The Pleasure Garden

Alfred Hitchcock's first completed film as director — and already, unmistakably, a Hitchcock picture. Two chorus girls at a London music hall take different paths: the virtuous Patsy marries a colonial planter and follows him to the tropics, while the flirtatious Jill climbs the social ladder through men. Hitchcock, just twenty-five, was hired to direct what the studio considered a routine melodrama, but his visual storytelling — a montage of leering male eyes watching chorus girls, a brilliantly staged tropical fever sequence, an ending of startling violence — announces a filmmaker already thinking in purely cinematic terms. Shot partially on location in Italy and on the Bavarian Studios lot in Munich, the film is fascinating less for its story than for the evidence it provides of a great director's instincts forming in real time.