Champagne (1928)

Film: Champagne (1928)

Stars: Betty Balfour, Jean Bradin, Gordon Harker, Ferdinand von Alten

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

(Throughout the year, in connection with our 'Saturdays with the Stars' series, I am watching every gap I have in Alfred Hitchcock's filmography in what we're calling 'Sunday Leftovers.'  Every Sunday, I'll be watching a Hitchcock film that I've never seen before as I spend 2021 completing his filmography)

Today in "Sunday Leftovers" we're hitting our penultimate Hitchcock silent feature.  Hitchcock would continue to make films outside the thriller genre throughout the early 1930's, so we aren't going to be saying goodbye to his formative years quite yet, but as today's Champagne proves, Hitchcock wasn't adept at everything.  Champagne is a weird movie, and we'll get into some of the reasons why below, but it's also the second comedy that the Master of Suspense would make (though not his last, as we discussed during our month devoted to Carole Lombard).  The first one, The Farmer's Wife was okay if a bit misguided.  Champagne feels more experimental than that picture, but also less successful, particularly when it comes to, well, comedy.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Betty (Balfour), a spoiled heiress who is jetting across the world and crashing an airliner just to rendezvous with her boyfriend (Bradin), against her wealthy father Mark's (Harker) wishes.  The two are planning on eloping, even as Betty is pursued by a mysterious man (von Alten), but when her father comes aboard the ship, he tells her that he's lost his fortune, and they are now broke.  Betty's boyfriend leaves in the confusion, and Betty then assumes he was just a fortune-hunter.  Betty & Mark start living in poverty, with Betty attempting to make the best of it, though Mark's behavior seems to indicate that he might be tricking Betty.  This proves to be the case when Betty gets a job selling flowers at a night club (there's a firm hint this is going to be, if not prostitution, at least an escort situation), and both the boyfriend & dad come to tell Betty that this was a ruse to get Betty to be more serious, and her fortune isn't loss.  Betty runs off with the mysterious man, who it seems at first is going to kidnap her, when suddenly we realize that he is also in on the ruse, and was on the ship to stop Betty from marrying her boyfriend, who now that her dad also thinks he's worthy, she'll marry.

The plot reads as messed up because it is.  Betty is not a particularly good person in the first ten minutes of the picture, but for the remainder of the film she's basically gaslit by the men in her life, trying to manipulate her into being exactly who they think a woman should be.  Considering she takes her father losing his fortune in stride & gets a job right away (and is promptly slut-shamed for it), she's a better person than all of them and deserves to let them rot, for my money.  The film's comedy elements are also pretty sparse, and the treatment of Betty to a modern audience doesn't read as comedy.  The flagrant sexism of The Farmer's Wife is broad enough that even if it's problematic, you still see the humor motifs on display.  Champagne doesn't do that, though, and as a result it's a comedy without any laughs.

I will say, to its credit, that Hitchcock is clearly getting his footing in the first twenty minutes, and you almost think you're about to see a different movie.  The mysterious man and the woman headed for danger are classic plots of his later films, and would've worked better in a straight drama.  I also loved the cinematography in the scenes with the plane & the ship, even if I found them a bit confusing (it wasn't entirely clear what was happening in the early scenes-I saw an earlier cut of the film rather than the restored version, so this might work better in the 104-minute version).  But nice camera work doesn't get around that this movie is a snooze.