Hitchcock Ranked Part 2

Between January and March 2022, I watched all Alfred Hitchcock’s films in chronological order and came up with a ranking of them from worst to best. In this five part article, I’m sharing the reviews I wrote as I went along and the final ranking on which I settled. In part 2, I’m looking mostly at middling 3 star films, with a couple of 3 and a half star ones at the end promising an upturn of quality in part 3.

You can find part 1 of this article here.

All entries contain spoilers.

40. THE PLEASURE GARDEN

The Pleasure Garden was actually not bad. I’ve seen numerous reviews saying it’s unwatchable but I suspect many of these come from people putting too heavy a weight of expectation on it given that it’s a Hitchcock film, as well as people who are unused to silent cinema in general. For a debut film from 1925, this is a perfectly competent, if not especially remarkable, melodrama. Sure, there were already cinematic masterpieces being made at this time to which The Pleasure Garden cannot begin to compare but this is clearly the work of a director cutting his teeth and, despite claims to the contrary, The Pleasure Garden isn’t without Hitchcockian flourishes that signpost the greatness to come. The opening sequence is full of them, from the first shot of a seemingly endless stream of chorus girls teeming down a spiral staircase to a rogues gallery of lascivious spectators and a blurry shot from the POV of one of them, which he then corrects by raising his opera glasses.

The ingenuity of the opening scenes gets a bit lost as the hoary plot takes hold but Hitchcock punctuates the action with characteristically playful and irreverent moments, like a woman saying her prayers being unceremoniously interrupted by a dog licking her bare feet. And there’s a climactic moment with a ghostly apparition that is chillingly effective and signposts Hitchcock’s later reputation amongst horror fans. The Pleasure Garden was based on a novel by Oliver Sandys (a pseudonym for author Marguerite Florence Laura Jarvis) and the screenplay was written by Eliot Stannard, who would continue to work with Hitchcock throughout the silent era. The script gets a bit baggy in the middle before cramming in an hour’s worth of action into the last 10 minutes. Certain plots and characters just peter out (although this was the widely available one hour version and there has apparently been a recent longer restoration which improves the film). But overall I enjoyed The Pleasure Garden throughout its whole runtime. It’s far from a great film but it is a pretty decent one with a clear indication that this was a director to watch, although that may be easier to pinpoint with the benefit of hindsight.

39. SECRET AGENT

Well, this was utter nonsense! But was it entertaining nonsense? After all, you could legitimately call a film like Vertigo nonsense in regards to its plot but that doesn’t stop it being a masterpiece. Secret Agent is not a masterpiece, but is it at least entertaining? The answer is… sort of.

Secret Agent has long been the least acclaimed of the run of 30s thrillers that established Hitchcock as a big hitter. I did see it once before many years ago but somehow I’d forgotten pretty much everything about it. I’m not sure quite how that happened because, inferior as Secret Agent may be, it’s not exactly forgettable. Sure, it has no great performances, a weak plot, few scenes of real note and no clear themes, but Secret Agent is just strange enough to be memorable. A lot of this strangeness comes from Peter Lorre as a comedic trigger man known as the General, who is sent to assist John Gielgud’s spy by bumping off an enemy agent once Gielgud has rooted him out. Lorre’s character is a larger than life, amoral, lecherous cartoon character and Lorre hams it up shamelessly. In contrast with his effective villain who quietly stole The Man Who Knew Too Much, Lorre’s General may as well spend the film running around with his trousers round his ankles for all the scenery-devouring he does.

Lorre’s performance would probably grate more if Gielgud’s underperformance didn’t make it so necessary. In the lead role of the soldier who is unexpectedly pressed into service as a spy, Gielgud struggles to make any impact at all. The role was originally intended for Robert Donat, reuniting him with his 39 Steps co-star Madeleine Carroll. But ill health meant Donat had to pull out, leaving the role to Gielgud. Gielgud apparently struggled with Hitchcock’s less-than-fawning attitude to actors and as a result seems to have opted to barely act at all. Carroll, as the spy who is sent to pretend to be Gielgud’s wife, is supposed to fall in love at first sight with him but this is impossible to believe, unless she desperately needed a new clothes prop. Carroll herself struggles to bring life to a thin role which seems intent on portraying the only main female character as a silly little girl who’s thirst for adventure gets her in over her head. It falls to a droll Robert Young as Carroll’s persistent suitor to carry the acting honours and he is amusing, although his role in the story seems so blatantly pointless that it becomes easy to see where the film is going.

Secret Agent is ultimately very minor Hitchcock, which suffers further from following his first masterpiece The 39 Steps. It’s such an odd film that I was never bored watching it but I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t be the case on repeated viewings and it’s not a film I’ll rush to see again.

38. THE RING

After the success of The Lodger, Hitchcock made boxing melodrama The Ring, the only film for which he ever took sole screenwriting credit (although his then-regular collaborator Eliot Stannard is said to have contributed). In terms of story, The Ring doesn’t have much new to offer. A simple tale of rivalry in which a love triangle exacerbates the quarrel between two boxers, The Ring’s basic but reliable plot feels like a mere framework on which to hang directorial flourishes and there are plenty of them, from distorted POV shots to haunting images of taunting heads hanging over the shoulders of troubled fighters.

At 90 minutes, the film does sag a bit between these memorable devices and occasionally Hitchcock cops out a little. One notable instance of this is a scene in which a boxer sitting in an office is told he has a long way to go before he can face the heavyweight champion. We then cut to a series of fight posters showing the boxer’s name next to different opponents. With each poster, he moves further up the billing until we cut back to the office and he is told “Now you’re almost ready.” I get it, it’s a visual shorthand but it left me feeling shortchanged and I thought Hitchcock might at least have cut in some shots of the fights, even if they were just fleeting tasters of the action. The Ring is also marred by some ugly racism, something we often expect to find in 20s films but which still took me off-guard as I don’t generally associate Hitchcock’s work with racist stereotypes. Maybe this is a tendency I will end up revising during this odyssey but I’m hoping The Ring’s racist moments (including a conspicuous N-bomb) will turn out to be an anomaly.

Ultimately there is much to enjoy in The Ring, particularly a funny performance by Gordon Harker as an uncouth trainer, but it does feel like a step down from The Lodger, although it still clearly points the way to Hitchcock’s growing mastery as a visual storyteller.

37. DOWNHILL

With Downhill, the fourth silent Hitchcock film I’ve watched, there’s definitely a pattern emerging. A lot of people who are dismissive of this early period will tell you that the films have no style and Hitchcock the artist is not yet visible. This is palpably untrue and has been from the beginning of my Hitchcock odyssey. What actually seems to be the case is that Hitchcock was a strong, inventive director from the off but he just wasn’t working with the best material. Downhill, then, is a film that leaves me torn, in that the screenplay, adapted from a play by Ivor Novello and Constance Collier, is kind of all over the place and uses big subjects in the service of no insight whatsoever, emerging as melodrama for melodrama’s sake. The tale of a thriving boarding school boy who’s life takes a downturn when he takes the fall for a friend, Downhill is also absolutely riddled with misogyny. Women in this film are depicted as either deceitful, malicious, cold, opportunistic or repulsive, to the point that you can hardly believe a woman co-wrote the thing.

What saves Downhill, and in fact elevates it considerably, is Hitchcock’s growing talent as a visual storyteller. This was his third film of 1927 but you can see how his direction has improved even in that short time. We get plenty of the stylish techniques we’ve seen in the films preceding Downhill, including POV shots, dream sequences and visual symbols, as well as a resistance of expositional intertitles in favour of a showing-not-telling approach. Chief among the innovations is a pull-back-and-reveal technique that I don’t recall ever seeing in a film from this early in cinema history. Having been expelled from school and ejected by an angry father, we cut to Ivor Novello’s hapless Roddy in what we presume is his new career as a waiter. As he serves a couple, we see him pocket an item they’ve left on the table and immediately assume he’s fallen into thieving to support himself. But then the camera pulls out and we see that all this is happening on stage in front of an audience and the scene becomes a dance number, with Roddy joining a chorus line at the back of the stage.

Terrific moments like this punctuate Downhill throughout and while they can’t overcome its sour tone completely, nor save it from its meandering overlength, they did keep me fascinated throughout and made this a better film than either The Ring or The Pleasure Garden, though still lagging behind the far more likeable The Lodger. Downhill isn’t a classic then but it is, for the most part, a technical triumph.


36. JAMAICA INN

Jamaica Inn has gained a reputation among many as Hitchcock’s worst film. It’s amazing how quickly such a reputation can build once the ball gets rolling, with a perfectly serviceable little adventure film finding its way onto Worst Films of All Time lists. This was surely exacerbated by Jamaica Inn’s public domain status which led to a widely circulated version in terrible condition, with large portions of the film missing, murky sound and muddy picture. It should never be underestimated just how much effect a poor print of a film can have on your enjoyment of it. I long laboured under the impression that His Girl Friday wasn’t very good for just this reason. Honest to God, His Girl Friday!

The version of Jamaica Inn I watched last night was in reasonable shape, although I could tell that a more polished version (and one reportedly exists) would immediately increase my enjoyment of what looks in places like quite a handsome film. That said, it was also clear to me that Jamaica Inn is a flawed film with a good few issues. The first of Hitchcock’s trilogy of Daphne du Maurier adaptations, the film ended up being heavily criticised by du Maurier herself, who almost withheld the rights to Rebecca as a result. Hitchcock agreed, saying that he felt like a director for hire on the production, dominated by its star Charles Laughton’s constant interference. Nevertheless, audiences flocked to Jamaica Inn as they had with The Lady Vanishes, giving Hitchcock another immediate hit. In overstating what a disaster the film is, that latter point is often overlooked.

I don’t think Jamaica Inn is a disaster. Neither do I think it is a classic. The film works best as a tense adventure movie, with scenes like the opening shipwreck or Robert Newton and Maureen O’Hara’s run in with a bloodthirsty gang of crooks really standing out. But, like the doomed ships at its centre, Jamaica Inn keeps crashing into the rocks. Laughton, as the villainous Squire Pengallan, apparently demanded more screen time, changing the shape of the narrative in the process. Laughton’s performance is enjoyably larger than life but foregrounding such a verbose, preening character severely slows the pacing so that the action can never quite fully get going. In Pengallan, Laughton obviously thought he’d found a plum role but his performance is merely fun, rather than one for the ages as he may have envisioned.

There’s a lot of talent involved in Jamaica Inn, with a cast including Laughton, Maureen O’Hara, Robert Newton, Leslie Banks and Basil Radford, a script co-written by The Lady Vanishes’ Sidney Gilliat and editing by future Kind Hearts and Coronets director Robert Hamer. Hitchcock’s direction is adequate with bursts of excellence but Jamaica Inn never quite gets out from under the feeling of being a compromised production. The cast, so wonderful in other films, all seem to be struggling to do much with the material, especially operating in the shadow of Laughton, who doesn’t so much chew scenery as devour the whole film canister. The result is definitely not one of the worst films ever made, nor is it close to being Hitchcock’s worst film. I’d characterise it more as an enjoyable but frustrating missed opportunity.

35. FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

Alfred Hitchcock had a good 1940, with both his films from that year proving popular with audiences and critics alike. Hitchcock was new in Hollywood but this didn’t stop the first two films he made there from both scoring a clutch of Oscar nominations. Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent even ended up competing against each other in several categories, including Best Picture, which Rebecca ultimately won. Everyone remembers Rebecca and it is still held up as a classic of cinema. Foreign Correspondent, however, is rarely seen or spoken of these days. There are reasons for that.

Foreign Correspondent is one of Hitchcock’s stranger films; a globetrotting spy adventure with prominent elements of comedy and romance and a propagandist bent. If that sounds like a lot to cram into two hours, it is. It’s not that such a film couldn’t work (North by Northwest would have most of these ingredients), it’s that Foreign Corespondent doesn’t blend them comfortably enough. It’s no surprise to hear that the film’s screenplay passed through the hands of ten different writers across five years. That’s just enough writers and just enough time to overthink yourself into a mess. In fact, it’s a wonder Foreign Corespondent works as well as it does. While still a failure in my book, it is fun in places even as it feels ungainly.

What sinks Foreign Corespondent is its inability to commit to a tone. It could’ve been a magnificent drama with elements of comedy but these styles keep bleeding into each other at inappropriate times. After the film’s most famous set piece, an assassination in the rain, a high speed chase occurs. During this chase, Joel McCrea’s reporter is introduced to another reporter played by George Sanders. Sanders’ character has a comically eccentric surname and the pair discuss this in a dryly witty exchange. The dialogue is fine but the fact that it takes place while they are driving at high speed and being shot at feels ridiculous, to mention nothing of their comparative flippancy having just witnessed a bloody public murder. It would’ve been easy to have the characters meet before the chase, when their exchange would’ve been amusing, allowing Hitchcock to then focus on the action sequence as just that. But dividing up the comedy and drama doesn’t always prove successful either. Later in the film, following some important revelatory scenes, we get an extended sequence in which Edmund Gwenn plays a cockney assassin trying in vain to dispose of an oblivious McCrea. The scenes border on slapstick and, while a drastic change from deeply dramatic to broadly comic can work, here it just feels like an error in judgement that slows the film’s pace when it should be picking up a head of steam.

There’s also a romance at the centre of Foreign Corespondent which may stand as one of the most perfunctory in cinema history. Whirlwind romances are not uncommon in classic Hollywood cinema but the mid-film marriage proposal here comes out of nowhere, and the acceptance of said proposal beggars belief. It’s a poorly written relationship and, more than that, it’s just not needed or indeed helpful to have it there in an already clearly overstuffed film. Romance was pretty much de rigueur in 40s Hollywood films so it’s hard to hold this against Foreign Corespondent too much but it’s clear that even the writers saw this strand as a distraction.

Fans of Foreign Corespondent often point out that it features some of Hitchcock’s best set pieces. There are certainly high points, like that aforementioned assassination and a famous plane crash scene towards the end, but other than those I often felt that Hitchcock didn’t quite reach the level of tension for which he would quickly become famous. The celebrated sequence in the windmill, for instance, felt clunky and devoid of the suspense for which it was aiming. Perhaps it’s effectiveness was dulled by the precedent set by the awkward mixing of tones earlier in the film. As Joel McCrea struggled to avoid detection by the villains onto whom he’d stumbled, I kept expecting him to break off for a second to crack a joke or fall in love.

Much is made of the film’s final scene, for which legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht was asked to write a rousing speech encouraging American involvement in WWII. While some complain of it as a sentimental, jarring presence, I’ve never begrudged it its place in the film. It dates it in a good way, firmly situating the film in its historical context and giving us a glimpse of what wartime audiences experienced. There is a small sense of the film having been hijacked at the last minute to serve a greater political purpose, but in a film that is so all-over-the-place anyway, why not go for it?

Foreign Corespondent is quite fascinating in many ways but when you’re actually watching it it’s more frustrating. Its inability to settle into an identity prevented this viewer from settling into the experience, making the two hour runtime drag.

34. THE BIRDS

I used to absolutely love The Birds. It was one of the first Hitchcock films I ever saw which undoubtedly contributed to this affection but I’ve watched it several times across the years and for a while had it rated as a 5 star classic. It’s amazing how much opinions can change over time. Though I did still enjoy it, watching The Birds last night, the film felt stale and awkward. The slow build towards the first major bird attack felt tedious where it had once seemed to work so well and the lead actors all felt terribly stiff or overwrought. I liked The Birds but this time round I appreciated it more as a trashy oddity than anything approaching a classic.

Oddly enough, one thing I had no problem with at all was the premise. The idea of all the birds in a small community suddenly turning on the humans is often dismissed as silly and seems to be one of the main reasons behind The Birds’ critical stock plummeting in recent years. But I think the idea behind the story is solid. It’s a fine example of a narrative that plays on our fears of things we take for granted as harmless suddenly becoming a threat. Anyone with even a small amount of imagination should have no problem granting the premise. But the execution sometimes leaves something to be desired. The Oscar-nominated effects have dated in places. Did that first moment when a single seagull bonks Tippi Hedren on the head ever elicit anything but giggles? Too often the wildly flapping birds and the humans running in terror from them are clearly not sharing the same space. Again, a little imagination and a willingness to put the effects in the context of their time period helps but somehow the terror never fully takes hold in the way it still does in, say, the original King Kong. Not all the effects are bad. The scene where hundreds of birds suddenly pour down a chimney still looks fantastic. And Hitchcock inserts some sequences which effectively build tension, such as the famous moment when the birds slowly amass on a school climbing frame behind an oblivious Hedren. The ending too is still effective, its ambiguity more satisfying than an explanation for the inexplicable would’ve been. This is also the moment when Hitchcock’s decision to completely eschew a musical score most pays off. Elsewhere, this decision gives the film a hollow, even cheap feel.

If the birds themselves are intermittently effective, it’s a shame the same can’t be said of the actors. Hedren, in her major screen debut, is barely adequate as the spoilt socialite who pursues Rod Taylor’s square-jawed lawyer to his bayside home village, while Taylor himself is dull. Jessica Tandy doesn’t quite manage to get a handle on what is, to be fair, a haphazardly written character and, cruel though it may seem to criticise a child’s performance, Veronica Cartwright is pretty much unbearable as Taylor’s little sister Cathy. Of the main cast, only Suzanne Pleshette stands out as the romantically spurned but laconically cool schoolteacher. The weak performances are at least partly down to a script that never gives its actors much semblance of real human beings to grab onto. This is further highlighted when The Birds suddenly comes to life briefly in a café scene filled with humorous caricatures. This comic interlude provides a much needed break from the lifelessness of the leads and their barely diverting entanglements.

The Birds definitely picks up in its second half once the focus shifts from the humans to the birds themselves. The slow build to a sudden flood of terror that Hitchcock intended could’ve potentially worked really well with a better script but once the carnage begins I found myself unable to care much about what happened to anyone. Consequently, at nearly two hours, The Birds became a bit of a chore, even though I fitfully enjoyed it.

33. MARNIE

Marnie was a film I wasn’t particularly looking forward to revisiting as I remembered it being pretty unpleasant. It is, but it’s also frustrating because for about an hour Marnie is also quite good and occasionally great. It’s the story of a habitual thief and liar who uses her attractiveness to dupe men into hiring her without references, before cleaning out their company safes, changing her name, changing her hair colour and moving onto the next lecherous sucker. It’s a fun set up and the opening scenes of an impish Marnie emerging from a sink awash with black dye to reveal her natural blonde hair, accompanied by Bernard Hermann’s rousingly florid score, are gloriously cinematic. A scene of a robbery, in which we see an oblivious Marnie emptying a safe on one side of the screen and a slowly approaching cleaning lady on the other, belongs in the canon of great Hitchcock suspense sequences. But Marnie loses its appeal when it dives headlong into dark, psychosexual waters in its second half. For some, this is the making of the film and many still claim Marnie as an underappreciated masterpiece. But grim fascination only goes so far in my case and by its final scenes Marnie is just too jumbled and unsavoury to get me back onside.

Before rewatching The Birds, the film Hitchcock made directly prior to Marnie, I was expecting to like it a lot more than I did. With Marnie, it went the other way. My fears of an entirely uncomfortable viewing experience were quickly quashed by a great first half and I became hopeful of rating Marnie higher than I was ultimately able to. The breaking point for many people who feel the way I do is Marnie’s infamous rape scene, in which Marnie’s new husband Mark, played by Sean Connery, becomes frustrated with her refusal to let him touch her and forces himself on her as she withdraws into catatonic horror. This is an undoubtedly unpleasant, though not overly graphic, scene but this isn’t the point where Marnie loses me. It’s the subsequent handling of the aftermath of the rape where I have problems. Connery’s Mark is not a morally straightforward character (those who say the rape scene is where they lost sympathy with him are presumably forgetting that he blackmails Marnie into marriage before that) and this irredeemable act on his part has narrative possibilities if properly handled. Unfortunately, Marnie then becomes a film about solving the mystery of why any woman would not want to be raped by Sean Connery.

Marnie works when Connery is able to maintain his character’s morally compromised identity but Hitchcock slips up by slowly repositioning him as the romantic hero. There are those who claim this is a reductive view of the film and that Marnie’s fate in ending up with Mark is just another tragic step in a series of psychological imprisonments. But such grim and ambiguous climaxes were a rarity in 1964 and to read this as a downbeat proto-Chinatown style denouement requires the viewer to ignore the fact that everything from dialogue to performance to score is telling us that Mark is a redeemed hero and a saviour to Marnie, even if it does acknowledge a long road ahead.

There are, of course, always going to be those who accuse Marnie’s critics of not accounting for the attitudes of its era. For instance, the 60s TV series The Forsyte Saga contained a scene of marital rape and when members of the public were surveyed on whether the husband had a right to claim conjugal satisfaction by force, a disturbing number of both men and women said he did. Of course, this example is nowhere near a big enough study to be taken as representative and I cite it for that very reason. Because, despite the less enlightened times in which it came out, there were plenty of people who would, and did, object to Hitchcock’s clumsy treatment of this material. Among them was Marnie’s original screenwriter Evan Hunter who begged Hitchcock to change the scene and, when he refused, wrote two versions of the script to show Hitchcock how the story could still work without the rape. For his trouble, Hunter got himself fired and replaced by Jay Presson Allen. Allen largely does a good job with the screenplay but she must have felt the overbearing importance of sticking closely to Hitchcock’s specifications, including his somewhat disturbing obsession with that rape scene, in which he seemed to take lascivious delight.

It’s not uncommon for Hitchcock films to come unstuck when they get too mired in psychology. I couldn’t abide Spellbound for that very reason and Psycho’s worst scene comes when the reins are handed to a psychiatrist to explain Norman Bates’s condition. But neither of those films come quite as badly unstuck as Marnie does in its final scene. Aside from its clear positioning of self-confessed sexual predator Mark as the hero, this scene features outrageous overacting by Louise Latham as Marnie’s mother and Tippi Hedren as Marnie herself. Having found Hedren a little stiff in The Birds, I was actually largely impressed with her performance in Marnie. Marnie is a character that asks an incredible amount of the actress portraying her and Hedren is able to switch between cool detachment, hysterical excess and haunted catatonia with an alluring strangeness that mirrors the film itself. But her full regression to childhood, including a high-pitched squeak of a voice, make it almost impossible not to laugh at the crucial dramatic juncture, even from beneath the weight of what is by now the film’s considerable ickiness.

Marnie is an odd, fascinating and at times brilliant film but taken as a whole I can’t consider it a success. And I think it’s a mistake to suggest that this perplexing curate’s egg accurately represents dominant attitudes of its era. Rather, it seems to reflect the problematic attitudes and inclinations of Hitchcock himself, with the growing permissiveness of the era merely allowing him to unleash them in a less veiled fashion. For a Hitchcock fan then, Marnie is a troubling experience indeed. I couldn’t completely deny it credit for that great first half but neither could I put it any higher than number 31 in my ranking and honestly it’s something of a relief to be done with it now.


32. CHAMPAGNE

Well, Champagne proved to be something of a surprise, in that having read almost nothing but terrible reviews, I found it completely charming. I can see why some people don’t think much of it (Hitchcock himself certainly didn’t), it is feather-light and a tad lacking in plot but for me it turned both these things into virtues, offering up a confection as bubbly and refreshing as it’s titular beverage.

Champagne is the story of a madcap heiress who’s father, fearing she will make a frivolous marriage to the man he has forbidden her to see, pretends to have lost his fortune in order to force her to reassess her life. Like Downhill, Champagne has a premise ripe with satirical potential that it doesn’t fulfil but unlike Downhill it opts to have fun with it, rather than deliver a crushing tale of despair with no real moral centre. More importantly, that visual flair that was largely missing from the last two Hitchcock films is here in spades. Almost immediately, for instance, a champagne bottle is opened directly towards the screen, making the viewer recoil from the cork before the screen is soaked with bubbly. There are little moments like this throughout, as well as wonderful throwaway jokes, such as when Hitchcock draws our attention away from a crucial confrontation between the father and daughter and instead focuses on a man trying to get past them on the stairs. He makes several attempts to get round them as the argument continues, before politely excusing himself and going back up the stairs again. Champagne’s willingness to overshadow a key emotional beat with a joke (involving a character we’ve never seen and will never see again) speaks volumes about its easy going approach to narrative, as well as it’s subtly subversive relationship with audience expectations.

Another thing Champagne has going for it is the lead performances. Gordon Harker, so memorable in The Ring, relishes his opportunity to play the larger role of the father, all twitchy frustration and conflicted anger born of a genuine, if overbearing, love for his daughter. As the daughter, Betty Balfour is one of Champagne’s main draws. Apparently Balfour was one of the biggest British stars of the 20s and you can see why. She has an immediate sparkle and instinctive comic timing, as well as an ability to make her character into someone sympathetic when she could’ve been a one-dimensional spoilt brat. She brings Champagne to life even in those moments when the narrative slows and Hitchcock’s steady directorial hand falters.

Champagne may well prove to be the lightest film Hitchcock ever made but it is all the better for it. Though I have been enjoying my trawl through Hitchcock’s little-seen silent films immensely, a lot of that enjoyment has come through fascination rather than straight entertainment. Champagne provided both and left me somewhat perplexed at its utterly dire reputation. I’d watch it again in a heartbeat.

31. THE LODGER: A STORY OF THE LONDON FOG

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog is Hitchcock’s most respected silent film and the only one I’d seen before. It’s a crucial film in his development as a director and is often listed among his best films by Hitchcock aficionados. I remembered enjoying it and I still do, although I’ve actually downgraded it half a star since the first time I saw it. This time round the direction felt better than the material it was working in the service of and I was left a little underwhelmed by the story itself, which meant the 90 minute runtime dragged a little in the middle. But The Lodger is still a very good film thanks to its visual style, Hitchcock’s growing ingenuity and a great, if often overegged, performance by Ivor Novello as the titular sinister lodger.

Watching The Lodger made me even keener to see lost Hitchcock film The Mountain Eagle since there has obviously been a huge leap from the scrappy charm of his debut The Pleasure Garden to the comparative refinement of The Lodger and I’d love to know to what extent The Mountain Eagle bridges that gap. As usual, The Lodger is peppered with Hitchcock’s playful black humour and little virtuoso moments such as the famous scene in which a ceiling becomes transparent to reveal the lodger pacing in the room above.

The Lodger will definitely be of interest to Hitchcock fans but it falls short of being a classic for me. Doubtless, and somewhat unfairly, the fact I’ve seen so many more silent films since I first watched this has affected my appreciation of it since The Lodger doesn’t begin to compare to films like Metropolis, Napoleon, Sunrise or The Kid Brother which all came out the same year. You can, however, see glimpses of Hitchcock learning from the silent masters. Some of the atmospheric shots of the landlady’s bedroom look like they’ve been influenced by German expressionism in particular. But at this stage, Hitchcock feels like a promising apprentice rather than the fully fledged master he’d eventually become.