Review: The Pleasure Garden

Nice chorus girl Virginia Valli takes pity on Carmelita Geraghty when the latter is targeted by a pickpocket, getting her a look-in at the title music hall, as well as a place to stay. Turns out Geraghty is kind of a beeyatch social climber who ignores her perfectly nice fiancé (John Stuart) for a Russian aristocrat. For her part, Valli hooks up with a no-good friend (Miles Mander) of Geraghty’s fiancé. Gee, I wonder how this will all turn out?

 

Perfectly nice 1925 silent film from Sir Alfred Hitchcock (“The Lodger”, “Strangers on a Train”, “Vertigo”) won’t rank among his 10 best-ever films but it’s quite good and definitely worth seeking out for Hitchcock buffs. The story might seem stock-standard looking at things retroactively, but it nonetheless works and was probably much fresher at the time. We even get an early example of the ‘meet cute’ where a romantic couple literally trip over one another. Although it mostly plays out as a romantic piece of fluff, it actually gets darker and more Hitchcockian towards the end with a murder. I didn’t see that coming at all. You won’t get a lot of The Master here, but he at least seems quite invested in the material and there’s not enough running time for it to have any boring parts at least. The quartet of main characters are really interesting, there’s a real mixture of genuinely nice and genuine lowlifes in the film.

 

Shot before “The Lodger” but released after, this is technically Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s first film and it’s an interesting and mostly likeable film with a bit of bite towards the end. It’s not the most substantial film in the filmography of The Master, but I liked this one quite a bit. Of his 52 available non-propaganda films I’ve got it ranked at #24 in between the underrated “Champagne” and the more popular “Sabotage” and that’s a testament to how many good/great films he directed because this is still pretty good. Based on a novel by Oliver Sandys, the screenplay is by Eliot Stannard (“The Lodger”, “Champagne”).

 

Rating: B-

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