Gainsborough Pictures

Downhill is one of the darkest of Hitchcock's early films, a bleak downward spiral he later dismissed but that still carries his signature. Ivor Novello plays a schoolboy who takes the blame for a theft committed by his best friend and is expelled, disowned by his father, and sent sliding through a succession of humiliations in Paris and London. Each act is a step down, and Hitchcock makes the descent literal with a famous shot of an escalator. The film reunites Hitchcock with Novello after The Lodger and is one of the silent pictures restored by the BFI. It entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Drama · Silent

Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of the Noël Coward play, made during his British silent period. A woman divorces her abusive husband, flees the scandal to the Riviera, and marries a younger man whose aristocratic family does not know her past and turns on her when they learn it. Hitchcock was not fond of the material and the film is largely a commission job, but it shows his early interest in the social trap: a woman judged by a code that does not apply to the men around her. Most of the Coward dialogue is conveyed through intertitles rather than spoken, since this was a silent film of a talkie play. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · Romance · Silent

Alfred Hitchcock considered The Lodger his first true film, the moment he found the themes that would define his career. A mysterious young man takes a room at a London boardinghouse just as a killer called the Avenger begins murdering blonde women in the fog. The landlady grows suspicious, and her daughter falls for the stranger. Ivor Novello stars as the lodger. The film is drenched in the imagery Hitchcock would return to again and again: the wrong man, the blonde in peril, the guilt that cannot be escaped. The Lodger is the earliest Hitchcock film to survive intact. It entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Thriller · Crime · Drama · Silent