It is time to set some limits to the cult of the director. A bad film by a good director is still a bad film.
Hitchcock was a good director and Downhill was a bad film.
The problem is not what Hitchcock does with the material but the material itself. The story is not only dated and melodramatic, it is incoherent. It charts the downward spiral of promising public schoolboy, Roddy Berwick, after he is expelled from school for taking the blame for a friend's offence. However, his subsequent descent is not a consequence of this initial misfortune. At each stage it is precipitated by something completely different and the only common factor is Roddy's own feebleness.
After expulsion from school he rows with his father and stalks out of his home, so the second step in his decline is due to his pride and pigheadedness.
He finds work as an actor and seems to be doing OK. Then, in a ridiculous plot development, he inherits £30,000 which enables him to marry an actress on the make. Although his fortune is £1.3 million in today's money, she runs through it in an improbably short period of time (doesn't he ever read bank statements?) and kicks him out of the house which, for some reason, has been signed over to her. This step in his decline is due to his sheer stupidity.
Next we find him as a taxi dancer in France. How or why he has ended up doing this job is a mystery. Is he incapable of holding down a normal job? If not, why doesn't he return to acting? When the sudden irruption of daylight into the dance hall reveals how tawdry it all is, this seems to come as a revelation to him. Apparently, it hadn't previously occurred to him that squiring middle-aged women round a dance floor, as a low-rent gigolo, might be regarded as a bit demeaning.
He takes this disillusionment badly and promptly sinks even lower until he ends up in a Marseilles flop house, where he is now ill and delirious. It is difficult to account for this final stage in his decline other than that is was needed to complete a predetermined pattern.
With the aid of some sailors he returns to England and eventually makes it back to his own home. It is not obvious what he has done to earn this help from these relative strangers. His father is now full of repentance and says: "Forgive me, I know everything."
For a youth of whom great things were expected, it cannot be said that Robby acquits himself very well in his adversity.
That is the material Hitchcock has to work with and although he has fun with a few of the scenes (as other reviewers have documented) there really isn't anything he can do to salvage this pointless farrago. Ultimately, this is not a story: it is just a succession of Ivor Novello's self-pitying, masochistic fantasies.
Of course, from the very beginning of his career Hitchcock had command of a rich cinematic vocabulary so you can find a number of Hitchcock touches even in this picture. Individual scenes undoubtedly have their merit, but the picture as a whole is just an utterly negligible trifle.
In the Sixties, when Hitchcock was interviewed at length by Francois Truffaut about his whole body of work, he had very little to say about this movie.
Perhaps we can best honour his memory by following his lead.
Hitchcock was a good director and Downhill was a bad film.
The problem is not what Hitchcock does with the material but the material itself. The story is not only dated and melodramatic, it is incoherent. It charts the downward spiral of promising public schoolboy, Roddy Berwick, after he is expelled from school for taking the blame for a friend's offence. However, his subsequent descent is not a consequence of this initial misfortune. At each stage it is precipitated by something completely different and the only common factor is Roddy's own feebleness.
After expulsion from school he rows with his father and stalks out of his home, so the second step in his decline is due to his pride and pigheadedness.
He finds work as an actor and seems to be doing OK. Then, in a ridiculous plot development, he inherits £30,000 which enables him to marry an actress on the make. Although his fortune is £1.3 million in today's money, she runs through it in an improbably short period of time (doesn't he ever read bank statements?) and kicks him out of the house which, for some reason, has been signed over to her. This step in his decline is due to his sheer stupidity.
Next we find him as a taxi dancer in France. How or why he has ended up doing this job is a mystery. Is he incapable of holding down a normal job? If not, why doesn't he return to acting? When the sudden irruption of daylight into the dance hall reveals how tawdry it all is, this seems to come as a revelation to him. Apparently, it hadn't previously occurred to him that squiring middle-aged women round a dance floor, as a low-rent gigolo, might be regarded as a bit demeaning.
He takes this disillusionment badly and promptly sinks even lower until he ends up in a Marseilles flop house, where he is now ill and delirious. It is difficult to account for this final stage in his decline other than that is was needed to complete a predetermined pattern.
With the aid of some sailors he returns to England and eventually makes it back to his own home. It is not obvious what he has done to earn this help from these relative strangers. His father is now full of repentance and says: "Forgive me, I know everything."
For a youth of whom great things were expected, it cannot be said that Robby acquits himself very well in his adversity.
That is the material Hitchcock has to work with and although he has fun with a few of the scenes (as other reviewers have documented) there really isn't anything he can do to salvage this pointless farrago. Ultimately, this is not a story: it is just a succession of Ivor Novello's self-pitying, masochistic fantasies.
Of course, from the very beginning of his career Hitchcock had command of a rich cinematic vocabulary so you can find a number of Hitchcock touches even in this picture. Individual scenes undoubtedly have their merit, but the picture as a whole is just an utterly negligible trifle.
In the Sixties, when Hitchcock was interviewed at length by Francois Truffaut about his whole body of work, he had very little to say about this movie.
Perhaps we can best honour his memory by following his lead.