Downhill (1927)

You know how it is when you come across a previously unknown movie from a favorite actor, director, or writer, and you get excited and then you watch it and you come away from the experience feeling seduced and abandoned?  Yeah. May I cry on your shoulder for a few minutes?

Downhill, aka When Boys Leave Home in America (a much weaker and somehow slightly pornographic title) was Alfred Hitchcock’s fifth film as director. Now, I knew going in that most of his silent pictures, made in Britain, were not thrillers so I didn’t expect bodies in every library (pleasant as that would have been). But still I didn’t anticipate this kind of wishy-washy, sentimental melodrama.

Based on a play called Down Hill by Ivor Novello and Constance Collier, the film begins on the rugby field of some upper class boarding school. Roddy Berwick (Ivor Novello) is the team hero, cheered on by all, including his best pal, Tim Wakely (Robin Irvine). Sometime after the big game, the lads go into the village where they are both carrying a flirtation with a clerk at the Bunne Shoppe named Mabel (Annette Benson). Both boys get a little tipsy but Tim has enough umph left to step into the other room with Mabel.

Not long afterward, Mabel shows up on campus with the news that she is preggers and, since he comes from a wealthy, claims Roddy is the father. Tim doesn’t tell the truth because he is up for a scholarship, money he needs to attend Oxford. Roddy agrees to take the rap and promises he will never tell. The opening intertitles tell us “This is a tale of two school-boys who made a pact of loyalty. One of them kept it—at a price.”

Roddy is expelled and when he returns home to tell his father about his disgrace, old dad (Norman McKinnel) boots him out. 

The beginning of Roddy’s wanderings lead to the theatre, where he becomes an actor and falls in love with the leading lady (Isobel Jeans). As fate, and melodrama, would have it, he inherits £30,000 from a relation we have never heard about before. It’s enough for the actress, Julia, to marry him. Right. Life wasn’t miserable enough before.

The money will quickly run out, Julia will dump him, he will move to Paris where he earns a paltry living as a gigolo. Disgusted with himself, he writes a suicide letter to Tim. A few more improbable things happen to him before returning to London where dad has learned the truth about Mabel (how he learned it we aren’t told—maybe Tim finally fessed up, but since he’s become a something-something in the church, it’s doubtful.)

The ending is rushed, but since it’s absolutely incredible maybe that’s for the best.

For my taste, the picture offers no narrative interest whatsoever, but it does contain a few nice if immature Hitchcock touches. When Mabel tells her lies, Hitchcock moves in for a close-up. Lip readers in the audience learn much. As Roddy rides the escalator in the underground station, he slowly descends between two ragged protuberances from either wall, making him seem to be sinking into the mouth of hell. Every woman in the film, save Roddy’s weak mother (Sybil Rhoda) is, to some degree or other, a stinker. 

The film was produced by Michael Balcon and C.M. Woolf at Gainsborough Pictures’ Islington Studio. Adaptation of the original play was by Eliot Stannard, Claude L. McDonnell was the cinematographer, and Ivor Montagu and Lionel Rich were the editors.

Novello’s other 1927 film with Hitchcock was The Lodger, a better picture all the way around. Check it out.