Retrospective: Alfred Hitchcock's Champagne (Patreon)

Thanks to the Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York for screening this film.

If you ever get the chance to see a silent movie on a big screen with live accompaniment by a pianist, take it. It makes even a lousy movie fun.

Speaking of lousy movies, hardly anyone has a nice word to say about Alfred Hitchcock’s early silent romcom Champagne. The contemporary press dismissed the movie, and Hitchcock himself basically told Francois Truffaut that Champagne was a waste of time. I’m not sure I know anybody who’s seen the film outside of the friends with whom I watched it for the first time last night.

Champagne has at least somewhat earned its non-reputation. It’s a minor film from the days before Hitchcock had even made The Thirty-Nine Steps or The Lady Vanishes. It has Hitchcock’s usual problem of using up all its best ideas in its first hour and crashing hard in the back half (sorry, Vertigo). The latter part of Champagne is a dour, rather mean-spirited slog that abandons most of the film’s romcom pretenses and plays a sexual assault (albeit in a dream sequence) for laughs. Champagne displays all of Hitchcock’s worst instincts in a package he assembled at the behest of British International Pictures, and it’s easy to see why it’s been forgotten.

Which is a damn shame. The first half of Champagne is a lovely romcom, full of great physical comedy and some outright brilliant effects work. It’s Hitchcock doing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 25 years early: dating games and financial battles on a ship, lots of feathers, and a second half set in Paris where the female protagonist loses everything. It’s possible nobody involved with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes never saw Champagne, but if they had, it would at least mean Champagne inspired one of the greatest films of the 1950s.

But in its own right, that first half of Champagne has a lot of pleasures. The opening shot, where a moving image of a ballroom is projected into a champagne glass, a feat that should have been impossible in 1928. Then there’s a series of stunning revelations where the crowd in the ballroom runs upstairs, and the camera reveals that they’re on an ocean liner. Then sailors fill up a lifeboat, descend to the ocean’s surface, and rescue the film’s protagonist, played by silent era star Betty Balfour, from her sinking airplane (which, in her own words, she flew to catch up with the plane).

Balfour is the heart of the movie. Even the worst scenes are elevated by her mastery of physical comedy that would have given Robin Williams a run for his money. The best scenes allow Balfour to be one of the greatest stars of her era, or have her boyfriend stumble nauseously around a tilting ship as he fails to prevent Balfour from cuckolding him. Otherwise, well, there’s always Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.