The Pleasure Garden (1925)
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- Alfred Hitchcock's directorial debut is a melodrama about the love lives of two chorus girls, Patsy (Virginia Valli) and Jill (Carmelita Geraghty). With both girls working at the 'Pleasure Garden', Patsy soon meets and marries Levett (Miles Mander), who happens to be the best friend of Jill's fiance Fielding (John Stuart). When both men leave to do work in the colonies, Patsy soon finds Jill two-timing Fielding, something she would never consider, trusting her husband's fidelity completely. But her views of Everett are shattered forever when, hearing he is ill, she travels out to see him, only to find that he is sleeping with a native girl, and has developed a serious alcohol problem.
- Actors:
- Virginia Valli, Carmelita Geraghty, Miles Mander, John Stuart, Ferdinand Martini, Florence Helminger, Georg H. Schnell, Karl Falkenberg, Louis Brody, Elizabeth Pappritz
- Directors:
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Producers:
- Michael Balcon, Erich Pommer
- Writers:
- Eliot Stannard, Oliver Sandys
- Aka:
- Irrgarten der Leidenschaft
- Genres:
- Classics, Drama, Romance
More like The Pleasure Garden
Reviews (1) of The Pleasure Garden
Hitchcock Debut - The Pleasure Garden review by Steve
Silent melodrama that starts off as the sort of dirty joke that Alfred Hitchcock (on his debut as director!) might tell, about a pair of music hall dancers and the wolves and jackals that queue at the stage door.... But ends with murder in the tropics...
The twist is that the chorus line dame from the city (Virginia Valli) is the virginal good-girl, and the ingenue from the country (Carmelita Geraghty) is the gold digger. Both are American actors, though it is more interesting to see Miles Mander and John Stuart near the start of long careers in UK cinema.
It’s really only one for the completionists; there is little visual style and the editing is clumsy. But Hitchcock is rarely boring and he never just coasts; he always gives interesting cues and in the context of British silent cinema this is actually better than average.
Indeed, the production supervised by Michael Balcon and the location shoot on Lake Como suggest this was a prestigious project. But this is mostly watched now because of Hitch, and stands out as his only other UK/German picture, The Mountain Eagle (1926) is sadly lost.