2 out of 5

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

The Pleasure Garden is probably primarily notable for being Alfred Hitchcock’s (currently) first available full film; otherwise, it’s a fairly flighty relationship drama, and rather meandering, even at sixty minutes long.

Though a couple decades into the silent era, Garden has the marks of a green director: the film language isn’t very well defined, leading to several scenes with questionable reason for inclusion, and extended cuts of actors who aren’t clearly communicating much emotion in a moment, the viewer left to intuit a takeaway more from our external knowledge of how such dramas unfold, as opposed to what’s on screen. Still, with the knowledge that we are seeing the starting (directorial) steps of a massive talent, it’s notable how the movie bounces between tones, and takes “risks” that are part of what I’m criticizing above – Hitchcock (perhaps) trying to communicate more visually than he exactly knew how to do. More successful are the mentioned tonal changeups, which skip through light social commentary, playful cheesecake, some slapstick, and then some surprisingly brusque dramatics towards the end. That “commentary” is (again, perhaps) incidental, and / or stems from the source material, scripted by a woman writing under a man’s name: the entire story essentially swirls around male and female relationship stereotypes, mildly subverting them… only to resort to 100% trope.

But this is really trying to dig deep for analysis. In The Pleasure Garden, Jill (Carmelita Geraghty) arrives in London, planning to land an instant hire with stage director Oscar Hamilton (Georg H. Schnell), but gets stymied on the way thanks to having her money stolen. Thankfully, Patsy (Virginia Valli) is nearby and offers to let Jill stay with her, amused by the girl’s relative innocence. Patsy also happens to dance for Mr. Hamilton, and helps Jill to get an audition, which she nails with an impressive** Charleston. This translates into a lot of attention for Jill, which flip-flops her from naive out-of-towner to a self-absorbed star, moving out of Patsy’s room and taking up with a foreign dignitary, despite having a fiancée, pining for her elsewhere… We ping-pong around Jill and Patsy’s interactions, as well as those of their relative beaus, and some criss-crossed passions that result.

Scenes in The Pleasure Garden often dawdle on for a while without a clear takeaway, with an explanation offered a few minutes later. This is a valid way of engaging an audience, but the execution is a bit off here. And while Jill’s transition from naif to manipulator is mostly well-handled – you can see hints of her wiliness early on – Patsy’s mirroring flip-flop from know-how to hanger-on is pretty weak. This can be blamed somewhat on the limited runtime, but the dawdling makes it clear there was space to tighten some of this up.

In short: I doubt I’d find much value here without the director’s name attached. A harmless silent pic with some interesting, though minorly executed, flair.

*There’s supposedly a 90-minute version of this, according to wiki, on this bluray, but that hasn’t been released as of this writing. I see an import that claims a 74-minute cut, but otherwise, DVD editions and the public domain editions appear to be the 60-minute cut. I would be curious if the longer cut would smooth out pacing at all.

**Apparently. I’ll take the film’s word for it, and / or there was more comedy here that doesn’t translate to a modern audience, as Patsy’s dance looks pretty uncoordinated.