Champagne

Alfred Hitchcock once described Champagne as the lowest ebb in his career, and that may well be the chief distinction of this thoroughly lackluster 1928 effort from the director. There’s certainly little else to distinguish this shapeless, rambling romantic comedy. Following a spoiled heiress from riches to rags to riches again, the film is at once spry and exhausted, a madcap farce on barbiturates. The girl—a veritable font of teeming womanhood—finds herself caught in a love triangle with two men, who apparently do little other than smoke and drink fiercely while glaring at each other. (They would have made a lovely couple were it not for the dame.) This jet-set romance is interrupted when mega-rich daddy tells her he’s broke, and suddenly her world of cocktails and snappy gowns goes up in a puff of smoke. In a plot twist that recalls the earlier Downhill, she winds up working in young Alfred’s favored den of iniquity, a Parisian dance hall.

Surely this is the most superficial rendition of the eternal Hitchcock plot: a woman reduced to living doll for the edification of a neurotic, controlling man. You see, daddy was faking bankruptcy all along just to help his daughter learn a bit of responsibility and scare away any gold-digging gigolos scoping her inheritance. Rather delightfully, this is revealed when the girl’s father hands her a newspaper where the front-page headline reads, “Daring daughter to be taught lesson she’ll never forget, millionaire declares”—the film is a lovely paean to the diligence of the daily press, if nothing else. Yet there’s something creepy about the whole screwy setup, with father fabricating her entire world just to teach a few life lessons about love and money. Down and out, she learns her only option is to pursue her own objectification—no more of this unseemly independence that so bothered father. She settles for the wholesome career of toothpaste model, but the agency prefers her legs to her smile. Soon she’s in the dance hall, handing out flowers and looking for a new sugar daddy to rescue her from the awful place. The only lesson she learns is her own market value.

The Ring

People looking for insight into the mind of Alfred Hitchcock might well turn to The Ring, a 1927 boxing film that sports a rare solo writing credit from the director (although his wife, Alma Reville, also had a hand in it). Imagine their surprise when they discover the film is, at first blush, little more than an anti-climactic melodrama, largely devoid of suspense or the darker passions that course through his strongest work. Talk of circles and rings aside, the film actually offers little more than a quaint triangle. A promising boxer dubbed One-round Jack comes under the wing of heavyweight champ Bob Corby, who flirts with the youngster’s wife in-between sparring rounds. The girl, not even afforded the distinction of a name, is bandied about as a prize between the two men—a fact so explicit that the film even assigns her a monetary value (she’s worth more than two quid, at least).

The tension between the two men is played as pissing match, complete with all the expected warning signs of machismo run rampant. The most obvious is the armband Bob gifts to the girl, who hides it from her husband-to-be in embarrassment (the wedding ring Jack gives her is notably dwarfed by the shiny bauble). Every scene unfolds at an unhurried pace, but the confidence of the film—particularly after the muddled, self-conscious efforts of Easy Virtue and Downhill—is striking. The outcome of the final fight is never in doubt (love rallies for the knockout in the fourth round), but the sequence itself is a perfect showpiece for Hitchcock’s talent. He skillfully cuts between the two small figures in long shot, framed in a patch of light amid the darkened rabble, and the disorienting close-ups of the two bodies slamming against each other. It’s visceral and yet poetic without ever feeling precious. Here, at last, is Hitchcock moving beyond merely throwing style at the screen to see what sticks. He’s in full command of his abilities, a prizefighter that knows how to pick his shots.

That confident mastery of the material invests the slight scenario with surprising nuance. While the film at time seems blandly obvious and even anti-dramatic, Hitchcock approaches it with a detached, quizzical attitude. It ceases to be an old-fashioned love triangle and becomes instead a more tricky study of paranoia. Significantly, Jack never really sees any sign of infidelity, only the flirty familiarity between his wife and his mentor. Out of doubt springs despair, and the affable Jack devolves into a sullen primitive, sometimes listless and other times snarling with so much rage he can knock over photographs at ten paces with a single glare. Yet the film is filled with faulty vision, calling into doubt everything we see. Key events are hidden behind crowds, while point of view shots are typically blurred, either punch drunk or liquor addled. Little actually happens in the film, and the crowd brays for more blood; the performers oblige for their (and our) benefit. Optimists might say the film ends with the girl renouncing her fickle love for whoever’s on top, learning empathy by admitting her love for Jack when he is at his lowest point. The more cynical might say that it doesn’t matter who wins or loses—all the audience wants is a fight.

Downhill

Alfred Hitchcock followed his success with the The Lodger with Downhill, an aptly titled retrograde effort. Much of the credit—or blame, perhaps—belongs to Ivor Novello, who wrote the script and stars as a somewhat bewildered, prudish playboy. An all-star rugby player at a boarding school, the jaunty young Novello proves irresistibly attractive to women, including the sinister sexpot who lures him to “Ye Olde Bunne Shoppe” in the hopes of seducing him (ye olde bunne in the ovenne). She fails and settles for his chum, but puts the blame on Novello anyway in the hopes of tapping his family wealth. From there, his life—apparently as sturdy as the hideous cardboard sets where most of the action takes place—collapses in mild chaos, light depravity, and slight madness.

Hitchcock has never really been what you might call a feminist director, but he could still muster some strong, intelligent female characters throughout his career. Unfortunately, the sex-panicked script lays the blame for Novello’s fall at the feet of a series of shrill, callous gold-diggers and floozies, with rock bottom being a hairy-lipped lady in a dingy Parisian dance hall. If there is any reason to watch this film—and really, there probably isn’t—it would be for Hitchcock’s technique, which betrays an intelligence far livelier than the surroundings. Some elegant lighting, a few judicious tracking shots, and even some point-of-view perspective shooting add to the visual interest of the film, but do little to enrich the material. Mostly, these touches serve as an occasionally pleasant distraction from the finger-wagging, tongue-clucking moralizing of the dreary script.