good back-story, and good acting

Expected more

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

"Downhill" is the fourth early Hitchcock movie I discovered after "Waltzes from Vienna", "Juno and the Paycock" and "Mary" (I discount the original "The Man Who Knew Too Much" as the film started Hitch' canon), so the more restored gems I discover, the more I understood how Hitchcock became one of the most prolific directors ever.I could have said 'one of the greatest', but 'great' is a misleading word, Orson Welles was one of the greatest too, but his first strike was also his masterpiece, Tarantino also started with his best movies… but it's not just about hitting a home run in your first game, but about keeping the distance after that. Hitchcock was a late bloomer, he only made a name for himself in his forties and became the world' most iconic filmmaker in his fifties. It took a long time, but this is what allowed him to make a lot of films, just like John Ford, some were good, a few of them were great, but most of them were forgettable, if not forgotten. Still, within their own debatable quality, these movies he made as a contract-director allowed him to sharpen his tools and make his bones, the slow and hard way.In "Waltzes from Vienna", Hitch' experimented the use of music in order to make it in line with the action, a device that would be useful in "The Man Who Knew Too Much". In "Mary", it was the use of point-of-view shooting, every little movie he made planted the seeds of his emerging talent but "Downhill", Hitchcock's silent movie, released in 1927, was a totally different experience. While I expected the work of a rising director still learning the tricks, I discovered an ambitious, absorbing and compelling psychological drama, working like the ancestor of "Requiem for a Dream", even with the same straightforward title. And the storytelling was like the hurly-burly of life grabbing your heart and taking you in the path of the main protagonist played by Ivor Novello, i.e downhill.The movie chronicles the descent into poverty and madness of Roddy, a handsome young preppy promised to a brilliant future, Captain of his school rugby team, coming from a rich family, eye-pleasing… and maybe his worst quality: goodhearted. After flirting with a waitress and dating her with his friend Tim, he learns several days later from the headmaster that the girl is pregnant. The film clearly indicates that Roddy's innocent, if there ever is one culprit because nothing actually proves she's pregnant, but, her target is Roddy because she knows he's the wealthy one. And since Tim needs his father's money for a scholarship, to get to Oxford, Roddy sacrifices his career and causes himself to be expelled. Back home, his father won't believe his innocence (why should he? Who can be fool enough to jeopardize his life for an act he didn't commit?) causing his son to slam the door.There is a very defining moment in "Downhill" when a sad-eyed Roddy takes the subway's escalator and slowly vanishes from the screen. It is not the most subtle symbolism but it is very poignant and powerful within the plot's narrative as Roddy's journey can be compared to a slow downfall. Roddy starts as a stage actor and gets involved in a relationship that would empty his pockets because of a venal actress who won't improve his trust on people of female persuasion and he finally turns into a gigolo in a sordid French nightclub where we can see, while an old lady is having a heart-to-heart talk with him, that the man is drowning in his own self-loathing bitterness, constantly wondering how he ended up in such a situation.Besides Hitchcock's directing, Ivor Novello's performance is integral to the film's strength, of course it carries the mark of the silent era, and I concede that many close-ups or side-eyes from the characters were a bit distracting, but when I saw the film, I had to interrupt it and check the name of the actor, I realized Novello was 34 during the film, which was surprising because he really looked sweet and innocent in the beginning as the idealistic smiling preppy, I really thought he was in his twenties. Yet near the end, when the delirium phrase begun, you could almost give him the age of 40, and it's definitely not the make-up, the face of this poor man is like a sponge that absorbed so much hardship that you could only feel the pain in his eyes. And the talent of Hitchcock is to completely rely on the face of the actor to convey the tragedy of his life and use the minimum of card-boards to make his point.And the least card-boards there were, the more efficient they were, and I felt like it was Hitchcock putting himself in his so cherished Gold-like position, with an obvious sympathy toward Roddy, because the ugly words were never directed at him but at the steps of his hellish journey, calling 'stage' the world of 'make-believes' or nightclubs 'the world of lost illusions'. The film is interesting because it give us a hint on how Hitchcock, the man whose touch could always be read in his movies, could make his presence visible in the silent era, when he hadn't much trademarks to show off. And the result is simply astonishing and carries all the promises of Hitch's talent.A few words about the ending, I expect many viewers will be surprised by the 'happy' ending, thinking that realistically, the man should have ended up in a worse situation, but think about it, had it happened today, with the Internet and all the modern devices, he certainly wouldn't have went through the same troubles and been easier to find. The 20's were indeed a time where you could go downhill quicker than you'd think, and it's very revealing that the film's other title is "When Boys Leave Home".

Classmates and close friends at an English public school, Roddy Berwick and Tim Wakely compete for the affections of a local shop girl. When the girl falsely accuses Roddy of getting her pregnant, he is expelled. However, Roddy remains silent to protect Tim, who was the guilty party, and the friends make a pact to keep silent. Outraged at his expulsion, Roddy's father does not believe his son's claims of innocence and throws him out. Thus, Roddy strikes out on his own, and his life begins a downward spiral from stage acting to a disastrous marriage to taxi dancing to the Marseilles waterfront. "When Boys Leave," also known as "Downhill," was Alfred Hitchcock's fifth completed film, and, early on in his career, the master director explores his oft-repeated theme of the wrongfully accused.Shot in 1927, the film is silent with inter-titles, and the black-and-white cinematography is often well lit with striking visual compositions. However, Hitchcock generally holds the camera steady, and movement occurs within the frame. The film lacks the camera fluidity common among movies of the late silent era, although Hitchcock is already a master of visual story-telling, and the inter-titles are brief and sparse. As Roddy's life reels out of control, he is dwarfed by his surroundings in rooms with impossibly high ceilings and doors that are more than twice his height. Fortunately, Hitchcock elicits naturalistic performances from his cast, and none indulges in the grand style of acting that negatively stereotyped silent movies. Ivor Novello, a Welsh matinée idol best known for his musical talents, plays the suffering Roddy quite well. Isabel Jeans as Julia Fotheringale, a spendthrift actress, and Ian Hunter as Archie, Julia's shady lover, provide amusing support during one colorful episode in Roddy's descent."When Boys Leave" is from Hitchcock's apprentice period in England, when he was still learning the craft. While the story is thin, and the motivations vague, this short silent film shows flashes of the genius to come, and, for students of the master, every Hitchcock film is worthwhile viewing.

During my youth in the sixties and seventies silent films were quite regularly shown on British television, but today are they are few and far between even on specialist movie channels, and are hardly ever shown on terrestrial television, perhaps because the generation that can remember the silent era are mostly dead. Many people therefore do not realise that Alfred Hitchcock made a number of silent films during the twenties; they are much less well-known than his Hollywood films of the forties, fifties and sixties, and even than the British talkies like "The Lady Vanishes" which he made in the thirties. "Downhill", recently shown on Sky Classics, is one of them, dating from 1927, towards the end of the silent era. (It was released in the same year as the first talking picture, "The Jazz Singer"). As the film opens its hero, Roddy Berwick, appears to be a fortunate young man. The son of an aristocratic family, he is School Captain at an exclusive public school. He is popular, intelligent and the school's star rugby player. His world collapses when Mabel, a waitress at a local café, announces to the headmaster that she is pregnant and that Roddy is the father. The real culprit, in fact, is Roddy's best friend Tim, but Mabel appears to have singled Roddy out because his family is wealthier than Tim's and she is hoping that she can blackmail them. Out of loyalty to his friend, however, Roddy accepts the blame and expulsion from the school. This is not the end of his misfortunes, however. He is disowned by his father, who believes him guilty of the accusation. He goes to work as an actor and marries a famous actress named Julia, but the marriage is an unhappy one and she leaves him for another man. He inherits £30,000 from a relation, but loses it all, largely due to Julia's extravagance. He becomes a gigolo in Paris, but quits this line of work in disgust and ends up penniless and starving. The theme of Mabel's pregnancy is treated very obscurely, so much so that some have misinterpreted these scenes and incorrectly concluded that Roddy is expelled on a false accusation of theft. This is because the British censors discouraged any discussion of sexual matters. Although the American Hays Office was not set up until the 1930s, its British equivalent, the British Board of Film Censors, had been established in 1912, with the result that film censorship in Britain during the twenties tended to be stricter than in America (and, indeed, than in many European countries). In later years Hitchcock was to become famous for his suspense thrillers; nearly all his Hollywood films, with "Mr and Mrs Smith" a rare exception, fall into this category. In his early British period, however, he made numerous films in other genres as well, and "Downhill" is a melodrama rather than a thriller. It does, however, show evidence of some of the techniques that were later to make him famous, particularly in films like "Spellbound" in which he could indulge his love of the surreal and dreamlike. In one scene Roddy, taken ill while on a ship, experiences a delirious nightmare. Hitchcock also makes use of shots of a descending escalator, not for any literal meaning but as a visual metaphor for Roddy's descent into misfortune, which is of course the significance of the title "Downhill". (It is strange how English and many other languages use the expression "going downhill" as a metaphor for a change in one's fortunes for the worse, even though in reality the lowlands at the foot of a hill are often a more pleasant place to be than the hilltop itself). True colour films were very rare in the twenties, but "Downhill", in common with a number of other monochrome films from the period makes use of the device of film tinting, in which different scenes are tinted in different shades. Orange is normally used for interior scenes and daytime exteriors, blue for nighttime exteriors and green for scenes set at sea and the nightmare sequences. Only a few scenes are in straightforward black-and-white. Even in my youth, most of the silent movies shown on TV were comedies. Indeed, at the time I formed the quite erroneous impression that during the silent era nobody ever made films about serious subjects and that my grandparents' generation only ever went to the cinema to laugh at the antics of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy. The sort of slapstick at which these comedians excelled has passed the test of time better than the serious films of the era which can look very alien today, largely because they required non-naturalistic acting techniques with which we are unfamiliar. Dialogue had to be supplied by title cards, and in "Downhill" Hitchcock keeps his use of these to a minimum. Emotion had to be conveyed through facial expression and gesture alone, something which must have appeared strange to British people in the twenties who generally believed in keeping a stiff upper lip and regarded gesticulating while talking as a foreign eccentricity. "Downhill", however, shows just how powerful silent film could be as a story-telling medium. The film's happy ending may seem sentimental today, but at the time "vice punished and virtue rewarded" was an established dramatic convention, and Roddy's misfortunes are due not to his vices but to an excess of virtue, which enables the cowardly Tim and the manipulative Julia to take advantage of his good nature. Once one gets used to the melodramatic acting techniques, one can appreciate the power of some of the performances here, especially from Ivor Novello (today better remembered as a musician and composer than as an actor) as Roddy, Annette Benson as the scheming Mabel and Isabel Jeans as Julia. The film makes compelling viewing for anyone with an interest in Hitchcock's work. 8/10

With their theatre play Down Hill Ivor Novello and Constance Collier produced another lampoon dealing with British boarding school life and the layers of society it depends upon. Ivor Novello attended a school like that himself (Magdalen College, Oxford) and the theme of his play seems authentic in its unlikeliness. A school boy takes the blame for 'getting a girl into trouble' although a friend is to blame. He is expelled not only from school but also from his posh family home. Without his father's backing life quickly goes down hill. After a short career as a Paris gigolo he ends up in the slums of Marseille. Hitchcock filmed Down Hill with his typical mix of 'suspense' and humour throughout the film. The camera zooms into terrified faces, goes down hill on an escalator and an elevator and picks up every shadow and shade on its way. Apparently Hitch had the final scenes tinted in a horribly yellowish green when the protagonist feels ill. Apart from the almost unneeded final act Downhill is a downright Hitch. Its climax is the Paris night club scene where the young and inexperienced taxi dancer and gigolo is awaited by a horny elderly woman who has already compensated his services yet to be rendered.