Downhill (Gainsborough Pictures, Woolf & Freedman Film Service, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s (Sunday, June 21) Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Nights” feature was one I was really looking forward to: Downhill, Alfred Hitchcock’s fourth feature film and the immediate follow-up to his third, The Lodger. It had the same writer (Elliot Stannard) and the same star (Ivor Novello, whom host Jacqueline Stewart described as a surprisingly open Gay man in an era in which the anti-Gay laws that had caught and punished Oscar Wilde were still very much in effect; he had a long-time partner, fellow actor Bobbie Andrews, from 1917 to his death in 1951, though according to John Stuart Roberts, biographer of one of Novello’s casual affair partners, Siegfried Sassoon, Novello “was a consummate flirt who collected lovers as he gathered lilacs”). Downhill was based on a play Novello co-wrote with actress Constance Collier in 1926 and was put into production almost immediately after the success of The Lodger by producer Michael Balcon and his company, Gainsborough Pictures. Novello plays Roderick “Roddy” Berwick, star student at an elite prep school, whose downfall begins when he and his roommate Tim Wakeley (Robin Irvine) spend a night at a candy shop with the woman who works there, Mabel (Annette Benson). Mabel shows her true colors by playing a record of a song called “I Want Some Money” – the label is shown on screen, which would have been a cue to the in-house organist or pianist to play the song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChwRe3QOmIY&list=RDChwRe3QOmIY&start_radio=1). She and Roddy dance to it, but Tim is the man she’s really interested in; the two go off into a corner and have sex. Later Mabel complains to the prep-school dean, Dr. Dowson (Ben Webster), and says she’s got pregnant and Robby is the father. (We have only her word that she’s pregnant at all.) Roddy honors the deal he made with Tim and doesn’t rat him out.

As a result, he’s expelled from school just one week before the term was supposed to end, and he returns home to his parents early. His mother (Lilian Braithwaite) is sympathetic but his dad Sir Thomas (Norman McKinnel) is anything but; he denounces his son as a liar when Roddy tries to explain, and Roddy leaves home because he’s so hurt that his dad condemns him without letting him present his side of the story. Roddy’s downfall takes him first to a theatre company (referred to in an intertitle as “The Land of Make-Believe”) in which he gets a small part as a waiter. He attracts the attention of the play’s star, Julia Fotheringale (Isabel Jeans) … well, he doesn’t, but the 30,000 pounds he’s just inherited from a relative on his mother’s side does. Though she already has a live-in partner, Archie (Ian Hunter, later Dr. Watson to Arthur Wontner’s Sherlock Holmes in 1932’s The Sign of Four, easily the best of Wontner’s four extant films as Holmes), Julia gets Roddy to marry her, only to dump him as soon as she’s extracted his mini-fortune and left him in debt. From there Roddy crosses the English Channel and becomes a taxi dancer in Paris, mostly with middle-aged women as his clients. He sinks even further than that and becomes a wharf rat in Marseilles, falling into the clutches of a white sailor and his roommates, a Black couple. (One of the most fascinating aspects of Downhill is that all the steps in Roddy’s downfall are driven by avaricious women. Well, what else do you expect from a Gay male author?) They put him on a ship to London and he spends the five days of the voyage below decks in a delirious state as he dreams and re-lives the previous incidents of his life. Ultimately Roddy lands back in London and seeks out his parents, who welcome him like the Prodigal Son and not only reconcile with him but get him back in school at the end.

The first 25 minutes or so of Downhill are pretty dull, less because of any flaw in Hitchcock’s direction than the shopworn banality of the material. But my husband Charles came home from work right before Roddy is expelled, and the film got considerably more interesting as Roddy went downhill. Hitchcock threw in a lot of elaborate effects shots, including a great scene in which Roddy enters Julia’s room and, because of the angle in which she’s laying in bed as he comes in, she first sees him upside down: a scene Hitchcock later reused between Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in Notorious. As the film progresses Hitchcock throws in more and more expressionistic camera effects – remember that Hitchcock’s first two films as director, The Pleasure Garden and the now-lost The Mountain Eagie, were British-German co-productions and Hitchcock was in UFA Studios when F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang were making their early masterpieces and learning from them. In later years Hitchcock thought he’d overdone these effects, but they add a lot to the movie and anticipate much of his later work. Jacqueline Stewart tried her best to link Downhill to Hitchcock’s subsequent films, saying that it’s about a young man whose life is unhinged by circumstances over which he has no control and he has to fight back against other people’s presumptions of his guilt. I think she was reaching a little (or more than a little), but it was certainly fascinating to watch this early Hitchcock a day after I’d seen one of his fully realized masterpieces, Rear Window (1954), and notice the embryo of a later master of cinema!