CHAMPAGNE stars the bubbly Betty Balfour as a frivolous flapper whose millionaire father looks to teach her a lesson in frugality by letting her think he’s gone bankrupt. The movie brims with sight gags, with a swaying camera mimicking the roll of an ocean liner to generate several humorously queasy moments. But the comedy also has an unsettling undercurrent in the way the men in Betty’s life—her father, her fiancé, a mysterious admirer—seem eager to see her shamed. Throughout, Hitchcock revels in provocative uses of POV, including a look through the dregs of a glass of champagne that brackets the picture.”—BFI.
Appears in: Reel Music Festival 31, The Hitchcock 9
Genres: Comedy
Other Films by Alfred Hitchcock
Vertigo
Topping Sight & Sound’s most recent critics’ poll of the 50 greatest films of all time, this 1958 psychological thriller was considered a critical and box office failure in its initial release. Hitchcock casts Jimmy Stewart against type as a traumatized, former San Francisco cop turned gumshoe whose chance encounter with a mysterious woman (Kim …
Rear Window
One of the most famous procedural thrillers in film history and routinely voted amongst the greatest films ever produced, Rear Window came relatively early in a long string of masterpieces from Hitchcock that all delve deeply into the American consciousness. L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies (James Stewart) is a New York magazine photographer who spends most of …
Easy Virtue
Hitch’s “wrong man” theme finds early expression in this tale of a young woman divorced by her husband after being wrongfully accused of adultery.
Downhill
“DOWNHILL mixes cynical humor with sexual horror as it tracks star rugby player Roddy’s descent from upstanding British schoolboy to Montmartre gigolo, the downhill road laid for him by a series of scheming women. Hitchcock’s formal audacity is on flamboyant display in false flashbacks, upside-down POV shots, and massive foreground objects dwarfing the characters behind …
Easy Virtue
The tyrannies of polite British society come under scrutiny in this adaptation of Noël Coward’s stage hit of the same name. Adapted by Eliot Stannard, who scripted most of Hitchcock’s silent films, EASY VIRTUE offers an early example of one of Hitchcock’s favorite themes: the “wrong man”—in this case, woman. After Larita Filton is unjustly …