Champagne

Champagne (1928) Not just the name of the movie, but what you'll need a lot of to get through it.

Notable cast/crew: Betty Balfour as The Girl.  Jean Bradin as The Boy.  Gordon Harker makes his final Hitchcock appearance as The Father.  Hannah Jones, making the second of five appearances, as an uncredited Club Servant.  Phyllis Konstam makes the first of four appearances, in an uncredited role.  Eliot Stannard writes the screenplay.   

Running time: 85 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Plot: Millionaire father is distressed to see his daughter in the papers again.  She has run off with his airplane, which she ditches in the Atlantic Ocean, in order to catch up with an ocean liner carrying her boyfriend so that they can elope.

Champagne goggles

While at sea, her boyfriend suffers from seasickness so she spends time with a mysterious man.  She receives a telegram from her father telling her he thinks her boyfriend is only interested in her for his money.  After a spat, they rendezvous in Paris where the boy finds her in the company of the mysterious man again.  He becomes increasingly annoyed with her obnoxious behavior, so she spends more time with the mysterious man.  Her father then turns up to tell her he has lost his fortune (made in the champagne business) in a stock market crash.

She decides to sell her jewelry but is robbed on the way to sell it.  She tries cooking at home, but her food is inedible.  Her father slips out to a restaurant to dine alone, and it is revealed this is all a ruse to teach her a lesson.  He's still loaded.

Her boyfriend returns offering to take care of her and her father.  She decides she doesn't need him and will get a job instead.  He storms out again.  In her job at the dance club, she runs into the mysterious man again.  He informs her that it isn't a safe place to work.  Her boyfriend shows up and joins them at their table.  He disapproves of where she's working and who she's hanging out with.  He storms out but returns with her father.  He berates her then reveals he never lost his fortune.  He has only been trying to teach her a lesson which evidently didn't work.

She leaves and turns to the mysterious man who had left his card with her earlier.  He's leaving for America, and she asks if she can accompany him.  Their paths all intersect in the end as the mysterious man has been working with her father all along to keep an eye on her.  Her father now blesses her marriage to her boyfriend.

MacGuffin: None

Hitchcock cameo: None

Hitchcock themes:

• Trick camera shots

Verdict: This film is awful.  The lead actress behaves not unlike a modern-day socialite, but, rather than come off as charming, she comes off as an obnoxious brat.  I spent the entire movie wishing someone would slap some sense into her or that she'd get hit by a bus to make the movie end.  Hitchcock was not fond of this picture either, referring to it as "dreadful", "the low ebb of my work", and "a movie without a story to tell".  The only redeeming features are the camerawork he employs: triple exposure to simulate seasickness, the rocking of the camera to show the boat tilting, multiple shots filmed through a glass, and the first freeze-frame in movie history which pulls back to reveal it is actually a photo.  Unless you're a Hitchcock completist, this one isn't worth the time.

Out of five bananas, I give it:

Next review: The Manxman