Adapted from the bestselling 1923 novel of the same name, The Pleasure Garden is a rather sordid tale of voyeur­ism and sexual politics involving the fate of two chorus girls: Jill, an ambitious schemer, who ditches her nice fiancé Hugh and finds success through a rich lover, and Patsy, the good-hearted girl, who is pressured by social expectation into marriage with an unscrupulous charmer, Levet.

Although it marked his directorial debut, The Pleasure Garden was not Hitchcock’s first rodeo. He had done nearly every job on the studio floor – designing titles, writing scripts, art directing – and had been assistant to Gainsborough’s most successful director, Graham Cutts, working on Woman to Woman, The White Shadow (both 1923), and The Blackguard (1925) at the Ufa studio in Berlin, where their re­lationship began to show signs of strain. Gainsborough boss Michael Balcon used the opportunity to separate them and gave the 25-year-old Hitchcock his first solo film, sending him off to the Emelka studio in Munich with Alma Reville, a safe pair of hands. They worked well to­gether and in fact Hitch proposed to her on the return trip, somewhat unroman­tically, as she had her head over a bucket being seasick.

Hitchcock thought The Pleasure Gar­den was melodramatic, but if he didn’t care much for the subject matter, he cer­tainly gave it extra dimension, weaving in extra layers of meaning through his consistent scheme of visual imagery. A shot of a casually discarded apple, for ex­ample, one bite taken from it, effectively symbolises Patsy’s husband’s attitude to her on their wedding night – one bite and he’s bored – and hints at his future conduct.

It was presumably this kind of artiness that irritated distributor C.M. Woolf, who postponed the film’s UK release for over a year, only after Hitchcock’s sub­sequent film The Lodger (1926) got unexpectedly good reviews. The reaction was positive. “The Daily Express” in its review of The Pleasure Garden in Janu­ary 1927 saw the famous cleverness and dubbed Hitchcock the “Young Man with a Master Mind”.

Bryony Dixon