1godzillafan vs. Hitchcock: A Filmography Journey

I had never seen many of Alfred Hitchcock's films over the span of my life. I had watched Psycho and The Birds. That was pretty much it. I liked both, but there wasn't really anything in them that made me want to delve deeper into Hitchcock. Then last year I saw North By Northwest as a part of TCM Big Screen Classics and it was a revelation of the filmmaker for me. Hooked from beginning to end I walked out of that movie wanting to know more about Hitchcock and to see all of his films for better or for worse.

Usually I do filmography retrospectives around winter, which seemed to have been an unofficial tradition for me for quite some time. It seemed like once every December I'd start watching stuff from certain filmmakers and keep watching. I had done the likes of Ishiro Honda, Sam Raimi, Steven Spielberg, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd over the last few years, and I have plans for Frank Capra and Akira Kurosawa in the future (though nothing set in stone). This year I did some Hitchcock films, but I didn't watch everything. My little blog got in the way and I only watched about ten random films or so (including another TCM Big Screen Classic screening, this time of Vertigo). But I quite loved what I saw. Now I want to go back and finish the job.

I don't have a set schedule for this, nor do I anticipate it being very in depth or perceptive. I'm just posting little thoughts I feel like posting after watching these movies. But let's head back to 1925 and check out Hitch's humble beginnings.

The Pleasure Garden

Not Hitchcock's first attempt at a feature, which was a scrapped comedy called "Number 13" (which I guess may not have been its actual title) and there was a short film that predated this, though Pleasure Garden is the earliest completed surviving work in his filmography. It would be unfair to instantly expect brilliance, though I did notice some moments in the film that felt like the master peeking through the curtain.

This little melodrama is about a dancer named Patsy who takes a struggling girl named Jill in and helps her get a job as a dancer only to have the noob become a sensation. Wow, just typing that out it starts to sound like an early version of Girl in Gold Boots, though that's about where the similarities end. Once Jill becomes popular, she shuns her fiance and forgets her humble beginnings, leaving Patsy a little bit in the wind. Patsy later marries a man who is by all accounts Douchy McJerkface and lives a miserable life, though the film eventually leads up to her falling in love with Jill's ex-fiance.

If there was one thing I kept thinking about by watching this is that it's a bit half-baked. The simplistic elements come off a bit trite by today's standards, though it's possible they hadn't yet been driven into the ground in the 1920's. But ignoring that, there's a decent story and heart at this movie's core, but it feels like it needs to be fleshed out a bit or rewritten. A lot of happenings in the film seem to happen entirely at random, making this feel less like a story and more like "things are happening." The third act especially is a bit kooky, where Patsy's jerkass husband just snaps and starts killing people or threatening to kill people left and right.

But I sometimes feel to enjoy it more when there's a bit of a Hitchcock twinkle to it. There's a bit of a wit that feels familiar that underlines certain scenes. There's a scene toward the end where Pasty is tending to Jill's ill-ex, who is hallucinating that she's Jill and asks her for a kiss. In response to this, Patsy gives the camera a hesitant look and then just kinda shrugs "Eh, why not?" then leans in. I laughed. Also during that insane climax there is a rather effective moment where Patsy's murderous husband is haunted by a girl he drowned, who stares at him through a transparency effect and walks toward him. It's actually a fairly effective little sequence that reminded me a little bit of something like Sadako crawling out of the television at the end of Ring.

But it does feel like this is just a script in a pile given to an amateur in order to make a product. A product was made and it has its moments, but it just falls a bit flat.

Next Hitchcock made a film called The Mountain Eagle, which is now lost. According to the Wikipedia description the film was about two men fighting over the love of a schoolteacher as one frames the other for murder. Hitchcock claims the film was "a very bad movie."

Up Next: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog