Downhill

Hitchcock, Gainsborough, 1927, from the play Ivor Novello wrote with Constance Collier under the name David L'Estrange. Novello is a public-school hero who takes the blame for a friend's trouble with a waitress and then falls: shop, music hall, Marseilles. The title is a direction. Hitchcock keeps sending him down stairs, down streets, down a lift. The school is the last place the film believes in.