The World of Movies: Champagne
Written by Rachael Crawley
The World of Movies is a series that explores global cinema, drawing on films from many countries, industries and eras. This week, we enjoy a little light comedy from 1920s Britain.
Champagne.
May contain spoilers.
Despite its robust film and television industry, it turns out to be surprisingly hard to track down a British silent movie – what survives is often not easily available, though American and German films turn up far more easily. Fortunately, there is one director whose work can reliably be found, at least most of the time (looking at you, The Mountain Eagle). That’s right, folks – we’re hanging out with Hitchcock. Let’s join the Master of Suspense as he tackles… light comedy?
We love to focus on Hitchcock’s Hollywood classics, but his British years had some rather diverse pieces, particularly his silent works. Champagne (1928) is part of this atypical turn. As it turns out, he can frighten us and make us laugh, too.
Heiress Betty (Betty Balfour) has disgraced herself once again. She has “borrowed” her father’s private plane to meet up with her boyfriend – by landing it on a ship headed for France. It’s the Roaring Twenties, and she is determined to go her own way, causing quite a bit of chaos in the process. A few scenes later, despite initial plans to elope, she has left said boyfriend and developed an interest in an older man. As all of this is happening, her father, a champagne tycoon, suddenly loses his fortune.
Champagne.
These sequences are quite funny and appropriately energetic, and Balfour has great comic timing as the young heiress. The production design looks wonderful - it is the very epitome of the 1920s “flapper” style, and there are fashions and cocktails galore. (Unfortunately, the edition I saw had no score.) The transition after her father’s loss of fortune, in which he and Betty adopt an austere new lifestyle, feels rather eerie. Modern audiences know that this would happen in real life, thousands of times over, just a year after this movie.
Unfortunately, the second half loses a fair amount of steam, and some of its plot twists stretch credibility. It also takes a mean-spirited turn that doesn’t mesh well with the buoyant tone of the beginning. It’s a sombre part of the story, sure – but the constant “correction” of the protagonist’s attitude begins to wear thin. The ending, by consequence, feels cheap and unearned. For a movie that initially seemed promising, this is a disappointment.
Champagne.
The film is quite different from the average silent in a few ways – the actors have a fairly low-key manner about them, and it all feels more realistic and less stagey. It flows smoothly throughout. There are some clever editing gags. The whole thing would fit well into a screwball comedy, ten years in the future. I had the sense from time to time that I was watching a much later movie, one simply missing its sound. There is some fun camera work, including a shot through a champagne glass, and what may be cinema’s first freeze frame. Despite the film’s drawbacks, it does show what an adroit filmmaker Hitchcock was, even at the beginning of his career.
Reportedly, this was one of Hitchcock’s most disliked films, and it would never rank as a film classic. While its plot is fairly cookie-cutter, and the second half weakens it overall, it is worth seeing for its stylistic elements. As an early example of a legendary filmmaker, “directing against type” to boot, Champagne is quite a curiosity.
Rachael Crawley holds a Master's Degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, and has worked with film in Canada and in Europe. She adores language and cinema, and how these subjects interact with each other.