When Boys Leave Home

Novello again, in an underrated road-to-ruin melodrama, plays a public-school rugby champ disgraced when he takes the fall for getting a waitress pregnant. Visual experiments abound and there's a justly famous scene with the curtains of a Paris nightspot being pulled back, exposing its superannuated regulars to the unsparing sunlight. [14 Jul 2012, p.4]

Its bizarre melding of moral-panic melodrama with the filmmaker’s signature wrong-man theme is fascinating. Read full review

It's directed by Hitchcock with imagination and, especially in the first half, much comedy. Essentially though, this should be filed under 'Novello'. Read full review

Downhill is a serviceable film, with an admirably minimal use of title cards, and it effectively shows how difficult life can become for the working class. The ending, however, is so upbeat that it substantially detracts from the sobering pessimism of the preceding movie. Read full review

It's a morality play, full of hopeless tosh. Still, Hitchcock manages to include a hallucination sequence and a highly suggestive spurt from a soda siphon. [12 Jan 2020]

[Hitchcock] has managed to breathe some life into it. He has not made it credible--that would be expecting too much--but he has at least made it seem far less ridiculous than one could possibly have expected. [12 Oct 1927]