The Pleasure Garden

Plot synopsis:
Jill, a young dancer, arrives in London with a letter of introduction to Mr. Hamilton, proprietor of the Pleasure Garden Theatre. The letter and all her money are stolen from her handbag as she waits to see him. Patsy, a chorus girl at the Pleasure Garden, sees her difficulty and offers to take her to her own lodgings and to try to get her a job. Next morning Jill is successful in getting a part in the show. Her fiance, Hugh, arrives with a colleague called Levet. Hugh and Patsy become very close while Jill is being pursued by a number of rich men, eventually breaking up with Hugh in order to begin a relationship with the wealthy Prince Ivan. Not long after this, Hugh is sent to Africa by his company.
Jill moves out of the lodgings she shares with Patsy and becomes more involved with the Prince. As she becomes more successful and used to the rich and famous lifestyle she also becomes more dismissive of Patsy, shunning her and eventually seeing her as a commoner. As Patsy laments the loss of her friend, she is comforted by Levet who convinces her to enter into marriage with him. The couple honeymoon in Italy before he leaves to join Hugh in Africa. After some time Patsy finally receives a letter from her husband in which he says he has been sick for weeks. Patsy is determined to go to take care of him and asks Jill to lend her the fare. Jill refuses as she is preparing for her marriage to the Prince and has no money to spare. Patsy is able to borrow the fare from her landlords Mr and Mrs Sidey. When she arrives at her husband's bungalow, she finds that he is having an affair with a local woman and leaves. Levet tries to drive the woman away but when she refuses to leave him, follows her into the sea and drowns her.
Meanwhile, Patsy has found that Hugh really is very ill with a fever and stays to take care of him. Hugh has since discovered from a newspaper that Jill is to marry the Prince and he and Patsy soon realize that they love each other. Levet finds them together and accuses Hugh of making advances to his wife. Patsy agrees to follow Levet back to his bungalow in order to save Hugh. During the night, Levet is stricken with guilt and paranoia over the murder of his mistress and begins seeing ghostly visions of her. Hugh becomes convinced that the ghost of his mistress will not stop haunting him until he murders Patsy too. Levet corners Patsy with a sword but he is shot dead before he can kill her. He and Patsy find consolation with each other and return to London.
Parts of the movie scenes were filmed in Lierna, Lake Como.

Tags: murder, melodrama

Review:
The Pleasure Garden is the first film that Alfred Hitchcock directed to completion.
I enjoyed some of the point of view shots early in the film with the blurred view of the man looking through his monocle as well as the gentleman looking through the binoculars at the show girls legs.
Not that it was used like the staircase in Vertigo, but it made me smile thinking of how important that would be in his later film.
Jill (Carmelita Geraghty) is an aspiring dancer who gets engaged to Hugh (John Stuart) who has to leave for work overseas.
Patsy marries Levett (Miles Mander), Hugh's friend who also goes overseas to work with Hugh.
I liked seeing Cuddles, the dog, thrown in for a little comic relief to contrast the seriousness of the film, which of course is another of Hitchcock's trademarks.
This was Hitchcock's first ever film as director to be completed and it is indicative of his huge talent.
Hitchcock imbues it with directorial flourishes of brilliance with clever, interesting camera shots, intelligent storytelling and little bits of his psychological themes which strengthen all his films.In conclusion this is a superb film considering its age and the fact it is Hitchcock's debut..
Looking at Hitchcock's early pictures, one struggles to see signs of his future greatness, like looking through every manger for the baby with the halo.
But this, the first complete Hitchcock movie, shows no signs of his future greatness.
He is clearly a journeyman director, some one who shows promise, but sent to Berlin for his final exam.On the plus side, this movie starts off surprisingly well, with a snappy, American-paced chorines-on-the-town plot.
The start moves fast, plot points pop up, and suddenly we take a turn and the story descends into melodrama.Fairly typical of Hitchcock, you might say and you would be right, but he hasn't got any sense of what his chosen symbols are -- both leads are brunettes, which will come as a surprise to anyone who knows Hitchcock's taste for icy blondes.
The symbolic items are standard and not particularly shocking -- Virginia Valli's wedding-bed deflowering is indicated by an apple with a large chunk bitten out of it -- and the actors are not really up to their jobs.Hitchcock was never a great director of actors but a great director of scenes.
at best, adequate, with Miles Mander very stagy and whoever plays his native lover -- still miscredited in the IMDb as Nita Naldi -- seemingly brain-damaged.There are a couple of interestingly composed visual glosses: the door that Mander must go through looks like a Turkish harem door and the decoration on either side differs dramatically; on one side is life, on another death.
and there's none of that here.I find it hard to give this an exact rating: the great start is sunk by the foolishness of the ending, and Hitchcock at the the start of his career is not the great film maker he would be in another thirty years -- or even four.
But it is Hitchcock, and therefore demands our attention, so I'll give it a good mark for that.But if it weren't Hitchcock's first film, no one would care.
It's true that little of the Hitchcock we've come to love comes through but there are quite a few touches at that and all of them work.
The travel scenes at Lake Como and somewhere in the South Sea work very well indeed and there's precious little in this film that doesn't contribute meaningfully to the movie.
Hitchcock's first complete film, and a quite decent one.
The Pleasure Garden is notable for being the first complete film of Alfred Hitchcock, one of the greatest and most influential directors in film, so it is one of great historical interest.
Hitchcock has definitely done worse though, and The Pleasure Garden is a decent film.
Even for such an early effort, Hitchcock's direction does shine through with great use of camera angles and directorial flourishes.
The story is intelligently explored, the script serves the actors and Hitchcock competently(though of course there have been much better scripts since) and while the pacing is uneven the beginning and ending are solid enough.
All in all, a quite decent first complete film, though Hitchcock definitely went on to much better since.
The Pleasure Garden would probably have been consigned to the dusty bin of obscurity, were it not for its being the debut of one Alfred Hitchcock.Hitchcock was of course destined for greatness, so this picture inevitably gets scrutinised for hints of said greatness, or at least traces of Hitchcockiness.
A point-of-view shot of the legs of a chorus line in the opening scene is often referenced as an example of such, a bit of pure voyeurism that is at odds with the moralist plot line.
Hitchcock was clearly interested from the beginning by the idea of putting the audience in the place of a character, and the latter example helps to tell the story visually, but it is of little long-term value.
Neither the thief nor the leg-viewer become established characters, so there is really no need for us to "become" them.The way these early scenes are shot may be aimed to cut down on the intertitles by conveying the story visually.
You see, during his apprenticeship Hitchcock had done some art direction work on Der Letzte Mann, a picture best known for containing no intertitles whatsoever except one at the beginning and one near the end.
Then again, it could just be because the 26-year-old director really liked to look at women's legs.But after those showy opening sequences, The Pleasure Garden gets bogged down in a series of "talking" scenes.
In the melodramatic climax there are some vague attempts at psychological manipulation, with a few close-ups of a menaced Valli, but it's too little too late.The Pleasure Garden is full of tricks, many of which can be seen as corresponding to the technique of the later Hitchcock – "God" shots, point-of-view shots, close-ups to focus us on a particular object.
But these are all things any monkey could pick up after hanging around a few film sets, and the director does not yet know how to put them to best use.
The Pleasure Garden may pique the interest of Hitchcock completists, but other than that it is simply dull..
People coming home to find their dog has chewed up their clothes These bits show the director already having a sense of humour, and playing with his audience, but not yet really knowing what to do with the fairly uninvolving story present, a sort of behind-the-scenes melodrama at a revue; infidelity, and the murder at the beach house.
A lot of the sets are well done, as is the director's humorous flair in filming some of them, but quite frankly, the plot is just boring and uneven.
Were it not for the fact that this is one of Alfred Hitchcock's first films as director (it is his first solely-directed feature film, but third film to be released) , no one would remember, or care about, this one..
Hitchcock's first film, a very good melodrama.
At the age of 25, Alfred Hitchcock, who had been an assistant director to Michael Balcon, was given the chance to direct his first film, which was of course silent.
Assistant director on the film was a girl named Alma Reville, who was to become Hitchcock's wife and lifelong partner in all of his film projects.
The American actress Virginia Valli plays Patsy, the good girl of the two.
And Jill, the girl who goes to the bad, is played by another American actress, Carmelita Geraghty.
Possibly the best performance in the film is by British actor Miles Mander, who outdid Falkenberg by appearing in 107 films, between 1920 and 1947, including WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1939).
In this film he plays a cad who married Patsy and then betrays her with a mistress and goes to pieces with drink and decadence.
Hitchcock's first film shows him to be merely a competent director.
There's nothing Hitchcockian about this film, although a clever early shot shows a producer puffing away on a cigar next to a "No Smoking" sign, a visual contrast to show character.The film does move along nicely and the acting is competent.
I imagine the original film has a good deal more about how she ended up, contrasting with Jill's fortunes.
The Pleasure Garden takes a long time to get where it's going.
It seems Alfred Hitchcock was still getting his feet under himself when in regard to filmmaking, but it was still interesting to see his directorial debut..
'Pleasure Garden' is Alfred Hitchcock's real firs movie as a director.
It doesn't feel like Hitchcock's movie and there are very little his trademarks visible (how could there be, he was just beginner director).
Besides being Hitchcock's first movie as a director, there is nothing special, but it is a sweet film that definitely deserves to be seen.
Especially by the fans of the legendary director.P.S. Alma Reville and Alfred Hitchcock got engaged during the shoot and what a couple they became..
Hitchcock's first film is fascinating in that him shows him leaping, almost fully formed, onto the screen with his lifelong themes and his jaundiced views present and shockingly incorrect.
The Pleasure Garden tells the story of a chorus girl, Patsy, who gives the gift of friendship to a newcomer, a rube of a girl called Jill who gets herself robbed on her first visit to the theatre and who lacks a friend, contacts and a place to stay.
Patsy gives her all of these.At first the film seems that it is going to be Jill's story, as we follow her hiring by the masher of an impresario and her quick elevation to the star of the lowbrow dance show the theatre is presenting.
But it gradually becomes apparent that Patsy is the focus of the tale, as she is romanced by a friend of Jill's earnest fiancée Hugh, a rodent of a man called Levett.
Levett and Hugh sail away to their overseas job in the colonies, leaving Patsy to pine for her husband and Jill to romance a roué Prince.Patsy and Levett's marriage is a curious thing.
There follows a denouement of rather rancid melodrama, as Levett kills his mistress, is haunted by her ghost, almost kills Patsy, is killed himself by a deus ex machina colonial superior, leaving Patsy and Hugh free to realise that they love each other.Levett's cynical view of women (he quickly recognises Jill for what she is), his view of marriage as a mutual sharing of loneliness, his sexual obsession with his Other of a mistress, his murder of her when she puts his respectable life at risk and his haunting by the dusky temptress is a pretty lurid and provocative portrait of white middle-class masculinity soured by experience and conflicting desires.
That he has to die for Hugh and Patsy to get together suggest that Hitchcock and his sources were up to the idea that respectable petit bourgeois marriage is built on the grave of all that it excludes long before the cultural and queer theorists were writing their stuff.
Levett is a fascinating character, far richer and far more unknowable than the rather bland leads - the first in a long line of portraits of human oddity from The Maestro.The film's opening sequence, as Charles Barr points out in his introduction to the recent Region 2 Network release in their The British Years box-set, has a dirty old man sitting in the front row of a theatre looking through a lens at the bodies of the dancing girls - voyeurism, the male gaze, women subjected to it all ready to go in old Hitch's very first sequence in his début film..
Yet, the 1925's silent film, 'Pleasure Garden' is not one of his films, well-known.
'Pleasure Garden' is the director full feature debut after filming short films for years.
You see it, in the opening scene, where he use the camera to mimic a person's gaze, forcing viewers to engage in a form of voyeurism like 1954's 'Rear Window' or 1960's 'Psycho'.
There is also a spiral staircase in the opening of this movie like 1958's 'Vertigo', use as a motif for impending danger or suspense.
Don't get me wrong, the cheesy comedy parts were fine and I did like the dog, "Cuddles", but there were a few things that could had made this film, a lot better.
First off, I think the film could had juxtaposing the humor against some of the heavy subject matter, a lot better.
The first half of the film looks nothing like the second half, at all.
It seems like two different movies, sloppy edited together with lots of pacing issues.
Based on a novel of the same name by Oliver Sandys AKA Marguerite Florence Barclay, the plot is supposed to tell the story of two chorus girls, Jill Cheyne (Carmelita Geraghty) & Patsy Brand (Virginia Valli) at the Pleasure Garden Theatre in London and their troubled relationships.
While, at first, it seems, like Jill Cheyne will be the protagonist of this story, due to her strong desires to be a dancer; it became apparent, that Patsy is indeed the main focus of this film with her melodramatic with her husband, Levett (Miles Mander).
While, in truth, these movie sequence is indeed, shot in Italy; in story it's supposed to be, Africa.
For a Hitchcock movie, I really surprised by the lack of any exotic & adventurous with this location.
Overall: I have to say, this dinky period melodrama lacks the depth and engagement of the director's better films to come.
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.
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.
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.
"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!").
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..
"The Pleasure Garden" is a British/German co-production from 90 years ago and the only reason why this film is still somewhat known today I guess is because the man behind the camera was Mr. Alfred Hitchcock, in his mid-20s, with one of his earliest filmmaking efforts.
The best thing about the film was maybe the cute dog.
It is a silent (don't be fooled by the music), black-and-white film that, like so many other suffer from simply not enough intertitles to understand exactly what's going on, even if the dramatic finale was decent.
Also like many other films from almost 100 years ago, this one got restored and there are several information in terms of the runtime.