Champagne

Like most of Hitchcock's silent era (and much of his early talkies, too), Champagne is a rather uncomplicated movie that does the two things he liked to do a lot in those day: take a swipe at the rich, and impart some moral lesson on and via its main character. Easy Virtue, Rich & Strange, and Downhill all followed this kind of template, and they all suffer from the same issues: dull stories, a general feeling of being out of touch with reality, and the moral lesson coming off mixed at best and cruel and judgmental at worst. Champagne is no different from most of these in those aspects, except that it intends to be a comedy. We're supposed to find it funny when Betty, the daughter of a rich champagne magnate, is left by her boyfriend and finds out her father is broke all in one day. We're supposed to find humor in how her boyfriend breezes in and out of her life, and their constant bickering that sends up more red flags than a semaphore enthusiasts convention. This whimsical approach to the material renders Champagne so weightless, a house of cards looks like a fortified fallout shelter. Nothing lands, because nothing is treated as important; Betty just whimsically drifts like a feather in the breeze to the next set piece, unaffected in any meaningful way. Being poor does not teach her the value of appreciating life. When she gets a job as a flower girl in an upscale restaurant, she keeps showing her I'm-rich-I-don't-care-about-the-rules whimsy, and never suffers any consequences for it from her employer. And when the movie doubles back at the end and reveals this was all a ploy by her dad and they are still rich and he now approves of the boyfriend, they go right back to bickering. WHAT WAS THE POINT OF ALL OF THIS. The movie literally ends with the characters in the same places they were at the beginning: rich, carefree, and clearly not meant for each other. There is some lovely camera work in Champagne that shows Hitchcock was really learning the visual language of film was more than putting a camera on a tripod. There is a lovely shot at the beginning and end, where events are happening but they're set into a single drop of champagne in a glass. These little touches make the movie at least visually interesting from time to time, but not enough to get past a plot without substance, characters without arcs, comedy without humor, and a moral lesson without either of those two concepts. Champagne is inoffensive -- Betty Balfour's energy keep this thing from being a total snooze -- but it's also inessential. It has no resonance while you're watching it, which means it'll have even less when it's over.