Producer Michael Balcon allowed Hitchcock to direct the film when Graham Cutts, a jealous executive at Gainsborough Pictures, refused to let Hitchcock work on The Rat. The film was shot in 1925 in Italy (Alassio, Genoa, and Lake Como) and Germany. Many misfortunes befell the cast and crew. When Gaetano Ventimiglia, the film's cinematographer, failed to declare the film stock to Italian customs officials, the team had to pay fines and buy new film, seriously depleting their budget.
Release
C. M. Woolf, the head of the Gainsborough film distribution company, found The Pleasure Garden to be insufficiently commercial and too "European" to be released, which led to the film not being shown in England initially. The Pleasure Garden premiered on 8 January 1926 in Berlin, Germany. After it was shown briefly in London in April 1926, The Pleasure Garden was not officially released in the UK until January 1927, just before Hitchcock's third film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, became a hit in February 1927.
Preservation status and home media
In June 2012, The Pleasure Garden and eight other silent Hitchcock films were restored by the British Film Institute. As a result, 20 minutes of missing footage was added to this film, including "the atmospheric color tinting of the period". A new score was commissioned for the restoration by young British composer Daniel Patrick Cohen and it has been performed live with the film many times around the world. Due to a lack of funds to properly record the score, it has not been released on home video. Australian label Imprint announced the film's Blu-ray release within The Hitchcock Nine collector set, accompanied with a new piano score by Neil Brand and an alternative organ score by Lee Erwin, scheduled to be released in September 2025.
The only official DVD release contains a poor quality edited version of the film by US collector Raymond Rohauer. At the end of 2021, The Pleasure Garden became the first Hitchcock film to enter the public domain in the United States. No version of the complete film is available on any media.
Significance
According to critic Dave Kehr, The Pleasure Gardens opening scene stands like a virtual "clip reel of Hitchcock motifs to come". The first shot captures chorus girls descending a spiral staircase (see Vertigo); a man uses opera glasses to better appreciate a blonde chorus dancer (see Rear Window); and the same blonde, who at first appears erotically remote, later emerges as down-to-earth and approachable (see Family Plot).