TwoWordHeap

Following his brilliance in The Farmer’s Wife and The Ring, Hitchcock made what can only be described as one of the worst films of his career, Champagne (1928). Having a barely existent story line and little to keep the viewer interested, and upon first viewing, one would be hard pressed to find anything positive (or remotely Hitchcockian) to say about it.

The Film

Champagne is the story of a young socialite, Betty (played by Betty Balfour) and her father’s (played by Gordon Harker) plan to teach her some kind of lesson about hard work and moral behavior. There really isn’t that much more to it. The socialite goes from a life of jet-setting on cruise ships and cavorting with a young man to living in poverty because her father tells her that they are ruined and penniless, which is all a lie. Included in her father’s plan is his friend (played by Theo von Alten), who plays the role of ‘Vile Seducer’, who tries to lead the socialite astray into a life of some sort of coercion. At the end of the film, everything is resolved, the socialite learns her lesson of the dangers of frivolous living, and gets back together with her young beau. The storyline is hard to follow and the thinly veiled ‘moral’ is so irrelevant that it makes this movie totally unmemorable.

The Saving Hitchcockian Grace

In Hitchcock’s British Films, by Maurice Yacowar, it is revealed that Hitchcock had a different plan for Champagne, a storyline that focused on a girl who worked at a champagne shipping company who dreams about being the type of girl who drinks champagne, which eventually happens and leads to her ruin. Now this sounds a lot more interesting and dark than what was filmed. Having the lead be a poor girl who dreams of a rich life gives the audience something to relate to and gives her something to want, to gain, and ultimately to lose in the end, as opposed to a rich girl who had lost and gained back. A covetous plot makes for a much more interesting film because it gives audiences something to want, which was a major downfall of Champagne (other than the want for a better film). The one brilliant film technique in this film was the use of ‘the shaky cam’, or in this case ‘ye olde shaky cam’. For those of you who haven’t read If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell, the shaky cam is used to create the illusion of an unstable environment (in Champagne the shaky cam is used to create a tumultuous storm at sea) or an evil presence coming up from the woods to terrorize a cabin (Sam Raimi, who is said to be heavily influenced by Hitchcock uses shaky cam a lot, in this case The Evil Dead films). Seeing how original masters like Hitchcock influenced modern favorites like Raimi is important and shows how influential Hitchcock was, even at his worst, but it is not worth sitting through two hours of Champagne.

Related Articles

• Introduction | Project Hitchcock

  06.29.09 | Found in See | Read 33 times

• The Manxman | Project Hitchcock

  09.10.09 | Found in See | Read 56 times

• Easy Virtue | Project Hitchcock

  07.14.09 | Found in See | Read 15 times

• The Lodger | Project Hitchcock

  07.02.09 | Found in See | Read 150 times

• The Farmer’s Wife | Project Hitchcock

  07.26.09 | Found in See | Read 21 times