Hitchcock's little known first COMPLETED feature

Hitchcock's first completed feature was actually "The Pleasure Garden." Virginia Valli and Carmelita Geraghty star as two chorus dancers at a music hall called The Pleasure Garden. When their male companions travel to the Tropics, the two women are left to their own devices. While the naive Valli remains loyal to her husband, Geraghty enjoys the "wild life."  Valli eventually follows after her husband (Miles Mander) only to find him involved with a native woman.

Produced in Munich, Germany, custom officials confiscated the film stock during a "location shoot" in Austria.  Although shot a year  before, the film wasn't  released in the UK until after "The Lodger" was a hit in 1927.  It seems fate again played a strong hand in giving Hitchcock the needed boost to become who we all know today.

According to Alfred himself, he was required to stand at the foot of his mother bed, and tell her what happened to him each day. This explains Anthony Perkins in Psycho (1960) standing at the foot of his mother's bed. 

-Also in his childhood days, Alfred Hitchcock was sent by his father with a letter to the local police station. The officer read the letter and, without further ado, locked young Alfred up for ten minutes. Then he let him go, explaining that this is what happens to people who do bad things. Hitchcock was frightened of the police from that day on.

-Hitchcock never won a best director Oscar in competition, although he was awarded the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award at the 1967 Oscars.

-He made a cameo appearance in all of his movies from The Lodger (1927) onwards. Hitchcock made his appearances in the beginning of the films, because he knew viewers were watching for him, and he didn't want to deviate their attention away from the story's plot.

-On April 29, 1974, the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York sponsored a gala homage to Alfred Hitchcock and his contributions to the cinema. Three hours of film excerpts were shown that night. François Truffaut who had published a book of interviews with Hitchcock a few years earlier, was there that night to present "two brilliant sequences: the clash of the symbols in the second version of “The Man Who Knew Too Much” , and the plane attack on Cary Grant in North by Northwest." After the gala, Truffaut reflected again on what made Hitchcock unique and concluded: "It was impossible not to see that the love scenes were filmed like murder scenes, and the murder scenes like love scenes...It occurred to me that in Hitchcock's cinema...to make love and to die are one and the same."

-Walt Disney refused to allow him to film at Disneyland in the early 1960s because Hitchcock had made "that disgusting movie Psycho.

-Making movies was a family thing for Hitchcock as he married Alma Reville, an assistant director and screenwriter. The couple worked together from then forward. She was a screenwriter for “Shadow of a Doubt” in 1943. They had one daughter, Patricia, who also appeared in several of his films: “Stage Fright” in 1950 and “Strangers on a Train” in 1951 and “Psycho” in 1960.

-When Alfred Hitchcock accepted the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, he delivered the shortest acceptance speech in Oscar history: he simply said "Thank you."

-The five films for which Alfred Hitchcock was nominated for a Best Director Oscar are Rebecca (1940), Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound (1945), Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960).

Société Pathé Frères

From Paris to Ithaca,NY

While it is tue that Theodore Wharton came to Ithaca as a result of an Essanay Film Manufacturing assignment, it was Pathe's serials that kept him there.

Charles Pathé (1862-1957), was a butcher's son who began his career as a traveling entertainer. Charles established a phonograph factory at 72, cours de Vincennes in Paris which led him to see the opportunities that the new means of entertainment offered and in particular by the fledgling motion picture industry. In 1895, he was associated for a while with Henri Joly who manufactured for Pathé a camera to take films for Edison’s Kinetoscope (Remember, Edison didn’t patent the Kinetoscope in Europe).

Founded as Société Pathé Frères in 1896 with brothers, Émile, Théophile and Jacques, the year also saw the Lumières' Cinematographe projector expanded use for exhibitions around the world. Charles oversaw a rapid expansion of the company. To finance its growth, he took the company public in 1897, its shares then listed on the Paris Stock Exchange.

In 1902, patent wars were cropping up everywhere. Pathé acquired the Lumière brothers (see story earlier) patents which greatly expanded its film processing facility, then set about to design an improved studio camera and to make their own film stock.

The Pathé technologically advanced equipment and aggressive merchandising combined with efficient distribution systems allowed them to capture a huge share of the international market.  This allowed them to experiment with hand-colored film - Pathécolor - and synchronization of film and gramophone recordings.

By 1909, Pathé had a movie library of over 12000 films and built more than 200 movie theaters in France and Belgium and by the following year they had facilities in Madrid, Moscow, Rome and New York City plus Australia and Japan. Slightly later, they opened a film exchange in Buffalo, New York. Prior to the outbreak of World War I, Pathé dominated Europe's market in motion picture cameras and projectors. It has been estimated that at one time, 60 percent of all films were shot with Pathé equipment. It was around this time that they came to distribute the Wharton Studio films. In 1918 the group was split into two parts: Pathé-Frères (gramophones and recordings) managed by Emile and Pathé-Cinéma (exhibition, distribution, production) managed by Charles.

Pathé became the largest film equipment and production company in the world during the first part of the 20th Century, as well as a major producer of phonograph records. In 1927, with the creation of Kodak-Pathé, Charles Pathé  retired. He died in Monaco on his 94th birthday.

The Lodger  -  Establishes Carlyle Blackwell’s Gainsborough/Piccadilly and Alfred Hitchcock

Many people do not know that Alfred Hitchcock’s development as a film director and cinema artist was, in part, a result of Syracusan, Carlyle Blackwell.

The first  Hitchcock film as we have come to know them to be, was Gainsborough Pictures “The Lodger,” a movie exploring the concept of suspicion as a basis for the suspense. Oh, and it was also about Jack the Ripper.

Adapted from the novel of the same name, The Lodger’s plot centers around whether the new boarder in the lodging house is Jack the Ripper? The suspense mounts until even the audience - who up to that time considered the boarder innocent thinks he is the killer.

According to Richard A. Harris who wrote ‘The Complete Films of Alfred Hitchcock’, this is the first appearance of the theme of many later Hitchcock films: that of the wrong man accused of a crime and his escape from the people in pursuit of him.  Fate, plays an important role in this film as Wardour, Hitchcock’s employers (Michael Balcon and Carlyle Blackwell) distribution company thought after viewing the first cut of  “The Lodger”  that it was terrible and canceled its booking.  “The Lodger” just could not interest them even with the drawing power of its star the great matinee-idol, Ivor Novello. 

Wardour asked Gainsborough to make changes and scheduled a screening a few months after they were made. There is much debate as to who should get credit for changing the picture, be it Wardour, Hitchcock or Gainsborough. Whether Hitchcock planned to make the film  with his now classic signature or not is a matter for film school essays. We do know that Wardour loved the second viewing and scheduled the film for release. 

It immediately garnered good reviews calling it the best British picture ever made.  The film employed some technical tricks created by Hitchcock that were instant hits. For example, when the landlady hears the lodger's footsteps above, she "sees" them in what looks like a double-exposure but is actually a plate glass floor. The use of lighting to create and suggest shadows  haunt the film. The gripping mob scene at the end of the film-with the lodger in handcuffs hanging on an iron fence, alluding to the crucifixion is also significant.

All of these trend-setting innovations were controversial in their day, but they worked then as they do now.

 Carlyle Blackwell

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