of happens out of left field, with us being told by the end Cuddles knew all along.It's a pat end for a pat film, not terrible, just stunted by the time it was made, the silent medium it was made in, and the inexperience of its maker, who managed to get much better very soon.

The Pleasure Garden is notable for being the first complete film of Alfred Hitchcock, one of the greatest and most influential directors in film, so it is one of great historical interest. It's not one of his best, there is somewhat of a primitive look, some of the pacing does get pedestrian in the middle and the scripting at times suffers from being overly talky. Hitchcock has definitely done worse though, and The Pleasure Garden is a decent film. Even for such an early effort, Hitchcock's direction does shine through with great use of camera angles and directorial flourishes. No signs of phoning in. The story is intelligently explored, the script serves the actors and Hitchcock competently(though of course there have been much better scripts since) and while the pacing is uneven the beginning and ending are solid enough. The acting give their all, maybe with some over-playing here and there, but there is signs of effort. All in all, a quite decent first complete film, though Hitchcock definitely went on to much better since. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Interesting composure and camera-work, and the dog, are about all this one has going for it. Interesting, slightly voyeuristic opening shot of dancers pouring down a spiral staircase, in sepia-tinted brown. A bit of mild, subtle humour as we see a bored man among the first row of otherwise thrilled patrons at the revue. Top hat'd Hamilton smoking a cigar while standing in front of a 'Smoking Prohibited' sign. People coming home to find their dog has chewed up their clothes These bits show the director already having a sense of humour, and playing with his audience, but not yet really knowing what to do with the fairly uninvolving story present, a sort of behind-the-scenes melodrama at a revue; infidelity, and the murder at the beach house. Surprisingly dull and lackluster results, considering the way it all sounds, although the climax does have a little bit of action to it. A lot of the sets are well done, as is the director's humorous flair in filming some of them, but quite frankly, the plot is just boring and uneven. Were it not for the fact that this is one of Alfred Hitchcock's first films as director (it is his first solely-directed feature film, but third film to be released) , no one would remember, or care about, this one.

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.