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Select media
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Stills must not be reproduced, copied or downloaded in any way.
Film details
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Featuring
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Country
United Kingdom
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Year
1927
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Genre
Drama
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Type
Film
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Category
Fiction
Alternative titles
- When Boys Leave Home Alternative
- When the Boys Leave Home Alternative
Introduction
“The film slips subliminally between reality and fantasy as Novello’s fate worsens... with one astounding scene in a nightclub where the arrival of daylight reveals the true decadence on the faces of its clientele.”
David Thompson, Sight & Sound, October 2007
In his second film for Alfred Hitchcock after The Lodger (1926), Ivor Novello – who wrote the source play for Dowhill – plays (somewhat implausibly at 34) model school student Roddy, falsely accused of getting a young woman pregnant. Expelled and disgraced, Roddy goes into self-imposed exile, reduced to renting himself out as a companion to lonely, wealthy women before winding up destitute and ill in Marseilles.
Unusually dark for the time it was made, Downhill is another example of Hitchcock’s much-revisited ‘wrong man’ plot. Fascinating for the way it fetishises Novello’s suffering, and with some exceptional compositions (a sickly green tint when a delirious Roddy voyages home prefigures the much later Vertigo), Downhill is one of Hitchcock’s most unfairly neglected works.
Rebellious teenagers appear throughout British cinema, from girls in reformatories in Good-Time Girl (1948) and borstal boys in Boys in Brown (1949) to juvenile delinquents in Bronco Bullfrog (1969).
Cast & Credits
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Cast
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Roddy Berwick
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Dr Dowson, the headmaster
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Sir Thomas Berwick
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Tim Wakeley
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The Rev Henry Wakeley
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Sybil Wakeley
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Mabel
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Lady Berwick
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Julia Fotheringale
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Archie
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dresser
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Madame Michet
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poetess
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sailor
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Credits
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Unknown:
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Presented by
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Presented by
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Scenario
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Based on the play 'Down Hill' by
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[Based on the play]
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[Based on the play]
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[Script/Editing Associate]
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