Downhill

Hitchcock's dark, underappreciated study of social disgrace and male self-destruction. Ivor Novello plays Roddy, a golden-boy school captain who takes the blame when his friend gets a shopgirl pregnant, and is expelled. From there, his life is a relentless downhill slide: cut off by his family, rejected by society, he drifts through Parisian nightclubs, failed marriages, and the colonial demi-monde until he hits absolute bottom. Hitchcock structures the film as a literal descent — Roddy is always going down stairs, escalators, slopes — and the Expressionist visual techniques he learned in Germany give the decline a nightmarish, accelerating quality. The film's frank depiction of sexual exploitation, class cruelty, and psychological collapse is remarkably adult for its era, and it anticipates the director's later fascination with wrongful accusation and spiraling consequences.