Champagne

This film is a real mixed bag of sorts. The film follows a woman named Betty who is in love with her rich boyfriend. However, Betty also has a substantial amount of money and Betty's father believes that her boyfriend is a gold-digger. Betty takes her father's plane and goes after her boyfriend anyway who is on a ship heading to France. Betty attempts to get married to her boyfriend but they get in an argument and separate after they reach France. After getting back together Betty's father tells her that they have lost all of their money in the stock market which causes Betty's boyfriend to leave again. Will her boyfriend return or is he really a gold-digger? The story isn't very interesting when it comes down to it although I did enjoy the twist at the end of the film.

As for the acting, it's actually pretty good. Betty Balfour plays Betty and does a stupendous job at it. She seems to fit into the role very naturally and does a good job at not exaggerating emotions like in most silent films. Gordon Harker plays Betty's father Mark and seems to do a good job at seeming unpleased with his daughter's decision. And finally Jean Bradin plays Betty's boyfriend and he also does a good job in the role. While the acting is good, it doesn't save the film.

The special effects in the film are flawed and some of them seem obvious which isn't very good at all. However, the music is stupendous here and does a great job at creating emotions which you don't normally get from films of this time period. The camera angles and shots being used are truly ahead of their time which helps the film.

Even though I praised many aspects of the film the plot just feels so basic and uninteresting plus the poor quality of the special effects really hurt the atmosphere and immersion of the film. So while it has many positives it also has many negatives which causes it to equal out to a very mediocre film. Score: 4/10

Hitchcock was one of cinema's most aggressively experimental film makers, a fact largely unnoticed because, first, he worked largely in known genres rather than straight drama, and also because many of his experiments worked so well, they were adopted everywhere as conventions of film making. But when his experiments fail, they scream out for attention.

Champagne is one of the latter, pretty much a failure in terms of everything but the camera work. The main story is the the main problem. There's nothing about the characters' little problem here - and it's a very little problem when you think about it - that would lead us to grow concerned about their resolution to it. That gives us an unfortunate opportunity to ask whether we actually find the characters appealing - and we don't. The father is vile, his friend is vile, the lover is an airhead, the daughter is an airhead. So we're left with more than an hour of vile airheads trying to determine what virtue among the wealthy might be. As if they could possibly know.

Strong, intelligent women do not make much of an appearance in Hitchcock's silent films; the young Hitchcock had an ambiguous attitude towards women, whom he frequently presented as both victims of male cruelty and simpering imbeciles. That's very much in evidence here.

And Hitchcock struggled artistically with what may have been a real personality problem his whole life - the one word that can link all of his films is 'paranoia.' No one can be fully trusted in a Hitchcock film, making his world a treacherous place, even in his 'comedies' - the real "Trouble with Harry" (in that film) is not that he's dead, but that nobody gives a dam' that he is.

This paranoia informs this supposed comedy throughout, as well, and in fact defines its experimental nature - Hitchcock repeatedly paints his characters with ominous shadings, setting up scenes of potential violence, potential madness, potential rape; fortunately none of which ever happens - but we're supposed to laugh at this?! My sense is that this was the question Hitchcock wanted to raise, that's the experiment going on here. But nobody really wants that question raised, answering it doesn't give us a very good time.

Lesser Hitchcock, to be sure.

When the cork popped on "Champagne" in 1928, silent star Betty Balfour was a much bigger name than Alfred Hitchcock. Ms. Balfour was known as Britain's Mary Pickford. So, this is much more a Balfour flick than a Hitchcock. The director called it "Dreadful" (he was never happy filming a "star vehicle"). This was a transatlantic-themed film, seeking to broaden Balfour's popularity; but, she never "went Hollywood", and was stalled by sound. Balfour and French boyfriend Jean Bradin gain some mileage out of getting tipsy on an Atlantic cruise ship. Hitchcock gets in a few interesting shots. The sequences following Balfour going to get a job as a toothpaste model, but finding men more interested in her legs than her teeth, kick it up a notch. Nothing too revolutionary.

***** Champagne (8/20/28) Alfred Hitchcock ~ Betty Balfour, Jean Bradin, Gordon Harker, Theo von Alten

Champagne was among the last of Hitchcock's silents, and made at a period when Hollywood was already turning fast towards the talkies. Perhaps because of this, the young and naive Hitchcock appears to be cramming in as much visual technique as possible.

Right from his first picture, Hitchcock had loved the point-of-view shot. Champagne makes heavy use of what I call "extreme" point-of-view shots – that is, ones which really draw your attention to the fact that we are seeing a character's-eye-view, for example where we see the actor's hands in front of us, or the camera moves as the character walks. To this end Hitchcock even had giant props built to wave in front of the lens. There are also copious other techniques which aim to literalise the experience of the characters – for example shaking the camera around when the ship is rocking. Although the later Hitchcock would sometimes use such tricks (far more subtly) to draw the audience into the character's world, here and now it's just a bit of overt stylisation that in no way enhances the film.

Trickery for trickery's sake is often worse than useless. When Betty Balfour is told her father has lost his fortune, there is a superimposition of a room spinning. If Balfour is good enough, she could convey what is going on inside her character's head. I think I speak for most audience members when I say I would rather look at a good acting performance than a post-production special effect.

It's a pity Hitch felt he needed to dress up his shots so much, because even at this early stage he had good timing for basic point-of-view and reaction shots, allowing him to smoothly reveal intentions and opinions. His basic film grammar is good enough to keep down the number of intertitles. By the way, the difference between a picture like this and those made around the same time in the US (which tend to be very wordy) is not that the Hollywood directors were bad at visual storytelling, it's that their pictures were often full of unnecessary title cards, whereas in Europe the goal was generally to keep them to a minimum.

It's a mercy too that the acting in Champagne tends to be fairly naturalistic, the only touches of theatricality being for the sake of comedy. None of them is exceptional, but none of them is really bad either. I'm not quite convinced though by Gordon Harker as a millionaire, but perhaps this is because I'm so used to seeing him playing earthy working class types.

All else I have to say about Champagne is that it is just a bit dull – a comedy drama that is not enough of one thing or the other. A reasonable plot, a handful of good gags, but ultimately lifeless. At this point Hitchcock was really just saying, through his camera, "Look at me! I'm the director! Look what I can do!" when he should have been turning all those audience-involving techniques into gripping entertainment - as he later would.

Hitchcock liked to isolate people on trains and ships and force them to interact with whomever was in that setting. In this one, the spoiled brat daughter of tycoon lives the life of a princess on her father's money. She is wasteful and shallow and draws attention in that Paris Hilton kind of way. We know that she must have a good heart but now, anything that happens to her is deserved. Enter her father, who wants to teach her a lesson. After all, she has embarrassed him time and time again. She is going to elope with her nice young man, who finds her a bit insufferable at times. He hangs in there while she tests the limits of her entitlement. She is eventually reduced to fending for herself. Hitchcock does a decent job with this but I think there could have been a bit more to it. He got just a bit lazy here. Still, it is billed as a comedy, not "The Scarlet Letter," so there is a lighter touch. It's certainly worth a peek.