Alfred Hitchcock made two attempts at directing before his first wide release, The Pleasure Garden, was made in 1925. 1922’s Number 13 stopped in mid-production because of budget problems after he had shot only two scenes, and that footage is lost. His next attempt, the comic short he co-directed (without credit) in 1923, Always Tell Your Wife, is missing one of its two reels.

The Pleasure Garden’s release was held up for a year and only released in the UK in 1927, after Hitchcock’s next film, The Lodger, was a big success. Garden was based on the novel of the same name by Oliver Sandys, the nom de plume of Marguerite Florence Laura Jarvis, and was given to Hitchcock to direct by Michael Balcon, owner of Gainsborough Pictures. Balcon had taken over the studio vacated by Famous Players-Lasky British Producers in London where Hitchcock had started out as a title card designer. (He would subsequently work as a writer, art director, assistant director and production manager before being given directing opportunities.) The scenario was written by Eliot Stannard, with whom Hitchcock would collaborate seven more times.

It was the first British film to feature American actresses in the hope of being a crossover hit. Virginia Valli, a big star in Hollywood at the time, was given the lead; Carmelita Geraghty was cast as the second lead. The two male stars were British actors Miles Mander and John Stuart.

The film was shot on location in Italy and at the Geiselgasteig studios outside Munich as a coproduction with the German studio Emelka. Its German title was Irrgarten der Leidenschaft (Maze of Passion), changed from the original Der Garten der Lust after objection by the censors.

The credited Assistant Director was Alma Reville, to whom Hitchcock would propose during the shoot; they would marry soon after and honeymoon at the Villa d’Este at Lake Como, one of the locations of the film.

In an article entitled “My Screen Memories” in Film Weekly of May 1936, Hitchcock would write about the problems which bedeviled the production almost from the outset.

“ … my first real directing effort had … terrors in store for me,” he wrote in a section subtitled “I Begin with a Nightmare.” “It gave me some of the nastiest shocks in my whole life. Although it was made over ten years ago, the details of the trials and tribulations I went through are still vivid in my mind. I can smile about them today, but at the time they were ghastly.”

On the train journey from Munich to Genoa cameraman Gaetano di Ventimiglia hid the production’s camera under Hitchcock’s bunk bed at the Italian border, in an attempt to avoid customs charges. It was found, however by the authorities, the unexposed film was confiscated, and the company was levied a fine. Hitchcock hoped the stock would be returned; when it wasn’t till much later, he was forced to buy new stock in Milan, running up his meager budget. Then he discovered that his wallet had been stolen and almost all the production money, 10,000 lire, was gone. He had to borrow money from the cast and crew, including from Valli, to carry on.

Directing an established star as a new director made the 26 year-old Hitchcock extremely nervous. “ … I was in a cold sweat,” he continued in “My Screen Memories.” “I wanted to disguise the fact that this was my first directorial effort. I dreaded to think what she, an established Hollywood star, would say if she discovered that she had been brought all the way over to Europe to be directed by a beginner. I was terrified at giving her instructions. I’ve no idea how many times I asked my future wife if I was doing the right thing. She, sweet soul, gave me courage by swearing I was doing marvelously. And Virginia Valli played her scenes sublimely unconscious of the emotional drama that was being enacted on the other side of the camera.”

The film was well-received by the press and public when it was finally released. The Daily Express called Hitchcock the “Young Man With a Master Mind.”

The film starts out when Geraghty, playing the provincial Jill, arrives at the Pleasure Garden looking for a job in the chorus line. Her wallet is stolen and she is helped out by Patsy (Valli), one of the chorines. Jill gets hired and eventually becomes the star of the show, jettisoning her fiancé Hugh (played by Stuart), turning her back on Patsy, and getting engaged to a Prince. Patsy marries Hugh’s friend Levet (Mander), the two honeymoon in Italy, then Levet and Hugh get posted to Africa by their employer, and Levet sets up a local girl as his mistress and drinks all day. When Patsy follows her husband to Africa, Levet loses his mind, and his subsequent actions cause Patsy to realize that her true love is actually Hugh.

The film actually seems like two different films. The Pleasure Garden scenes in the first part show the lives and romantic problems of the two chorus girls; the focus then shifts to Patsy’s sad Italian honeymoon and then to Africa, where it turns into a melodrama, complete with a murder and a ghost. While the picture is of interest as the starting point of a legendary directing career, it probably would have sunk into oblivion had it been made by another director. Some stylistic flourishes that hint at Hitchcock’s future genius can be spotted in the film – the opening sequence where the chorus girls run down a spiral staircase; leering men in the front row of the theater ogling the legs of the girls through opera glasses; some shots shown from the audience’s perspective; while the little dog in Patsy’s lodgings provides comic relief.

This film, which has been in the public domain for a while, has been fair game for bootleggers, and various versions, some re-edited with replacement titles, are all over the internet. But in 2010, the British Film Institute raised the funding to restore all of Hitchcock’s existing silent films, including The Pleasure Garden. A 92-minute restored version (which includes 20 minutes of previously lost footage) was produced from four nitrate prints that survived in the archives of the BFI, the EYE Film Institute Netherlands, Cinémathèque Française, and the Southern Methodist University in Texas, with a new score by composer Daniel Patrick Cohen. The color tint and tone and original titles were restored; several scenes were added back, especially the honeymoon scenes at Lake Como; and the camera jerk was corrected.

The BFI program notes: “For many years The Pleasure Garden had circulated in what appeared to be two versions, perhaps representing two different releases, but close comparison at the BFI of the five copies, four of them original nitrate prints, meant that we could trace them all back to the same negative. Major narrative strands and twists have now been re-integrated making it possible to reconstruct, as fully as possible, the original edit and using the best of these sources we have been able to achieve a huge improvement in image quality. This was made possible by the restoration team’s delicate scanning, over several months, of 20 reels of fragile nitrate, totalling more than 17,500 feet. The colour scheme of The Pleasure Garden is particularly complex. The tints and tones of the nitrate copies differed but the colours of the restoration have been chosen to match the print in the BFI National Archive. Finally, the artwork and text of the intertitles have been completely restored.”

The restoration of all nine films cost about $3 million and was done by the BFI National Archive in association with ITV Studios Global Entertainment and Park Circus Films. Principal restoration funding was provided by The Hollywood Foreign Press Association and The Film Foundation, and by Matt Spick. Additional funding was provided by Deluxe 142.