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Hitchcock, Gainsborough, 1927, from the play Ivor Novello wrote with Constance Collier under the name David L'Estrange. Novello is a public-school hero who takes the blame for a friend's trouble with a waitress and then falls: shop, music hall, Marseilles. The title is a direction. Hitchcock keeps sending him down stairs, down streets, down a lift. The school is the last place the film believes in.
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The title is a direction and the film obeys it: stairs, streets, a lift, Marseilles. Novello takes the blame for a friend and keeps descending. Blunt, and the bluntness is the lesson. Watch the escalator shot. Hitchcock learning that a camera can say down.
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