Downhill mixes cynical humor with sexual horror as it tracks Ivor Novello's descent from upstanding British schoolboy to Montmartre gigolo, the downhill road laid for him by a series of scheming women. Hitchcock's formal audacity is on flamboyant display in false flashbacks, upside-down POV shots, and massive foreground objects dwarfing the characters behind them. The film reaches a psychological and stylistic climax with delirious, nightmarishly vivid visions of an evil feminine conspiracy. “I wanted to embody the dream in the reality, in solid, unblurred images,” Hitchcock later said.
—Juliet Clark