Downhill

In my review of Hitchcock’s Murder!, I noted how it felt like a silent movie retrofitted into a talkie, due to its direction and staging. It left the movie with a weird feeling that it could never shake, that it wasn’t everything it should or could be. Downhill is Murder’s mirror image. Originating as a stage play, Downhill was turned into a movie by Hitchcock. A silent movie. Stage plays are not known for their silence, so this is a rather square peg in a distinctly round hole. The story is of a young man, Roddy, who is from high society and attending a posh boarding school. He and a buddy have a bit of a party with a local shopgirl, who then accuses Roddy of getting her pregnant, when it was the friend. But said friend is of lower class and if he is scandalized, he’ll lose out on a scholarship, so Roddy takes the bullet … and gets expelled. And disowned. And from there, life keeps kicking him in the shins. Hitchcock’s choice to make this during the silent era is puzzling. The movie is visibly dialogue heavy, but there are minimal intertitle cards to give the viewer the gist of what’s being said. His intent was to let the images do the talking, but either he was not adept enough as a director (this was only his fourth movie), or the transition from stage to screen went horribly awry … or both. The result is a movie that cannot achieve the level of drama or pathos necessary to convey the story, because the needed component isn’t there. Downhill is like an eggless cake; it just doesn’t work without that one ingredient. Add onto that a stultifying length of almost two hours that are watching this poor guy get kicked around and screwed over and over, and the end result is a movie that is as exhausting as it is tedious and improperly designed. If Hitchcock had waited just a few years for talkies, this might have come off better. Still not great — it continues Hitchcock’s early career fascination with English high society, which is a crushing bore 100 years later — but it might’ve had a chance to be okay. Without words, though, it renders Downhill a nigh on unwatchable. Not outright bad, but definitely misguided.