Downhill

Downhill is a 1927 British silent drama film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Ivor Novello, Robin Irvine and Isabel Jeans, and based on the play Down Hill by Novello and Constance Collier. The film was produced by Gainsborough Pictures at their Islington studios. Downhill was Hitchcock's fourth film as director, but the fifth to be released. Its American alternative title was When Boys Leave Home. Plot At an expensive English boarding school for boys, Roddy Berwick is school captain and star rugby player. He and his best friend Tim Wakeley are approached by a shopgirl, Mabel, who invites them to her shop during off-hours to dance and make merry with her. Shortly after, Mabel tells the boys' headmaster that she is pregnant and that Roddy is the father. However, Tim is the father, and he cannot afford to be expelled because he needs to win a scholarship to attend the University of Oxford. Promising Tim that he will never reveal the truth, Roddy accepts expulsion. Returning to his parents’ home, Roddy finds that his father Sir Thomas Berwick believes him guilty of the false accusation. Roddy leaves home and finds work as a waiter at a dinner theatre, then marries lead actress Julia Fotheringale after inheriting £30,000 from his godmother. Julia secretly continues an affair with her leading man Archie and discards Roddy after exhausting his inheritance and swindling him out of his mansion. To pay off his debts Roddy goes to work for a madame in a Paris dance hall who rents out Roddy as a taxi dancer (implying he is also a gigolo). One morning at dawn, looking around the near-empty dance hall at the remaining demimonde stragglers who've been up all night, and having been propositioned by a homely wealthy older woman, Roddy quits, disgusted with himself for having fallen so low in society and romancing women for money. Roddy ends up alone and desperate in a shabby room in Marseilles. Sailors take pity on him and ship him back home, possibly hoping for a reward. During the 5-day sea voyage, Roddy experiences delirium and elaborate nightmarish hallucinations, replaying the traumas of the past years, creating composite visions of the women who have used him for money, from Mabel the shopgirl, to Julia his ex-wife, to the madame, and the women who have availed themselves of his services. Disoriented, he stumbles his way through London with the chaos of the streets blending with and superimposing over visions of chaos in his mind.