Downhill

Downhill (1927)

A College Hero round whom is woven a picture of Love and Treachery.

When school captain Roddy Berwick takes the blame for his friend’s scandal, he is expelled and disowned by his family. Cast out of his privileged world, Roddy drifts through a series of humiliations—from waiter to penniless actor to gigolo—descending ever further into ruin and self-disgust.

Date of release
1927-10-24
TMDB
5.7 / 10 (103)
Runtime
1h 46m
Genres
Drama
Director
Alfred Hitchcock

Casting

Interesting facts

Downhill is a 1927 British silent drama film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Ivor Novello, Robin Irvine and Isabel Jeans, and based on the play Down Hill by Novello and Constance Collier. The film was produced by Gainsborough Pictures at their Islington studios. Downhill was Hitchcock's fourth film as director, but the fifth to be released. Its American alternative title was When Boys Leave Home.

Production

The film is based on the play Down Hill, which was written by its star Ivor Novello and Constance Collier under the combined alias David L'Estrange.

The stage performance had a short run in the West End and longer in the provinces. In the play, Novello thrilled his female fans by washing his bare legs in a scene following a rugby match. An appreciative James Agate, drama critic for the London Sunday Times, wrote: "The scent of good honest soap crosses the footlights." Alfred Hitchcock included a similar scene of Novello for the film, in which he is shown naked from the waist up.

Hitchcock used a variety of screen techniques with a minimum of title cards, preferring instead to allow the film's visual narrative tell the story. The scene after Roddy leaves home opens with the title card "The world of make-believe," but everything else in the scene is conveyed visually. A closeup of Roddy in a tuxedo pulls back to show that he is waiting on a table at a restaurant, where he pockets a woman's cigarette case.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended