1927's Ivor Novello vehicle Downhill is a long way from the quality of his most famous colaboration with Alfred Hitchcock, The Lodger. It's a mostly uninspired and clichéd example of a director paying his dues and working his way up as Ivor Novello's school hero Roddy finds himself on the road to ruin when Mabel at Ye Olde Bunne Shoppe makes a `serious charge' that she's got a bun of her own in the oven. Naturally it was Roddy's pal Tim, the vicar's son, who done the deed (you only have to look at Novello to know that he's so obviously batting for the other team that even Liza Minnelli wouldn't marry him), but he's the one whose family has the money and rather than risk his pal's scholarship takes the blame and finds himself on a downward spiral that involves working as a chorus boy in a West End show and a gigolo dancing with manly women in a Paris nightclub for 50 francs a dance before finding himself delirious among the wharf rats and white actresses in unconvincing blackface in Marseilles before a reconciliation.
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