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Pretty Good

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

'Downhill' is visually inventive and astonishing, but the story is nothing more than simple flat melodrama. Script is based on the play "Down Hill" written by Constance Collier and the film's star Ivor Novello. Roddy Berwick (Ivor Novello) and Tim Wakely (Robin Irvine) are best buddies attending expensive private school. Soon after both boys spend an evening with waitress (Annette Benson), she comes forward and says she's pregnant. She accuses Roddy, who comes from the rich family, being the father, while the real one is Tim. Roddy promises to keep his mouth to protect Tim, who might lose his scholarship. Roddy gets expelled from school, and thrown out at home by his father. Roddy falls deeper and deeper after being used by different people. Hitchcock fantastically depicts Roddy's descent after each dramatic episode with showing Novello's character going down on stairs, on escalators and with elevator.Not the Hitchcock's best movie - directing is marvelous, but the story is just too simple and predictable. On the other hand, it is very easy to care about the main character and despise the cruel people who but other persons through unfair grind (even when things happen thanks to Roddy's own naivety). P.S. At that time (in August, 2018) the film's theme is still relative.

This was Hitchcock's fourth film, after his first hit, THE LODGER, and with the same leading man, Ivor Novello. The latter was a very effective silent film actor, romantic and dashing (he resembled the young Fredric March). He takes direction well from Hitchcock, playing a man whose reckless "honor" sets him on the downward spiral of a vagabond existence.Hitchcock plays with camera angles and editing techniques that were innovative for the time. The use of the hand-held camera to denote visual unsteadiness, the montage of disturbing images to denote delirium, and a generous use of close-ups. It's the style here of a true artiste that is most impressive.Novello made 16 silents, two of which are lost. He proved himself quite a bad sound actor and only made six talkies. Film's loss was the theater's gain as he composed the music for and rote the librettos for 8 grand London operetta extravaganzas between 1939 and 1952, making a greater name for himself than his acting would have provided.This is one of Hitchcock's most impressive early films. The genius was there from the start.

It is time to set some limits to the cult of the director. A bad film by a good director is still a bad film.Hitchcock was a good director and Downhill was a bad film.The problem is not what Hitchcock does with the material but the material itself. The story is not only dated and melodramatic, it is incoherent. It charts the downward spiral of promising public schoolboy, Roddy Berwick, after he is expelled from school for taking the blame for a friend's offence. However, his subsequent descent is not a consequence of this initial misfortune. At each stage it is precipitated by something completely different and the only common factor is Roddy's own feebleness.After expulsion from school he rows with his father and stalks out of his home, so the second step in his decline is due to his pride and pigheadedness.He finds work as an actor and seems to be doing OK. Then, in a ridiculous plot development, he inherits £30,000 which enables him to marry an actress on the make. Although his fortune is £1.3 million in today's money, she runs through it in an improbably short period of time (doesn't he ever read bank statements?) and kicks him out of the house which, for some reason, has been signed over to her. This step in his decline is due to his sheer stupidity.Next we find him as a taxi dancer in France. How or why he has ended up doing this job is a mystery. Is he incapable of holding down a normal job? If not, why doesn't he return to acting? When the sudden irruption of daylight into the dance hall reveals how tawdry it all is, this seems to come as a revelation to him. Apparently, it hadn't previously occurred to him that squiring middle-aged women round a dance floor, as a low-rent gigolo, might be regarded as a bit demeaning.He takes this disillusionment badly and promptly sinks even lower until he ends up in a Marseilles flop house, where he is now ill and delirious. It is difficult to account for this final stage in his decline other than that is was needed to complete a predetermined pattern.With the aid of some sailors he returns to England and eventually makes it back to his own home. It is not obvious what he has done to earn this help from these relative strangers. His father is now full of repentance and says: "Forgive me, I know everything."For a youth of whom great things were expected, it cannot be said that Robby acquits himself very well in his adversity.That is the material Hitchcock has to work with and although he has fun with a few of the scenes (as other reviewers have documented) there really isn't anything he can do to salvage this pointless farrago. Ultimately, this is not a story: it is just a succession of Ivor Novello's self-pitying, masochistic fantasies.Of course, from the very beginning of his career Hitchcock had command of a rich cinematic vocabulary so you can find a number of Hitchcock touches even in this picture. Individual scenes undoubtedly have their merit, but the picture as a whole is just an utterly negligible trifle.In the Sixties, when Hitchcock was interviewed at length by Francois Truffaut about his whole body of work, he had very little to say about this movie.Perhaps we can best honour his memory by following his lead.

Alfred Hitchcock, despite all his ability, was undeniably a largely mechanical filmmaker. His approach was one of planning and manipulation rather than aesthetics or feeling. Not a bad thing in itself, so long as that cold mechanical mind could be put to the purposes of intrigue and excitement, as it would at the peak of his career. The trouble then with his earliest efforts is that they have all that technical intricacy without that much needed focus on reaching the audience as entertainment.His silent films in particular seem to lurch all over the place, and are proof that the term "experimental film" generally means a bad one. After all, if you know how to do it properly you don't need to experiment, do you? Downhill, unlike the films made immediately before and after, has less of the camera trickery that characterises Hitch's early work, the exceptions being a couple of mobile point of view shots in the Headmaster's office scene, and the rather extravagant finale, which believe me is nothing compared to the obtrusive bag of tricks Hitch employs in, say, Champagne (1928).Instead, the director focuses far more on the expression and gesture of the actors and the cunning arrangement of shots to reveal what is going on. Much of this is technique that Hitch appropriated from screenwriter Eliot Stannard, who actually predates Eisenstein in theories of montage, and the various inserts of reactions and concurrent bits of business – like the crosscutting from the courting couple to Ivor Novello dealing with the young customers in the shop scene – seem to fit in with the theories Stannard set out in film articles in the 1910s. A more Hitchcockian manoeuvre on display here is the beginning of scenes with close-ups, with gradual pull-back-and-reveal shots to give context. Often the opening shot, focusing on a single character or an item like a cap with the word "honour" on it, serves almost like a chapter heading. Gradually the shots become wider, giving more context to the scene, often finishing with a hauntingly empty wide shot – one that in another director's work might introduce a sequence. In one scene Hitchcock playfully confounds our expectations several times over, by starting with Novello in a posh outfit, pulling back to reveal he is in fact a waiter, then pulling back again to reveal the restaurant is part of a stage set.This more subtle approach by Hitchcock is very welcome, but the trouble is he seems a little over-confident in his own abilities. Downhill contains very few intertitles, but the action is not quite coherent enough to make up for them. The shop scene in particular is very confusing, and synopsis writers cannot even seem to agree whether Novello is being falsely accused of stealing or getting a woman pregnant. The latter is less obvious but makes much more sense. The focus on people and their actions is a bonus at least, and we get to see a bit more character from Ivor Novello as compared to his rather leaden personality in The Lodger, but the handsome chappy still cannot really act. And it's nothing but mugging and crazy stares from the rest of the cast, I'm afraid.But perhaps I am missing the point. The incident in the shop could be regarded as an early example of the "MacGuffin" – an otherwise unimportant device which serves only to drive the plot forward – and as such its details are of no consequence. And certainly, this rather trite plot of a man disowned by his family for some social misdemeanour, who descends the slippery slope until he ends up becoming a gigolo for fat French women… is certainly one which could bear a bit of style over substance. And isn't it in some ways the essence of cinema to conjure up atmosphere or visual delight, with coherence and plot detail being of secondary concern? All this is true, and yet the purpose of a motion picture is to tell a story, whether it be the ostensible one of plot, or an emotional one at a more human, character-driven level, and this is something Downhill fails to provide.