Downhill

Downhill (1927) (released in America as When Boys Leave Home) is a tale of two school-boys who made a pact of loyalty.  One of them kept it-at a price.

Notable cast/crew: Ivor Novello as Roddy Berwick.  Ian Hunter as Archie makes the first of three appearances in Hitchcock silent films.  Isabel Jeans as Julia Fotheringale makes her first of three Hitchcock films.  Hannah Jones as the Dressmaker makes the first of five Hitchcock films.  Only Clare Greet and Leo G Carroll will appear in more of his films.  Eliot Stannard (writer) wrote eight of Hitchcock's early films.  

Running time:  82 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Nobody knows you, when you're down and out.

Plot: Roddy and Tim are classmates at boarding school.  They spend time with a waitress, Mabel, who has a thing for Roddy and tolerates Tim.  When Roddy shows less interest in her, she becomes spiteful and goes to their school, accusing Roddy of having gotten her pregnant when it was Tim.  Mabel wants to milk money out of Roddy's wealthy father.  Tim says nothing for fear of losing his scholarship (his father is not well off), and Roddy accepts expulsion knowing this would ruin Tim for life.

It all goes downhill from there.  Roddy's father doesn't believe him when he says he's innocent so he leaves home descending into a life of debauchery.  He becomes an actor, comes into a sum of money through an inheritance, and marries a famous actress.  She is only interested in his money and, after burning through it until he's in debt, starts stepping out on him with her old sugar daddy.  Roddy catches them, confronts his wife, and leaves them after she reminds him he signed the house over to her.

He becomes a taxi dancer to make ends meet and ultimately winds up sick, broke, and barely surviving on the docks of Marseilles.  He is returned home to find his father has learned the truth, and he's restored to his position at home and school.

MacGuffin: The pregnancy.  It's not mentioned again after Roddy leaves home.

Hitchcock cameo: None

Hitchcock themes: 

• Expressionism 
• Staircases - and we got a lot of them, including an extended shot of Roddy on an escalator going down

Verdict: The movie is an adaptation of a stage play of the same name written and starring Ivor Novello.  Novello is about 20 years too old to be playing a schoolboy, but otherwise he carries the movie with his performance.

Hitchcock made limited use of title cards preferring to let the action tell the story.  Unlike the stereotype of silent movies, though, he has the actors speaking throughout the film while only using the title card for clarity or emphasis where the stereotype is of actors not speaking at all unless there would be a title card immediately showing what they said.

The story is quite obviously a version of the parable of the prodigal son albeit this time with the son leaving for a nobler purpose.  That theme works, and the imagery has strong parallels to the parable.  Certain plot points no longer work as well.  For example, a girl could not simply accuse whomever she wanted to of getting her pregnant now and hope to extort money to keep her quiet since a DNA test would quickly prove the boy's innocence.  However, if you keep in mind the age of the film, these flaws don't overwhelm the story.

Hitchcock made use of several interesting shooting techniques: long shots of Roddy walking down steps, an upside down tilted shot from Julia's perspective as she leans backward in her chair, and the voyage home originally being shown with a green tint to emphasize Roddy's illness/nausea.  Tinting of black and white films was common in the earlier days of film.  Hitchcock would revisit many of these techniques to emphasize a character's isolation or to keep a film visually interesting.

Out of five bananas, I give it:

Next review: The Ring