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Hitchcock in Munich
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THE PLEASURE GARDEN was the first completed film that Alfred Hitchcock directed. It was filmed at the Emelka Studios in Munich and on location in Italy.
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Alfred Hitchcock had not yet reached his 26th birthday when he was sent to Germany in the spring of 1925 to direct the first of two films as part of a joint Anglo-German deal that Gainsborough had made with the Emelka studios in Munich. (The original deal with Ufa had fallen through.) Hitchcock's first assignment was to be a picture called The Pleasure Garden.
The screenplay, based on a 1923 novel by Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes (under the nom de plume Oliver Sandys), was written by Eliot Stannard, who would later work as Hitchcock's scenarist on most of his British silent films. The Pleasure Garden is the tale of two nightclub dancers whose lives fatefully intertwine. (“The Pleasure Garden” is the nightclub where they work.) The Munich studio would duplicate the film's London interior settings, while Italy would stand in for exotic Africa. For the roles of the women in this British picture filmed in Germany and Italy, the studio wanted recognizable Hollywood names. Two well-known stars were imported from the United States to play Englishwomen.
Virginia Valli (1898-1968), a big silent film star at the time, would play Patsy Brand, the feminine lead. Carmelita Geraghty (1901-1966) would play her deceitful friend, Jill Cheyne. The role of Valli's scoundrel of a husband (Levet) was to be filled by the English actor Miles Mander. To film it all, Gainsborough hired the aristocratic Italian cinematographer Baron Gaetano Ventimiglia (aka Giovanni Ventimiglia), a former newsreel cameraman who had previously worked behind the lens for studios in Hollywood, Berlin, and Nice. He would also film The Lodger (1927), the first film that Hitchcock directed in Britain.
Once again joining Hitchcock for the trip to Germany and Italy was Alma Reville, his assistant and increasingly close friend. Along with cameraman Ventimiglia, the two arrived by train in Munich on a Friday in May 1925. But the very next day they all headed off to other destinations. Reville traveled to the French port of Cherbourg to pick up the two American stars, who were arriving aboard the Aquitania. Hitchcock, Ventimiglia, and leading man Miles Mander boarded a train for Italy, where the exterior scenes were to be filmed. That was when the trouble started.
Mander almost missed the train because of a makeup kit he had left behind in the Munich station. At the Austrian-Italian border their undeclared film stock was confiscated and they had to pay a fine. (They were traveling very light for a film company; customs officials did not find the camera, hidden under Hitchcock's bed.) When the team arrived in Genoa, they were told that the ship they wanted to film in the harbor was due to depart the very next day. They had to scramble to buy replacement film. Then Hitchcock's money was stolen from his hotel room. Despite such setbacks, the ship scenes were filmed, and the small cast and crew moved on to San Remo to film some beach scenes under the “African sun.”
Filming was under way on the beach when another problem arose. Mander and the German actress playing the native girl/mistress were having a hushed but animated discussion. What was the problem, asked Hitchcock. “Heute darf ich nicht ins Wasser gehen,” said the actress in her native German. Puzzled, Hitchcock asked her, “What do you mean, you can't go in the water today?” According to Hitchcock's own version of the story, this was the first time he had ever heard of menstruation. “I had had a Jesuit education, and such matters weren't included.”* Another woman was quickly recruited on the spot to stand in for the German actress. (There is some doubt as to who actually played the native girl, but it was not Nita Naldi, a mistake seen in many filmographies; even IMDb has it wrong.) Hitchcock and crew made the best of it, and then headed to Lake Como (where Alma joined them) to complete the exterior filming for The Pleasure Garden.
EMELKA TRIVIA • Hitchcock in Munich
The German title for Hitchcock's The Pleasure Garden was originally a more literal translation of the English title: “Garten der Lust.” But the German censorship authorities didn't like the dual meaning of the German word Lust (pleasure/lust) and made the studio change the film's title to “Irrgarten der Leidenschaft” (“[Garden] Maze of Passion”)
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On the train back to Munich, Hitchcock struggled with the bookkeeping for a project that was rapidly spiraling over budget, even before filming in the studio had begun. He had even been forced to borrow money from some of his acting talent. The unexpected customs duties and expensive tastes of his Hollywood stars in Paris and Munich had further depleted the funds allocated for the Italian part of the project. By the time Hitchcock returned to Munich, he later claimed he had only a single pfennig, the smallest denomination German coin, in his pocket.
By the time they returned to Munich, it was late July and shooting in Emelka's Glashaus studio at Geiselgasteig was almost unbearable under its “greenhouse” glass roof. But compared to the Italian shoot, the studio filming went smoothly. Hitchcock was now back in his element, comfortable working inside a studio. Although Hitchcock had by now picked up enough German to communicate at a basic level, he still needed the help of an interpreter when communicating about technical matters on the set in Geiselgasteig (today's Bavaria Film studios on the outskirts of Munich). But shooting progressed smoothly and was completed at the end of August 1925, shortly after Hitchcock's 26th birthday.
Following some serious editing by Hitchcock and Reville before producer Michael Balcon arrived from London to view it, the film was a strong effort that also reflected the striking angles, design, and other cinematic elements that Hitchcock had learned from the Germans. Balcon (and later critics) liked it, but the distributor, C.M. Woolf, thought The Pleasure Garden was too “German” for British audiences. As a result, Hitchcock's first film would not be released for another two years.
But for now, Hitchcock was pleased with his directorial debut. In just a few months he would return to Munich to direct his second picture in Germany. The Mountain Eagle was a strange story set in the mountains of Kentucky, but it was to be filmed in the Austrian Alps and at Emelka.
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M O R E > Emelka in Munich - A look at the studio where Hitchcock directed his first two complete films
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N E X T > Hitchcock Films
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B A C K > Hitchcock - Part 1
NOTES
* Quoted in Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light by Patrick McGilligan (pp 69-70)
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