The Pleasure Garden (Emelka [Münchener Lichtenspielkunst AG], Bavarian Film, Gainsborough Pictures, 1925)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, April 8) my husband Charles asked me if there was anything interesting on Turner Classic Movies since he’d burned out on MS-NBC. They were in the middle of a documentary on the glory years of MGM called When the Lion Roared and they weren’t going to show a feature until 9:15, so I decided to screen us a YouTube movie which turned out to be pretty good: Alfred Hitchcock’s first feature, The Pleasure Garden. Most of the filmographies count this as Hitchcock’s first film as a director, but apparently he started in 1922 with a short called Number Thirteen (not to be confused with his 1932 feature Number Seventeen) and then co-directed something called Always Tell Your Wife. Alas, Number Thirteen is completely lost (indeed, the impression I’d had from the Hitchcock biographies is it was either never finished or completed but never released) and there’s only one extant reel of Always Tell Your Wife, and it’s almost impossible to see. The Pleasure Garden was actually shot in Germany for a Bavarian production company called Emelka, which co-produced the movie with Michael Balcon’s Gainsborough and Gaumont-British. It was made in 1925 and featured two U.S.-based “B”-list actresses, Virginia Valli and Carmelita Geraghty, along with British actors John Stuart and Miles Mander. The film is named after a music hall in which Patsy Brand (Virginia Valli) works in the chorus; she takes in an aspiring dancer, Jill Cheyne (Carmelita Geraghty), and the two room together. Patsy persuades Oscar Hamilton (Georg H. Schnell, who Anglicized his name to “George Snell” for his credit), owner of The Pleasure Garden, to give Jill a tryout. (There’s a great scene in which Hamilton is shown puffing away at a cigar in front of a “Positively No Smoking” sign, which shows us that as the theatre’s owner he doesn’t think the rules apply to him.) Jill immediately auditions for the lead, gets it, and for her featured number wears a costume that reminded Charles of Josephine Baker’s outfits.

For the first few reels The Pleasure Garden seems to anticipate the Warner Bros. musicals of the early 1930’s with two or three women bonding over their theatrical aspirations – one could readily imagine Warners remaking it with Joan Blondell as Patsy, Glenda Farrell as Jill, and Dick Powell and Warren William as the two male leads. The women attract male interest; Patsy is courted by Levet (Miles Mander), who runs some sort of plantation in the South Seas (“played” by an island off the Italian coast), while Jill draws the attention of Hugh Fielding (John Stuart) but is interested in bigger game. After Hamilton makes the obligatory pass at her and she demands that he set her up in a fancy apartment of her own, she soon moves up the gold-digging ladder and ultimately courts Prince Ivan (Karl Falkenberg), who judging from his long beard we’re presumably supposed to think is a refugee from the Russian Revolution. Hugh has proposed to Jill but goes off without her, while Levet marries Patsy, takes her on a honeymoon in Italy (playing itself in these scenes) and then says he’ll send for her as soon as the mysterious company he runs the plantation for promotes him to a high enough position he can afford to have a wife with him. Patsy understandably gets tired of waiting for him, and when Jill won’t lend her the money to go to Levet she gets it from her landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Sidey (Ferdinand Martini and Florence Helminger). Alas, when she arrives she finds Levet in the middle of making love to his native mistress (Elizabeth Pappritz). Naturally she’s appalled by the blatancy of his extra-relational activity, and wants nothing more to do with him. Levet demands that she live with him, and to pave the way for her return he takes his native girlfriend for a swim and drowns her in the water (which someone on YouTube posted as a separate clip and labeled “Hitchcock’s first murder”). Then he tries to rape Patsy, but the plantation manager (Louis Brody) shoots and kills him, sparing Patsy the Fate Worse Than Death, and all this causes Hugh to realize that Patsy is the woman he loved and wanted all along.

Tom Luddy, who ran the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley in the mid-1970’s and programmed various revival theatres in the Bay Area, once showed The Pleasure Garden and blurbed it along the lines of, “Already murder is at the center of the story, though its treatment is melodramatic rather than suspenseful.” The Pleasure Garden is a quite well-made silent melodrama, obviously influenced by the sex dramas Cecil B. DeMille was making in his early years before he discovered the Bible, but the only parts that really look like Hitchcock’s later work are the beginning and the ending. Hitchcock repeated the camaraderie between the members of the Pleasure Garden’s chorus line at the start of his third film (and the first one that showed his real talent), The Lodger, and the final reel – the one in which two people get killed (though one is a justifiable homicide) – at last looks like a Hitchcock movie, with half-lit cinematography by Baron Gaetano di Ventimiglia. Working in Germany, Hitchcock got to see the UFA studios where Friedrich Murnau and Fritz Lang were making their great films, and he recalled watching Murnau shoot a scene for his 1924 film The Last Laugh. Murnau was doing a scene in which characters were shown at a railway station, and the front train was a real one, with people shown getting on and off it. The back train was also real, also with people, but the trains in the middle were models built of different sizes to create a forced perspective effect. Murnau invited Hitchcock to look through the camera’s viewfinder and told him, “It doesn’t matter what you see on set. All that matters is what the camera sees” – which Hitchcock cited for the rest of his life as the best advice he ever get on directing.

The Pleasure Garden was a perfectly competent silent drama, but there’s almost nothing about it that indicated a great director in the making – as there was in The Lodger, made a year and a half later. Ironically, though the whole point of using Virginia Valli and Carmelita Geraghty in the movie was to get it released in the U.S., no American distributor would touch it until The Lodger was released in the U.S. and became a hit. There are a number of quirky stories about the making of The Pleasure Garden, including Baron Ventimiglia’s unsuccessful attempt to spare the impecunious producers the tax duties on importing their raw film into Italy – he hid the camera under a train seat, but the Italian customs people discovered it and confiscated the film. Hitchcock was worried about that because it meant he had to send to his producers for more raw stock, and he was terrified that he’d blow his big chance to become a director by having gone over budget before he’d even shot a frame of film. Also Hitchcock had to do a last-minute replacement for the actress playing the native girl Levet drowns because a crew member told him, “She can’t go into the water.” “Why ever not?” Hitchcock said. “Because it’s that time of month.” “What time of month?” Hitchcock asked, and his biographer, John Russell Taylor, marveled that Hitchcock had led such a sheltered existence that as a young man in his early 20’s and already engaged to be married (to Alma Reville, his assistant on the film), he’d never heard of menstruation!