Downhill (1927)

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Film details

Featuring

Ivor Novello Ben Webster Norman Mckinnel
Country

United Kingdom
Year

1927
Genre

Drama
Type

Film
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).