zeebrite-321-220768 Even in 1928 Hitch was beginning to stand out from other directors. The camera-work and editing in this flick is outstanding. If you're a big Hitchcock fan, it will hold your interest for that aspect alone. If you're looking for great entertainment, look elsewhere.Though there are some funny moments, most of Champagne is a bit of a snooze. The story is okay (Daddy teaches rich daughter a lesson, you'll probably guess how) but far from engaging.The biggest problem is Betty Balfour. She's in nearly every scene and she's simply not that good. It's not a problem with the typical big-gestured silent acting but more to the fact that the emotions she portrays often don't fit the scene.Good for a diversion and a couple of laughs but you might end up glancing at your watch before the predictable end.

MartinHafer The film begins with a flighty and spoiled rich lady crashing her plane near a cruise ship. You soon learn that it was NOT an accident--she just missed the ship and thought nothing of destroying an expensive plane to make it to the ship where her fiancé is waiting. They are planning to elope but her father is furious--especially since it all seems like a fun adventure to the daughter instead of serious business. So, to teach her a lesson, the father tells her that he is broke and she'll have to support herself. Well, considering the type person she is, this seems like a great plan (too bad Paris Hilton's parents never saw this film) and the wedding plans soon fizzle.Next they show the formerly rich girl trying to behave like a normal lady--cooking and taking care of her now "poor" father. So, feeling desperate to help support herself and Dad, she applies for work on a cruise ship. Oddly, she really never seems to actually do that much working once on board. However, what does happen is that a wolf gets a hold of her and things look bad--leading to a cute surprise ending.All in all, a very entertaining film and something that might surprise some Hitchcock fans, as it's nothing like his later films. A decent silent light comedy that's worth a look because of its story and high watchability.

winner55 Hitchcock was one of cinema's most aggressively experimental film makers, a fact largely unnoticed because, first, he worked largely in known genres rather than straight drama, and also because many of his experiments worked so well, they were adopted everywhere as conventions of film making. But when his experiments fail, they scream out for attention.Champagne is one of the latter, pretty much a failure in terms of everything but the camera work. The main story is the the main problem. There's nothing about the characters' little problem here - and it's a very little problem when you think about it - that would lead us to grow concerned about their resolution to it. That gives us an unfortunate opportunity to ask whether we actually find the characters appealing - and we don't. The father is vile, his friend is vile, the lover is an airhead, the daughter is an airhead. So we're left with more than an hour of vile airheads trying to determine what virtue among the wealthy might be. As if they could possibly know.Strong, intelligent women do not make much of an appearance in Hitchcock's silent films; the young Hitchcock had an ambiguous attitude towards women, whom he frequently presented as both victims of male cruelty and simpering imbeciles. That's very much in evidence here.And Hitchcock struggled artistically with what may have been a real personality problem his whole life - the one word that can link all of his films is 'paranoia.' No one can be fully trusted in a Hitchcock film, making his world a treacherous place, even in his 'comedies' - the real "Trouble with Harry" (in that film) is not that he's dead, but that nobody gives a dam' that he is.This paranoia informs this supposed comedy throughout, as well, and in fact defines its experimental nature - Hitchcock repeatedly paints his characters with ominous shadings, setting up scenes of potential violence, potential madness, potential rape; fortunately none of which ever happens - but we're supposed to laugh at this?! My sense is that this was the question Hitchcock wanted to raise, that's the experiment going on here. But nobody really wants that question raised, answering it doesn't give us a very good time.Lesser Hitchcock, to be sure.

Balthazar-5 Although the film shows plenty of evidence of being made by the Master, most viewers will probably find it light compared to the 'more substantial' 'serious' films. But Hitchcock's metier is cinema, not suspense, and Champagne contains some choice examples of how Hitch thought cinematically in a way that no other director has done. A case in point is the magnificent visual joke towards the end of the film, when our heroes are aboard an ocean liner. From time to time they are bothered by a drunk who staggers into them and other passengers. However, before long, the ship hits a storm and sways around like a cork, causing everyone to stagger from wall to wall... except the drunk... On a more profound thematic level, this is one of the earliest Hitchcockian essays on the necessity of lying in one's bed if one has made it (cf The Birds). Incidentally, it's just occurred to me how much the Betty Balfour character in this prefaces those of Grace Kelly in Rear Window and Melanie Daniels in The Birds.