CHAMPAGNE (1928) B/W "silent" 93m dir: Alfred Hitchcock

w/Betty Balfour, Jean Bradin, Theo von Alten, Gordon Harker, Clifford Heatherly, Hannah Jones, Claude Hulbert, Jack Trevor, Marcel Vibert

From Francois Truffaut's book of interviews with the director, Hitchcock:

"FT: [The plot of CHAMPAGNE] can be summed up in a few words: A millionaire father objects to the man his daughter is in love with and the girl leaves home and sails to France. To teach her a lesson her father allows her to think he's bankrupt, so that she will have to make her own living. The heroine goes to work in a cabaret, where her job consists of encouraging the clientele to drink the very same champagne to which the family owes its fortune. ... That's the story.

"AH: That's just the trouble. There is no story!

"FT: I see that you're not very much interested in talking about Champagne. Could you just answer one question: Was the film an assignment from the company [British International Pictures] or was it your own idea?

"AH: What happened, I think, is that someone said, 'Let's do a picture with the title Champagne,' and I thought of beginning it in a certain way, which was rather old-fashioned and a little like that very old picture of [D.W.] Griffith's Way Down East. The story of a young girl going to the big city.

"My idea was to show a girl, working in Reims, whose job is to nail down the crates of champagne. And always, the champagne is put on the train. She never drinks any --- just looks at it. But eventually she would go to the city herself, and she would follow the route of the champagne --- the night clubs, the parties. And naturally she would get to drink some. In the end, thoroughly disillusioned, she would return to her old job at Reims, by then hating champagne. I dropped the whole idea --- probably because of the moralizing aspect.

"FT: There were lots of sight gags in the version I saw.

"AH: The nicest one, I think, was the drunkard who's staggering down the ship's corridor and swaying from side to side when the ship is steady, but when it's rolling like hell and everyone else is having a hard time trying to keep his balance, he walks in a perfectly straight line.

"FT: I also remember the dish that starts out from the kitchen looking very messy, with everybody putting filthy fingers in it. As it is carried to the dining room, refining touches are added en route. And what has started out as a revolting-looking mess in the kitchen becomes very elegant and grand by the time it reaches the customer. The picture was full of these humorous inventions."

From Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films by Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol: "... an American-type comedy based on a scenario by Eliot Stannard: Champagne (1928). It's a very funny comedy, to be sure, disappointing and merely marking time for its auteur. Too much in this film is sacrificed to what Orson Welles has called 'pathetic tricks,' and it is on the whole no more than a collection of superimpositions, distortions, speed-ups, an outpouring of frills and furbelows, of cumbersome feathers, of grotesque jewels. The satire is funny but superficial, yet even in the midst of this forced humor there is suddenly an unexpected harmony, a moment of gravity: the young harebrained millionairess, whose father has convinced her he's been ruined, takes a job in a nightclub and gets her buttocks pinched by her boss; the father admits his lie and the daughter bursts out in a reproach worthy of Corneille. He never gave a thought to her dignity; he doesn't know what dignity is, she complains. A flash of seriousness in a film that tries to portray the superficial and is caught in its own trap. Champagne is a failure. Of course, for Hitchcock it's bubbling, but a fly wouldn't drown in its depths."