- Alfred Hitchcock's proper directorial debut, The Pleasure Garden, is considerably better than the average silent drama. Sure, it's less compelling than most of Hitchcock's filmography, but the director deserves credit for converting its fundamentally silly premise (based on a novel by Oliver Sandys) into a watchable film. The story centers around two chorus girls, Patsy (Virginia Valli) and Jill (Carmelita Geraghty), and the film opens with the entire dance troupe marching down a spiral staircase. The audience of older men ogles with approval through binoculars and monocles, an experience that the camera shares with the film's audience.
- Jill has a lousy first day on the job when her money and letter of introduction are stolen, but Patsy helps her out and even offers her lodgings. Soon, Jill's star is on the rise, and she begins to neglect both the kindness of her fiance Hugh (John Stuart) and Patsy's friendship, preferring instead to consort with the exotic Prince Ivan (Karl Falkenberg). Simultaneously, Patsy finds herself courted by Mr. Levit (Miles Mander), who spends most of the year working on a foreign plantation with Hugh. Although Hugh is every bit as decent as advertised, Mr. Levit's secret lover and murderous insanity make him rather a poor match for Patsy or anybody else.
- The Pleasure Garden is enjoyable primarily as an early testbed for several themes and objects that the director would revisit in his later films. The spiral staircase, voyeuristic audience, visually highlighted purse, and fake blonde are particularly obvious examples just from film's first ten minutes. Personally, I like to think that Patsy's whimsical family (Ferdinand Martini, Florence Helminger), complete with family dog, served as a prototype for the Lawrences of The Man Who Knew Too Much, or the Newtons of Shadow of a Doubt. And of course there is the crazed Mr. Levit, whose visions of his drowned lover serve as a precursor for the insanity of countless Hitchcock villains. I wonder if Hitchcock realized back in 1925 that this was just the first draft of the film he'd be making his entire life?
- Although The Pleasure Garden was filmed before The Lodger, it was only released publicly after the success of that film.
