Downhill: Playing for the Old Boys

So, a lowly jobbing actor. But Hitch now drops a hint about how readily things can be upturned: when Roddy goes to return the cigarette case to the actress, Julia (Isabel Jeans), in her dressing room, she leans back in her chair to see who has entered, and we’re given an upside-down subjective shot of him in the doorway. (This anticipates a similar device in 1946’s Notorious, where Ingrid Bergman, recovering from a heavy night, gets a topsy-turvy view of Cary Grant.) Julia flirts blatantly with Roddy despite the presence of her lover, Archie (Ian Hunter), her leading man in the show; when she learns that Roddy has inherited thirty thousand pounds from his godmother, her interest intensifies.

Archie, seeing what’s coming, presents Roddy with the latest exorbitant bills Julia has run up, remarking, with evident sexual innuendo, “They’re yours, dear boy. Regard them as an entrance fee.” Even so, Roddy marries Julia, who soon goes through his inheritance while still carrying on with Archie behind his back. When this comes to light, the two men get into a clumsy fight. It seems this scene might have been even more ridiculous: Hitch originally had the combatants, both formally dressed, throwing increasingly large objects, until they’re both wrestling with pedestals as big as themselves. But the studio found this knockabout comedy too undignified, and the scene was truncated. “They said I was guying Ivor Novello,” Hitch recalled in a 1937 article in Sight & Sound. “It was ten years before its time.”

Once more, the symbolism turns overexplicit: broke again and thrown out of the apartment he unwisely put in his wife’s name, Roddy enters the elevator and heads—where else?—down. And so to the third section of the story, “The World of Lost Illusions.” The stage show that opened the second section had a certain boisterous rhythm to it. But now we’re in a Paris dance hall packed with dozens of dancing couples, awkwardly crammed together and showing precious little enjoyment. And the presiding deity of this purgatory: “Madame la patronne, expert in human nature” (Barbara Gott, looking as tough an old boot as ever there was), selling Roddy as a cut-price gigolo. “There is a nice English boy, very cheap at fifty francs a dance,” she tells a female client d’un certain âge.

Another woman invites Roddy to her table. She’s a little younger and seems sympathetic. But then the curtains and windows are thrown open, and “searching, relentless sun-light” (as the title card observes) floods in. David Thompson has singled out as a highlight of the film this “astounding scene in a nightclub where the arrival of daylight reveals the true decadence on the faces of its clientele.” Gazing around, Roddy registers the squalor of what he’s participating in; the woman he’s been talking to now appears haggard and predatory.

“Downhill—till what was left of him was thrown to the rats of a Marseilles dock-side.” So begins the final and most creatively inspired passage of the film. Roddy lies delirious in a waterfront dive: the woman who lives there persuades two sailors to take him back to England; there may be some money in it. With rough kindness, the matelots help him on board, his stumbling progress (down again, into a cabin) tracked by subjective shots.

“I tried to embody the dream in the reality, in solid, unblurred images,” Hitchcock said of the sequence that follows. Lying in a bunk for, we’re told, five days and nights, Roddy experiences a bewildering montage of images from his descent—Hitch’s Soviet influences coming on strong. Among these visions, we repeatedly see the gramophone record that was playing when Roddy and Tim visited Mabel in her tea shop, its rotating disc merging with other revolving objects, like the piston driving the ship, and at one point sending the camera spinning across the walls of Roddy’s school. There’s the orchestra that played at Madame la patronne’s establishment, and Madame herself, in the misogynistic image, seated at a table along with Mabel, Julia, and the predatory-seeming customer from the Paris nightclub, all grinning mockingly at Roddy and busily counting banknotes, while Archie lurks in the background wearing a chef’s hat—cooking up another scheme to fleece his rival, perhaps? And a gray-haired sailor sitting on a lower bunk gradually turns his head, Nosferatu-like, to reveal the glaring, accusatory features of Sir Thomas.

Downhill, let’s not forget, came very early in Hitchcock’s directorial career, little more than a year after his debut with The Pleasure Garden. Yet it’s hard to think of a sequence in his entire subsequent output that matches this one for imaginative virtuosity. James Stewart’s nightmare after (what he believes to be) Kim Novak’s death in Vertigo (1958), perhaps, but there Hitch had the help of saturated Technicolor and Bernard Herrmann’s masterly, disquieting score, not to mention far more sophisticated equipment. Roddy’s anguished, tumultuous phantasmagoria here is achieved through purely visual means.