The Passionate Adventure (1924)

 

With The Passionate Adventure, Hitch would again work as an Assistant director, screenplay co-writer, and art director on a film directed by Graham Cutts and produced by Michael Bolton. This marked the first film for Michael Balcon's new Gainsborough studio. After Balcon made Woman to Woman (1923) and The White Shadow (1924) with Victor Saville and John Freedman, he and director Graham Cutts formed their own studio taking along some of the crew used on those previous movies including Hitch. Like the previous two films, Clive Brook would once again play the male lead. The female lead would again go to an American actress, this time Alice Joyce. Joyce was a very prolific actress appearing in more than 200 films over a career that stretched through the 1910's, 20's and early 30's.

The story for this movie involves a married couple (Clive Brook, Alice Joyce) whose marriage has grown loveless after the husband has returned from World War 1. Unhappy with his home life, the husband heads to the East End of London. There he meets a young woman (Marjorie Daw) and forms a friendship with her. This gets him in trouble with her criminal boyfriend (Victor McLaglen).

This story was based off a novel of the same name by Frank Stayton. The movie was sold as a socially conscious film that would go "right to the root of the social institution of marriage." Some reviewers found the subject matter and the messaging tasteless. However, Walter Mycroft for the Evening Standard praised the film for its "absolute skill in production and for inspiration in setting." Mycroft would later be a screenwriter on the Hitchcock movie, Murder! (1930). 

Graham Cutts at this time was interested in a plight "to eliminate the explanatory letterpress [intertitles] as much as possible, as it is his belief that the perfect film is one which tells its own story in a series of pictures." This is very similar to Hitch's later comments about "pure cinema," where Hitch argued that films should tell their stories visually instead of through a plethora of dialogue. At the same time for an article entitled What Does the Public Want?, Cutts wrote about the classic German film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) that it "is too violent a swing into the realms of mental experiences to be universally acceptable, but along that line future developments lie if the public is to have the variety and breadth necessary to hold it." 

The greatest challenge for Hitch with this movie was creating a cannel set inside Islington studio’s 90-foot stage. 

Only one print of this film is in existence. It is in the BFI National Archive. It is a European release print with German intertitles. Unfortunately, this film is not available for me to view. 

-Michael J. Ruhland 

Resources Used

https://web.archive.org/web/20160305031858/http://www.britmovie.co.uk/films/The-Passionate-Adventure

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1422860/