Early Hitchcock
Hitchcock spent the second half of the 1920s at Gainsborough and then British International Pictures, learning the job in public. The Lodger is already a man under a wrong suspicion. Blackmail is the first British feature that talks, and it still works as a silent. The rest of the list is the apprenticeship: a boxing picture, a rural comedy, a champagne glass used as a lens. Watch the stairs and the close-ups of hands. He is not yet the director of Vertigo. He is already the director who would rather show you a look than explain it.
9 films
The Pleasure Garden
1925 · Alfred Hitchcock
The first minutes decide where to look: a track along the chorus line, then a man in the stalls with opera glasses. The plot is two dancers and a bad husband abroad. Shot near Munich and on Lake Como. The director is already the audience.
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
1927 · Alfred Hitchcock
The one that starts it. A glass floor so the pacing overhead can be seen from below, a blonde downstairs, a killer in the fog. Suspicion before proof. Watch the hand on the banister coming down the stairs. He never stopped shooting that hand.
Downhill
1927 · Alfred Hitchcock
The title is a direction and the film obeys it: stairs, streets, a lift, Marseilles. Novello takes the blame for a friend and keeps descending. Blunt, and the bluntness is the lesson. Watch the escalator shot. Hitchcock learning that a camera can say down.
The Ring
1927 · Alfred Hitchcock
His only sole writing credit. A fairground boxer, a bracelet from the champion, and a title that means three things. The party scene is where the camera starts drinking. The fight is cut like a fight. The marriage is cut like a fight.
The Farmer's Wife
1928 · Alfred Hitchcock
A widower writes a list of women and is refused by each. Rural, a little cruel, and Hitchcock takes the comedy seriously enough to time it. Watch Minta at the table while he writes. The film knows what he does not.
Champagne
1928 · Alfred Hitchcock
A job he did not like, and one shot he could not help: the action seen through the bottom of a champagne glass, the frame gone fisheye. A spoiled girl learns what money is in a Paris club. The plot is thin. The lens is the reason it is here.
Blackmail
1929 · Alfred Hitchcock
The first British feature that talks, and it still works as a silent. A woman kills a man who assaults her; her detective boyfriend covers it; a crook saw her leave. Joan Barry speaks for Anny Ondra off camera. The word knife at the breakfast table is the sound film learning what a word can do. Then the British Museum.
Juno and the Paycock
1930 · Alfred Hitchcock
A filmed play, and he knew it. O'Casey's Dublin tenement, a false inheritance, the IRA at the door, Sara Allgood repeating her stage part. The camera comments when it can. Watch the room during the news. Reverence for the text is the lesson he did not want.
Murder!
1930 · Alfred Hitchcock
A juror who is an actor decides to start the case over. Marshall shaving while a phonograph plays his own thoughts and an orchestra does Wagner off-set, because you could not post-dub yet. The case ends at a circus. Alma Reville on the scenario. By now he can do both kinds of film.