The Pleasure Garden (1925)

 

The Pleasure Garden was the first film to be solely directed by Alfred Hitchcock. In his book length interview with Francios Truffaut, Hitch would tell of how this came about, "Balcon [producer Michael Balcon] said, 'How would you like to direct a picture?' and I answered, 'I've never thought about it.' And in truth I had not. I was very happy doing scripts and the art direction, I hadn't thought about myself as a director. Anyway, Balcon told me there was a proposal for an Anglo-German picture. Another writer was assigned to the script, and I left for Munich. My wife, Alma, was to be my assistant. We weren't married yet, but we weren't living in sin either; we were still very pure."    

Interestingly an issue of The Film Daily (dated July 5, 1925) credited the film to Graham Cutts stating, "London, Graham Cutts will make 'The Pleasure Garden' for Gainsborough Pictures in Munich Germany. Virginia Valli and Carmalita Geraghty are now en route from the states to appear in the picture. Work states next week."

Like earlier films that Alfred Hitchcock worked on this movie is very much a romantic melodrama. Patsy Brand (Virginia Valli) is a chorus girl at a music hall called the Pleasure Garden. She meets a woman named Jill Cheyne (Carmelita Geraghty) and helps her get a job as a dancer. Jill gets engaged to a man named Hugh Fielding (John Stuart). However, when Hugh travels out of the country, Jill starts to fool around with other men. 

This film is your typical melodrama of the time boosted by great visual filmmaking. This movie is a pure visual treat. This is true right from the opening scene. The sets for the titular music hall are wonderfully larger than life. These sets alone tell us everything we need to know about the Pleasure Garden itself. We understand immediately the mixture of majesty and sin that attracts people to such a place. Equally as great is the outdoor location shooting, which is simply lovely to look at. Again, these images are not only lovely to look at but help tell the story. The juxtaposition of these idyllic settings with the relationship between the characters already falling apart works perfectly. Also helping this film is the lead performances by Virginia Valli and Carmelita Geraghty, both of whose performances help bring some charm and humanity to otherwise very cliché characters.

Unfortunately, the storyline here is nowhere near as memorable as the visuals.  This cliché-ridden story might work better if it was handled in a tongue and cheek manner but instead this movie takes these plot points much too seriously. Many of the melodramatic moments strain one's suspension of disbelief and the sheer number of twists and turns can become overwhelming at times. The storyline is actually very engaging as it starts though. The basic backstage story of these two very different women forming a close friendship and looking out for each other both in their professional and romantic lives is quite charming, if still familiar. Yet towards the middle of this film, the story gets too bogged down in these clichés and loses much of the simple charm it has in its early scenes. Still even in the later scenes, the visuals and performances make it worth watching.  

The screenplay was written by Eliot Stannard. This marks Stannard's first collaboration with Hitch. He would later be a writer on the Hitchcock films, The Mountain Eagle (1926), Downhill (1927), The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), Champagne (1928), Easy Virtue (1928), The Farmer's Wife (1928) and The Manxman (1929). His non-Hitchcock work includes Wuthering Heights (1920), The Taming of the Shrew (1923), A Christmas Carol (1923) and The Hate Ship (1929). Screen writer Sidney Gilliat (who would work on the Alfred Hitchcock films The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Jamaica Inn (1939)) would say about Stannard, "The only resident British writer I can remember was Eliot Stannard, a great character. He seemed to be writing or rewriting everything. If something went wrong on a picture, Stannard was called up — like Shakespeare would have been — and asked to come in and pep the scene a bit."

Eliot Stannard

The story was based off of 1923 novel (of the same name) by Marguerite Jervis (under the pen name, Oliver Sandys). Jervis was a very prolific British author writing over 150 books during her 60-year career. Though she most often wrote under various pseudonyms, her books also often sold very well. In fact, she was one of the most successful novelists of her time. Still, none of her works are remembered well. Eleven of her books have been adapted for the screen. Some other film adaptions of her work include The Honeypot (1920), Love Maggy (1921), Rose o' the Sea (1922), Blinkeyes (1926), Tesha (1928) and Born Lucky (1933). She was married to Welsh author Caradoc Evans. Evans was a very controversial author in Wales due to his collection of short stories entitled My People, which criticized many of his fellow Welsh citizens for smugness and hypocrisy, while also addressing the brutal poverty that was sweeping the country. The two married in 1933 and remained married until his death in 1945. As well as her literary career, Jervis was also a trained stage actress.    

Once again, the lead actress was an American star, Virginia Valli. Hitch would later recall, "Michael Balcon, who had conceived of the idea of 'importing' American stars long before anyone else, had engaged Virginia Valli for the leading role. She was at the height of her career then - glamorous, famous and very popular. That she was coming to Europe to make a picture at all was something of an event." Though largely forgotten today, Valli was a very popular movie star at the time. Born Viriginia McSweeney on January 18, 1895, in Chicago, she worked in movies as early as 1916 for the Essany Film Company. Her big break in movies was when she got the lead role in King Vidor's Wild Oranges (1924). She soon found herself playing the lead in such films as The Signal Tower (1924) and In Every Woman's Life (1924) and become one of Universal's biggest stars. Other silent films starring her were Paid to Love (1927) and Evening Clothes (1927). She made her sound debut with The Isle of Lost Ships (1929). Her last movie was Night Life in Reno (1931). The same year her last film was released she married popular actor Charles Farrell. They stayed married until her death on September 24, 1968, at the age of 73. This marked her only film for Hitchcock. 

An issue of Pictures and the Picturegoer (dated October 1925) states, "Virginia Valli was in London for a few days last month. She had just come in from Munich where she made The Pleasure Garden with Miles Mander and John Stuart and was on her way back to the states. Viriginia may make a picture in England later, when Universal start their proposed scheme for making pictures over there." 

Directing such a big star as Virginia Valli made the new director quite nervous. Hitch would later state, "I was terrified of giving her instructions. I've no idea how many times, I asked my future wife if I was doing the right thing. She, sweet soul, gave me courage by swearing I was doing a marvelous job. And Virginia Valli played her scenes sublimely unconscious of the emotional drama that was being enacted on the other side of the camera." 

Photoplay, 1925

Motion Picture Magazine, 1923

When Virginia Valli arrived, she had brought a friend along, actress Carmelita Geraghty. Hitch would later state, "The two were traveling together and intended to stick together." Carmelita Geraghty would be given the part of the second female lead in the film. Born on March 21, 1901, in Rushville, Indiana. Geraghty was the daughter of Tom Geraghty, screenwriter for such movies as The Courageous Coward (1919), When the Clouds Roll By (1919) and The Sporting Venus (1925). She was selected as one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars of 1924. These were a selection of 13 actresses that the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers would pick as the next big stars. However, she would not become the big star that they predicted. She had some other big roles including one in the first film version of The Great Gatsby (1926). In the sound era she would go on to have supporting roles in the Andy Hardy and Dr. Kildare movies. 

This film is one of the first collaboration between cinematographer, Gaetano di Ventimiglia. Ventimiglia would later work on the Hitchcock films, The Mountain Eagle (1926) and The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927). Most of Ventimiglia's filmography was made up of Italian movies. Though he did also work on the film A Woman in Pawn (1927) for the Gaumont British Picture Corporation. This film's art director was Ludwig Reiber, who spent most of his career working on German movies that have been forgotten over the years, though he would later be the art director for Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1927). He would also work on Hitch's next movie, The Mountain Eagle.

Much of this movie was filmed at Emelka Studios in Munich. This studio was on a fifty-acre estate surrounded by a large forest. On scene that takes place on Pasty's honeymoon was shot on location at Lake Como. A review in The Bioscope described this scene as "enchanting". 

The making of this movie was often beset by finical troubles on Hitch's part. As a struggling filmmaker, Hitch (as well as his future wife Alma) sometimes had difficulty managing the money to pay for hotel bills, food and other such expenses. Hitch later admitted that he got lucky a few times by Valli bringing her own food for a train ride and having a very light breakfast one morning. Hitch would later tell a story that illustrates the financial trouble he found himself in. "The critical day arrived [the arrival of a hotel bill]. In desperation I hit upon the idea of using Carmelita Geraghty as a means to extort some money from Virginia Valli. The ethics of a director playing such a trick on a star didn't trouble me. But, like a man, I left Miss Reville to do all the dirty work. She went to Valli and explained that, owing to the unexpected presence of her friend, we had insufficient expenses money to meet our obligations. Could she possibly advance us some cash? I was not present at the interview. Women can do these things more discreetly than men. At any rate, Miss Reville came back to me in triumph bearing a couple hundred dollars of Virginia Valli's money. By the time I had paid the bill I had got the equivalent of ten English pounds left."

The movie had its premiere at the Capitol in Haymarket, London on April 12, 1926. However, distributor C.M. Woolf, felt that the film was bound to be a commercial failure and withheld its theatrical release. The movie would not receive a full release in its home country until after the success of Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger. However, in the U.S. the film was being shown in 1926. Advertisements greatly promoted Virginia Valli's name. The film was still being screened at various U.S. theaters as late as 1928. 

Upon its release some reviewers attacked the film for the sexual nature of the story. Of course, when it came to classic Hollywood directors, Hitch was one who was unafraid of addressing sex in his movies. Think of the end of North By Northwest (1959) where two newlyweds consummating their marriage is shown through the unsubtle Freudian symbolism of a train going through a tunnel. However, Hitchcock would often state at the point in his life when he made The Pleasure Garden, he was wholly innocent and pure when it came to sexual matters, often emphasizing that he was still a virgin. 

In his book long interview with Alfred Hitchcock, Francios Truffaut brought this up stating, "You claim that, at the time, you were ignorant about sexual matters and totally innocent. Yet in The Pleasure Garden, the two girls, Pasty and Jill, really suggest a couple, the one dressed in pajamas, the other wearing a nightgown." Hitch responded, "That may be true, but it didn't go very deep; it was rather superficial. I was quite innocent at the time. The behavior of the two girls in The Pleasure Garden was inspired by something that happened when I was assistant director in Berlin in 1924. A highly respectable British family invited me and the director to go out with them. The young girl in the family was the daughter of one of the bosses of UFA. I didn't understand a word of German. After dinner we wound up in a night club where men danced with each other. There were also female couples. Later on, two German girls, one around nineteen and the other about thirty years old, volunteered to drive us home. The car stopped in front of a hotel and they insisted that we go in. In the hotel room they made several propositions, to which I stolidly replied, 'Nein Nein.' Then we had several cognacs and finally the two German girls got into bed. And the young girl in our party, who was a student, put on her glasses to make sure she wouldn't miss anything."

Hull Daily Mail, 1927

Alton Evening Telegraph, 1928

This movie can be watched below on YouTube. 

-Michael J. Ruhland

Resources Used

Hitchcock by Francios Truffaut

The Alfred Hitchcock Story by Ken Mogg.

Hitchcock on Hitchcock Edited by Sidney Gottlieb

The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White

https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/The_Pleasure_Garden_(1925) 

https://mediahistoryproject.org/

https://lisasreading.com/the-queen-of-romance/