Hitchcock's early features are works of early promise and wonder. They contain the genesis of the innovation that became a benchmark of his brilliant later talkies. From spine-tingling 1927 serial killer thriller The Lodger (starring Ivor Novello) to modernist melodramas The Pleasure Garden and Downhill plus (recently remade) Noel Coward adaptation Easy Virtue (pictured) - this is Hitchcock working in a very British register. Also excellent short 2001 documentary A Profile of Hitchcock: The Early Years provides some great background information about these disquieting and intuitive silent features.
