Alfred Hitchcock Collectors Guide: The Pleasure Garden (1925)

• The legend begins: spotlighting the Master’s first film
• Contrary to myth, THIS is “the first true Hitchcock film.”
• Replete with many trademark Hitchcockian flourishes
• Voyeurism, staircases, a theatre, a charming villain…
• Sex, strangling, shooting – it has them all and more
• Even his lifelong obsession, the first “Hitchcock Blonde”
• There were six to be precise, albeit wearing stage wigs
• It’s an early masterpiece but is still largely unknown

Note: this is part of an ongoing series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles; any dead links are to those not yet published. Subscribe to the email list to be notified when new ones appear.

Part 2: Restoration and home video

US one sheet poster

Contents

• A neglected garden
• Production and release
• Not Nita Naldi
• Related articles

A neglected garden

Good girl: Virginia Valli

Hitch’s feature début is an overt morality tale whose title, like that of The Ring, is meant for interpretation in various ways: literal (the theatre of its initial setting); erotic (its many references to pleasures of the flesh); and the darkly ironic (several characters’ descent into hell). Its Japanese title, 快楽の園, pleasingly yet rather less subtly translates as The Garden of Earthly Delights, after the notorious triptych by Hieronymus Bosch. The storyline clearly appealed to Hitch’s strong Catholic sensibilities. As the BFI’s Hitchcock 9 restoration press release noted:

Hitchcock’s first film as director demonstrates many of his obsessions from the first frame onwards – a cascade of chorus girls’ legs tripping down a spiral staircase. A melodrama complete with apparitions, exotic locations and a sojourn in Italy, this is also the first of Hitchcock’s many films about a woman marrying – to perilous effect – a man she doesn’t really know.”

The fates of two chorus girls fall into sharp relief – Jill, the schemer, finds success, and Patsy, the good-hearted girl, is betrayed by her unscrupulous husband. Hitchcock’s confident filmmaking style is evident from the first frame, with a cascade of chorus girls’ legs tripping down a spiral staircase, but it is his ability to condense the story and then to weave in extra layers of meaning that is truly impressive… The Pleasure Garden is a treatise on voyeurism, sexual politics and the gap between romantic dreams and reality. Hitchcock uses the minor characters to comment on the principals, to contrast the behaviour of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters through the use of parallel action.

“Hello boys”: Carmelita Geraghty, aka Salome, dances for her supper

Both literally and figuratively, Hitch opened his first film the way he would continue until his last: by placing his inimitable stamp all over it. On camera, with a flourish he signed his own name in the credits – a bold statement of intent to be sure, but one that was entirely justified. In every sense, the Master blasted out of the gate full throttle, but of all his works this is by far the most unfairly maligned, if not outright disregarded. And for good reason: the currently circulating copies are a pale imitation of the original film. They’re drastically edited, poor quality prints that are further compromised by having missing or rewritten intertitles and much of the remaining footage rearranged. Thankfully, there’s an exquisite restoration that’s just begging to be released on home video after having been screened numerous times internationally with live accompaniment. Simply put, The Pleasure Garden is a largely undiscovered masterpiece and if you haven’t yet seen the restored version, you really haven’t seen it at all.

Unravelling the Joys of The Pleasure Garden – Ken Mogg

Prior to the early 1960s, Hitch was routinely derided or at best dismissed by ‘serious’ critics as a technically accomplished director of populist films. Critic and filmmaker John Grierson’s infamous proclamation was typical: “Hitchcock is no more than the world’s best director of unimportant pictures.” All of that changed when Hitch began to be championed as an auteur par excellence by leading lights of the French New Wave and various other young critics and directors. The rest is history. However, his début offering has not been seen in anything like its original form since soon after its première. Hence it being utterly overlooked throughout his critical re-evaluation and the ensuing seemingly infinite number of Hitch-related books, documentaries, film studies courses, etc. I could fill a book myself with woefully ill-informed quotes regarding the film; Every other reference to it, however fleeting, is negative. For instance:

“Improbably for a director who’s remembered for taut psychological thrillers such as Vertigo, his directorial debut, The Pleasure Garden, was a jolly romp about chorus girls.” – William Cook, The Guardian

Selling her soul: Karl Falkenberg and Carmelita Geraghty negotiate the price of love.

What rot. Mr Cook is talking out of his hat and has clearly never seen the film, in any form. Hardly what you’d call cutting edge journalism. For the time being, you’ll have to take it from me: The Pleasure Garden is as dark and shocking as anything Hitch ever had a hand in; even more so when one considers when it was made. This unwarranted besmirching has also been exacerbated by the complete loss of his second feature, The Mountain Eagle. Here again, there’s nothing concrete to suggest it was anything less than as brilliant as his first. Until a copy of that film turns up, we go on waiting and hoping.

Similarly with the many films that Hitch played an increasingly significant role in prior to The Pleasure Garden, as the overwhelming majority are lost or unavailable. So you see, it’s much easier for his latter-day commentators to dismiss this rich body of work and declare The Lodger as ground zero for the Master. Nearly every one of them has lazily fallen into line until this has become the received opinion, however wrong it may be. But then, Hitch’s legacy is peppered with such egregious falsehoods, such as the erroneous belief his entire British oeuvre is in the public domain and up for grabs.

Production and release

Slipping seamlessly from the Seven Arts to the world’s oldest profession.

The film’s title refers to the fateful theatre where two chorus girls meet and begin their intertwining story. Of course, it’s ironic as it turns out to be anything but pleasurable; much like the Garden of Eden a deadly snake is lurking, ready to bring discord and tragedy. The screenplay was adapted from the bestselling, eponymous 1923 novel (Internet Archive) by Oliver Sandys, actually the masculine pen name of prolific author Marguerite Florence Laura Jarvis. It was an Anglo-German co-production of Gainsborough Pictures and Emelka Film Studios in Munich, and entirely shot at the latter’s facility and on location in Italy. The original German title was to have been Der Garten der Lust but this was deemed too racy by the censors, so the toned-down Irrgarten der Leidenschaft (Maze of Passion) was adopted instead.

Hitch’s original contract for directing The Pleasure Garden – yours for only $22,000!

Another commonly repeated fallacy is that The Pleasure Garden (and The Mountain Eagle) was so poor it was shelved indefinitely and only granted UK release in the wake of The Lodger’s success. The dates simply don’t tally: it was clearly released just before the latter film, with the two playing around the country pretty much concurrently. So why are people so keen to perpetuate a false narrative? Subjugating The Pleasure Garden in favour of The Lodger in this way is further proof of the strange desire to posit the latter as “the first true Hitchcock film” and discard the rest, Admittedly though, this misapprehension was started by the man himself when he misleadingly stated as much to Truffaut.

Carmelita Geraghty by Diogenis Papadopoulos, 2013. His superb series, Death & The Master, perfectly captures the essence of love, sex and death running through the heart of The Pleasure Garden. D&TM Part 2 | Artsy | Artospective | Instagram | Bēhance | Facebook

The basic fact is, the release of Hitch’s first two films was temporarily delayed due to the interference of his then nemesis, C.M. Woolf. Gainsborough’s distributor saw them as wholly uncommercial and too “European”, and was reportedly abetted in this by Hitch’s old boss, the personally troubled Graham Cutts, who resented seeing the young man’s career so quickly eclipse his own. Woolf retained a lifelong dislike of Hitch’s style but on this occasion begrudgingly backed off in the face of The Lodger’s ecstatic trade show reviews. Don’t worry, it all balanced out in the end: Hitch obviously scaled far greater heights than either and in spite of their own substantial achievements within the British film industry, the history books chiefly define Woolf and Cutts by their relationship to said young upstart. Well and truly owned.

Adding to The Pleasure Garden’s truly international flavour were two specially imported American stars, Virginia Valli and Carmelita Geraghty. Hitch also cannily enlisted his then girlfriend Alma Reville as assistant director, establishing a personal and professional partnership that would last for the rest of their lives. Hitch and Alma fell in love with several of the shooting locations, among them the Villa d’Este on the shores of Lake Como in northern Italy. They returned there at least half a dozen times, including for their honeymoon the following year and intermittently thereafter up until the 1970s. Coincidentally, Madeleine Carroll, star of The 39 Steps and Secret Agent, married her first husband there in 1931; or perhaps it was on the Hitchcocks’ personal recommendation? After all, Alma had already co-written The First Born (1928), a fantastic weepie in which Carroll starred.

You dirty old man. Miles Mander and Elizabeth Pappritz bring sin to the Garden of Eden.

Not Nita Naldi

For the record, though frequently stated otherwise, US star Nita Naldi, who played the lead in Hitch’s second film, The Mountain Eagle, did not appear as Miles Mander’s young native lover in The Pleasure Garden. At the time of shooting, Naldi was 30 years old and working in her home country on back-to-back films; she didn’t even arrive in Europe until almost two months after shooting had wrapped on Hitch’s first film. The part was actually played by Elizabeth Pappritz, a local 19-year-old German actor who bears no more than a passing resemblance to Naldi. The oft-repeated fallacy unfortunately originated with Peter Noble in his Index to the Work of Alfred Hitchcock (1949). In it he also inadvertently started the rumour of The Mountain Eagle being retitled Fear o’ God for its US release; it wasn’t. In any case, Naldi was a major international star by this time and certainly not given to appearing in uncredited bit parts.

In his five-part Life Among the Stars series for the News Chronicle, 1–5 March, 1937, Hitch wrote in detail of meeting Naldi for the first time when she arrived to film The Mountain Eagle. He also said, “The star I had for the second film I directed was a very considerable star in her day. Her name was Nita Naldi: you probably remember her with Valentino in Blood and Sand. But she came across the Atlantic to make one picture in Germany for £1,500.” Further, when describing the small crew tasked with filming The Pleasure Garden’s pivotal destructive scene at Alessio, though he didn’t actually name her, Hitch did refer to the appointed actor as “A German girl” and “my little German girl”.

Meanwhile, Pappritz was named and pictured in several German film magazines at the time, including Deutsche Filmwoche (no. 24, 9 October 1925) and Illustrierter Film-Kurier (vol. 7, no. 341, 1925). Of course, it being Hitch there has to be a final twist: in Life Among the Stars he also went on to state that Pappritz caught a chill (he was being circumspect: she was actually on her period) and was reluctant to go into the water. To get around this, he claims to have recruited a temporary stand-in: a waitress from the hotel where the crew was staying. But watching the film itself does not bear this out, unless he was actually referring solely to the shots where she’s fully immersed. That’s a bit of a stretch though as Pappritz was already in the water anyway and after all, Hitch was famed as a lifelong teller of porkies.

No sir, that’s not my baby. Elizabeth Pappritz: in the water, in The Pleasure Garden. Not Nita Naldi.

Part 2: Restoration and home video

Related articles

This is part of a unique, in-depth series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles.