So, finally I’m caught up and can start posting these. I’m already well underway with a long-planned “marathon” viewing of every film Alfred Hitchcock ever directed, so the reviews should come fairly steady for the next month or so. I’ve seen most of Hitchcock’s later work, and just about all the most notable ones, but there were a lot of gaps to be filled, especially in his earlier output.

I came to The Pleasure Garden with relatively low expectations. Of his early work, The Lodger tends to be the one most frequently cited as “the first true Hitchcock”, with Blackmail coming a close second. The Pleasure Garden apparently wasn’t even released in the UK until The Lodger became a hit.

I also came to it fairly anxious. It’s been a long time since I watched a silent movie, and I’m never really any good at it. A silent really has to be damn good to even hold my attention over a feature length. So it says a lot that, even at this early “throwing myself in the deep end” point of my Hitchcock marathon, I gleaned at least some significance from his debut… and in the end even sort of loved it a little.

As the movie begins we find ourselves as far removed from the stereotypical Hitchcock movie as it’s possible to get. Though people would later point to the leery looking old man in the audience of the opening scene as a hint at the voyeurism that would become a key component of Hitchcock’s style, it’s really just a rather quaint music hall scene. Here we meet a couple of chorus girls, one of whom is engaged to a man who lives far away. When the other girl marries and leaves on honeymoon, the engaged girl constantly postpones leaving the music hall to go and join her husband, preferring to (in so many words) sleep around. Meanwhile, the married girl’s husband has sailed out to the same location as the engaged girl’s fiancé. When the married girl goes to join her husband, however, she finds he has been unfaithful to her, and actually a lot worse besides.

This is where the movie sort of surprised me with a seriously dark turn in the finale. There are some really great visuals including a ghostly apparition that kind of serves a purpose akin to Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth. Of course, all is wrapped up quite happily, however, and that’s the part where I couldn’t stop smiling. The right two people wind up together and in the final scene, their dog barks happily. “How do you like that?” one of them says, “Cuddles knew all the time!” I don’t know why but that just had me beaming long after the end title, lol. It’s by no means essential Hitchcock, that goes without saying, but it’s got a few interesting things in it and also interesting how relatively simple the pleasures are that it extols.

Tags: Hitchcock, silent

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