The Passionate Adventure

Clive Brook - Adrien St. Clair
Mary Brough - Lady Rolls
Lilian Hall - Davis Pornela
Marjorie Daw - Vickey
John Hamilton - Bill
Alice Joyce - Drusilia Sinclair

This was the first film of Michael Balcon’s Gainsborough Pictures, formed - with a capital of £100 - after the financial difficulties of Balcon-Saville-Freedman. The "Gainsborough Lady" was chosen as trademark because Balcon liked the original painting and thought it would suggest "art and gentility and class". Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Morton’s script, from a novel by Frank Stayton, was a skilful mixture of "glamorous high life and picturesque low-life".

The story for this drama is of an aristocrat Adrian St. Clair (Clive Brook), who seeks escape from his unsatisfactory marriage to cold-hearted wife Drusilla (Alice Joyce), by starting a new life disguised as an East End derelict. Despite the modest budget, the leading lady, Alice Joyce, was brought from Hollywood, while Clive Brook and Victor McLaglen were both to launch their Hollywood careers immediately after this film. As art director, Hitchcock’s biggest challenge was to create the canal setting within Islington studio’s 90-foot stage.