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.
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.