Downhill (1927)

• Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

• From the play “Down Hill” by David L’Estrange (i.e., legendary stage actress Constance Collier and famous-for-several-things Ivor Novello – who, yes, is also the star of this film – writing under a collective pen name). Scenario by Eliot Stannard.

• Silent.

• Opening title card:

“Here is a tale of two school boys who made a pact of loyalty. One of them kept it – at a price.”

• These two boys are Roddy Berwick (played by the aforementioned Novello), the school’s handsome, model-citizen rugby hero, and Tim Wakeley (Robin Irvine), his BFF non-Rugbyist cohort, who hopes to attend Oxford next year.

• A flirty young maid-waitress at the school called Mabel (Annette Benson), who clearly has the hots for both “darling” boys, works a second job at a sweets den in town (“Ye Olde Bunne Shoppe”), and once upon an afternoon, invites the pair over to the shop(pe) for some……dancing. (On Wednesdays, the Shoppe closes at 1:00, dontcha know?)(Wink wink, nudge nudge, etc. etc.)

• Well, only one of the boyz makes a habit (?) of Mabel and Ye Olde Bunne Shoppe (*cough* Tim *cough*) – but when Mabel the Flirtster winds up with a…(I’m so sorry for this, but it’s right there) bunne in the oven, she makes the financially advantageous decision to accuse the richling boy – i.e., Rugby Captain Roddy – of being the responsible party and, like a true chicken shit, Ye Olde Bunne Papa Timmy makes no effort to correct her.

“I couldn’t speak, Roddy,” Chicken-Shit Tim says later. “My scholarship – – it would have broken Dad’s heart.”

Ugh. You no-integrity flirt-dope. Fuck you, fuck your scholarship, and fuck your daddy’s pride.

• The bit of film through which Mabel lie-recounts Roddy’s Ye Olde Indiscretion (…okay, I’ll stop, I promise) features a nifty segment of image overlay, whereby Mabel’s eyes/face are visible through her pictorially displayed “memories.”

(I use ‘nifty’ as a positive descriptor strictly in an aesthetic sense – as a communication of the narrative, it is heavy-handed as hell and I rolled my eyes. “WE CLOSE ON WEDNESDAY AT 1 O’CLOCK” the film dramatically force-feeds our eyeballs. Jesus, Mr. Hitchcock. We get it.)

• Equally eyeroll-worthy is the close-in shot of Sir Papa Moneybags’s reaction to “Expelled!” Sonny Boy Roddy’s unfortunate news.

• That said, there are several enjoyably creative film items to come, as Martyred Roddy leaves home and joins a (what else?) theatre company.

The first fun item is the film temporarily leading us to believe that Roddy has become a resort waiter – but a change in camera angle reveals the restaurant patio’s actual position on a stage…the stage’s edge and audience’s seats barely (but distinctly) visible on the right side of the screen.

The second is Hitchcock’s (and photographer Claude L. McDonnell’s) flipping upside-down of the image seen from Julia (last name: Fotheringale, played by Isabel Jeans)’s perspective, as she leans back in her chair and tilts toward Roddy, who’s just walked through her dressing room door.

(In 1927, were these the first-ever examples of either of these tricks? No, probably not – but still, they’re cool to see.)

• Upon arrival in Theatreville, we not only meet lead actress Julia – but also lead actor (and off-stage romantic partner of Julia’s) Archie (Ian Hunter)(!).

This was 27-year-old Ian Hunter’s fourth-ever screen role – and the earliest of which footage still, today, survives.

• There aren’t very many title cards in this – a fact for which I have a decent amount of respect. (Do we miss out on some key character details and potential layers of backstory because of it? Maybe. Probably. Okay, definitely. But I still find the attempt to convey the plot by almost purely visual commendable.)

• Roddy’s godmother dies, unconditionally leaving him £30,000 (the 2024 equivalent of roughly £1,500,000 – i.e., just shy of $2,000,000 U.S.), which turns out to be ‘all’ the leverage Ye Olde Roddy needs to theft Julia (and, er, all of her living expenses) away from our (relieved?) dude Archie.

• Wedded bliss does not ensue, as Roddy’s £30,000 turns to a £112 overdraft in a satin-shoed flash – and Sparklepants Julia (somewhat vexingly, from my perspective) continues to…dance…with Supposed Jiltman Archie on the side.

• While the Rodster and Jiltman Arch are unspectacularly fisticuffing through the living room for possession of vase-clutching Julia…do we, as an audience, start to wonder what on earth might be happening back in Ye Olde Preggerston with LyingPants Mabel and No-Integrity Tim? Yes, because surely whatever is happening with that (forgotten for nearly an hour) storyline is both more important and more exciting than this shit.

• Roddy, you fucking dope – you signed the flat-mansion over to SparkleButt Julia?

(…I was just about to make a declaration about his deserving to (unsubtly)(again, Mr. Hitchcock – this eyeroll is for you) go “DOWN” – but then I remembered that Kid Roddy is only like…what, 18 now? So…I’ll push my judgements aside and just comment ‘Yeah, I suppose that tracks.’)

• Title card: “The World of Lost Illusions.”

“Illusion, Michael…a trick is what a whore does for – -“

WAIT A SECOND. This “Arrested Development” reference just turned accidentally relevant in a way that I did not intend or expect.

“There is a nice English boy, very cheap at fifty francs a dance,” says Madame “la patronne, expert in human nature” to a whispering, well-dressed lady-…client.

Wowwwww.

(Oh, and by the way: the above-mentioned well-dressed “Lady with a Purse” is played by David L’Estrange’s second half, Constance Collier. Madame Michet, I’ll also note, is played by Barbara Gott.)

• Featured within this scene is an intriguingly handled exchange between Roddy and a character called, apparently, the Poetess – a dance hall patron who, though presenting as a woman, is shown to actually be a man dressed as a woman. (Further muddying the waters of this MovieWorld situation is the fact that Violet Farebrother, who plays the Poetess, is/was indeed…a woman.)

Roddy’s interaction with the Poetess includes an exchange of looks – executed with a surprising amount of gentleness and care – that promotes a feeling of warm, kindly intentioned sympathy – however, as the morning light more clearly reveals to Roddy the gender of the person to whom he is talking, the positive sentiment is traded for a (rather cruelly orchestrated) sense of (unfairly projected) horror.

Viewed through a modern-day lens, knowing full well what contemporary film-going audiences likely did not about Ivor Novello’s sexuality, this turn is a pretty heart-troubling one to take in and process. When this film was made, Novello was living an ‘openly’ gay life – which, at the time, would not have translated to a general public awareness – but is something that would have been known by his friends and movie-making colleagues. To be honest…I’m not sure what to make of the contradictory layers of sentiment contained in this short segment of film – and I certainly do not for a second want to assert that I have any idea about how Novello may have felt performing such a scene – so I’m just going to leave it here, for the consideration of other viewers in the future. Whatever meaning one might want to assign to this, it is certainly not a sentiment easily analyzed or defined – as evidenced by Hitchcock’s own description of this particular sequence’s content, 35 years after it was filmed:

“I showed a woman seducing a younger man. She is a lady of a certain age, but quite elegant, and he finds her very attractive until daybreak. Then he opens the window and the sun comes in, lighting up the woman’s face. In that moment, she looks dreadful.”

Was the Poetess character truly intended as a woman – with a distinct five-o’clock shadow, mind you – rather than a man? Or were there details and intended subtexts that simply remained unacknowledged and un-commented-on by the filmmakers?

(This might seem like an unnecessary, overreaching query – but to me, its worth is validated by another piece of DOWNHILL commentary included in the same interview of Hitchcock’s, which I will address a little later on.)

• However, for now – back to Roddy:

“Downhill – till what was left of him was thrown to the rats of a Marseilles dockside.”

Well.…..alright. DOWN we go to Shadowtown.

• “Dear Tim,” reads the as-yet-unmailed letter the Dock People pull from Bad-Shape Roddy’s pocket. “I am done for. If ever you get this it will mean that I’m dead & buried. But I want you to know that I’ve kept my promise. — Roddy.”

Jesus, the melodrama.

(Despite my distaste for the direction of this plot – the left-lit Vermeer-style setup of a lot of this section’s shots is, I’ll admit, very striking.)

• The Dock Bros manage to get Delirious, Ratsville Roddy aboard a boatvessel bound for England, and after a green-tinted nightmare sequence that is undoubtedly interesting, yet goes on too long, and thus loses some of its impact – he is deposit-landed back at home, where the Regretful Richlings are like, ‘Dag, sonskies. Sorry we fed you to the rats, I guess.’

• Post-film, Jacqueline Stewart says that later in his career, Alfred Hitchcock felt that his “use of visual symbolism here was a little too obvious.”

Baha! Geez, brother, you think?

That’s hilarious.

• Now, let’s address the aforementioned questions I have regarding ‘Hitchcock’s Retrospectively Declared Intent.’ When the film ended, my immediate reaction was one of vexed bewilderment:

So…was Homegirl not pregnant? She had to be, right – otherwise what did she stand to gain from the whole Accusation Ordeal? Is Sir Papa Moneybags’s “I know everything” statement to Roddy at the end an indication that…I dunno, Tim (willingly or unwillingly…I suppose it doesn’t matter) took responsibility for the situation, so Mabel and Mabel Jr.’s security became a non-issue?

???

I did a quick online search to check if my interpretation skills had gone haywire and had invented the pregnancy, and was promptly reassured by an essay I found – written by the BFI National Archive and published on the San Francisco Silent Film Festival website – on DOWNHILL’s 2013 restoration, which makes clear reference to “the shop girl who falsely accuses Roddy of fathering her child.”

Here’s the thing, though – in his 1962 interview with Hitchcock, François Truffaut opens the conversation about this movie by stating: “Your next picture, DOWNHILL, is about a boy who’s accused of a theft in his school.” Hitchcock does not correct him.

A re-watch of this scene – with ‘theft’ in mind, as the crime – does nothing to alter my initial interpretation of it. If theft was the crime, why would Mabel be approaching the school’s headmaster and not the police? If her accusation was somehow centered on Roddy’s mishandling of that one kid’s candy change, why would Tim be in any way to blame and need Roddy’s lie-protection? Most damningly (in my opinion, at least), why – in a faked-theft situation – would Mabel exclaim “His father’s rolling in money – he’s got to see me through it!”? He’s got to see her through what, exactly, if we’re talking about theft?

• All of this is to say: I have no solid answers. Not about this, and not about the Poetess conundrum. Neither, it seems, does anyone else. Perhaps that then, is what should earn all of our collective focus: a movie that is this divisively, confusingly unclear in its conveyance of multiple major plot points is not a successful piece of work, and should be called out as such. It’s ineffective storytelling, you guys. And that, I believe, is the bottom line here.

• I do not recommend this film.

• The End.