The Pleasure Garden (1925) | Presenting Hitchcock Podcast

Gooooood evening. In this months episode of Presenting Hitchcock, Cory and Aaron dance into complications as they discuss “The Pleasure Garden.”

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The Picture:

Picture Title: The Pleasure Garden

Written by: Eliot Stannard, based on the book by Oliver Sandys

Starring: Virginia Valli, Carmelita Geraghty, Miles Manders, John Stuart, Ferdinand Martini, Florence Helminger, Georg H. Schnell and Karl Falkenberg

Directed by:Alfred Hitchcock

Year Released: 1925

Our Favourite Trivia:

The film was shot in Italy (Alassio, Genoa and Lake Como) and Germany. Many misfortunes befell the cast and crew. When Gaetano Ventimiglia, the film’s cinematographer, failed to hide the film from Italian customs officials, the team had to pay fines and buy new film, seriously depleting their budget.

Sir Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville became engaged during the shoot.

Although shot in 1925, and shown to the British press in March 1926, this movie wasn’t released in the U.K. until after The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) was a massive hit.

This is the first Sir Alfred Hitchcock movie more widely available. Number 13 (1922) was never completed and is thought to be lost, and only one reel of his short film Always Tell Your Wife (1923) has survived (and even then it’s next-to-impossible to track down).

Producer Michael Balcon allowed Hitchcock to direct the film when Graham Cutts, a jealous executive at Gainsborough Pictures, refused to let Hitchcock work on The Rat.

The Random Draw for Next Picture:

Next up, we’ll be discussing “Murder!”

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