What was the first movie Alfred Hitchcock ever made?
Alfred Hitchcock is synonymous with the height of film noir and cinematic suspense during the Hollywood Golden Age of the immediate post-war period. But his career as a movie director actually began much earlier, when filmmaking was just coming into its own as a form of mass entertainment.
Before moving to Hollywood to direct David O Selznick’s production of Rebecca in 1940, he directed a whole host of British feature films, including the all-time classic spy thriller The 39 Steps and the original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which he would remake in 1956. All of Hitchcock’s most celebrated movies from his pre-Hollywood period are feature-length works with sound, but his CV extends even further back into the silent era of cinema.
Prior to his move across the pond, Hitchcock made 26 feature films, nine of which are without sound. Arguably, the most important of these films is 1927’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, which was the first thriller he made, setting the tone for the rest of his career. It was also the first Hitchcock feature deemed a commercial and critical success.
He made two other feature-length pictures before The Lodger, one of which is now lost. We still have the other one, though, which has been restored and archived by the BFI and is available to watch online.
What’s that first feature film called?
Hitchcock’s feature-length debut was The Pleasure Garden, released in 1925. The movie is a melodrama about two performers at London’s Pleasure Garden Theatre, whose lives become entangled through their mutual interest in various male suitors. It stars Virginia Valli, an American actress who was one of the world’s most prolific silent actors during the mid-1920s.
Hitchcock later wrote about Valli in his first memoir, Hitchcock on Hitchcock: My Screen Memories, “That she was coming to Europe to make a picture at all was something of an event.” At the time, she was seen as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
Before The Pleasure Garden, Hitchcock made a short comedy film called Always Tell Your Wife in 1923, although most of its 20 minutes are now lost to us. It stars its producer, famed British actor of the period Seymour Hicks, who commissioned and financed the picture as his first foray into movie production during a lean spell in his acting career.
Hicks was taking quite a risk in hiring the untested 22-year-old Hitchcock as director. Hitchcock’s only previous work in the director’s chair had been shooting a few scenes of the unfinished Number 13, a botched Gainsborough Pictures production in 1922, which was wound up due to budget problems.
In fact, it was this failure that led Gainsborough executive Graham Cutts to ignore Hitchcock when deciding on the director for his studio’s next picture, The Rat. That decision allowed the director the chance to work with Hicks and then to direct The Pleasure Garden. What could have ended his career prematurely ended up being a blessing in disguise, paving the way for Hitchcock’s unparalleled success behind the camera.
