Downhill

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🎙️ EPISODE 672: 03.24.23                 The lead actor here, silent film "star" Ivor Novello — who gets top-billing, before the movie, before Hitchcock —also wrote the play that this was based on. And yeah, that's me, a dumb little squirrel, looking for a scapegoat. Blame it on the crazy-eyed handsome man whose been dead for over 70 years, why not? Maybe in the stage production, where they could talk their way through (or over?) this go-nowhere plot, Downhill works. But as movie (silent or otherwise), it mostly fails. In fact, I think the story here is so halfwitted and silly that it actually makes what is an otherwise stale artifact slightly come alive in the stupidity. While Hitchcock is moving forward, however incrementally, from a technical standpoint — see a couple lovely overlays below — the meat and potatoes of his movies seem to be, somehow, getting worse.

This is so disjointed. Billed as a story of two dudes, a friendship put to the test, we never see the other non-Novello dude again after the first fifteen minutes. It's shocking, now four movies in, that Hitchcock's wackadoodle first feature (The Pleasure Garden) had easily the most interesting plot. Downhill is essentially a series of misfortunes suffered by Novello's character, a charming, high school rugby star (he was pushing 40 when he made this, lol). A girl for some unexplained reason says he knocked her up so he gets expelled from school and exiled by his rich family. He then gets bamboozled in a failed marriage by an actress who steals money he inherited from a distance relative. He ends up on skid row and then on a boat for some reason, before coming home to mommy and daddy who, at some point while he was gone, figured out that the inciting incident was based on a lie and beg him for forgiveness. Then, even though it seems like ten or more years have passed (???), he rejoins the high school rugby team and scores the winning touchdown. Then the movie thankfully ends.

If only the movie had been this stuff and no plot... if only.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 671 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 673 ⫸

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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. It was released on October 24, 1927.