Hitchcock returned to the out-and-out comedy with this romp starring Betty Balfour, who was referred to as "Britain's Queen of Happiness" and as the British Mary Pickford. Reportedly, Walter Mycroft (author of the source material) originally had the film be more of a drama about a girl who packaged champagne bottles wonder what happened to each bottle in their journey, then after sampling too much of her product, she goes through a nightmare excursion. Once Balfour was attached to the project, the film was quickly rewritten around her.
The film has Betty as a wild daughter of a Wall Street tycoon (played by Gordon Harker) who is picked up mid-ocean by a liner to catch up with her fiance (Jean Bradin) so they can vacation in Europe. Things goes somewhat amiss when she and her fiance (unnamed in the movie) have an argument over their upcoming marriage and she gives back the ring. Betty lives the high life in Paris, until her father comes and informs her that the market crash and their fortune is gone. What's a rich-now-poor girl to do in Paris and who is that strange mustachioed man who seems to be everywhere Betty is?
During a press conference for Hitchcock's final film, Family Plot, the director called Champagne the least favorite of all of his movies and during his interviews with Francois Truffaut, he said the film was the lowest ebb in his output. The movie does have some nice touches, but the movie does feel like that it didn't maximize its potential. Truffaut did suggest that the film could have been assigned to him, but it really seems like that instead of Betty Balfour appearing in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, it was more of Alfred Hitchcock directing a Betty Balfour movie.
Now while many of Balfour's movies are lost due to the ravages of time making it hard to give a comparison of her performances to Champagne, she does show a lot of her talent here, but it really seems it would have been better utilized by a director more suited to a comedienne's film. According to Michael Powell (who worked as a stills photographer before becoming one of the greatest directors in film history) said that Hitchcock was detested Balfour calling her "a piece of suburban obsenity".
There are some funny moments in the movie obviously, but the plot doesn't really stay focused on drama, romance or mad-cap moments just slightly scraping each. Alfred Broome, the assistant cameraman on the movie, said that a whole script wasn't made and that it was written on envelopes on the way to the studio. This may be more reason for Hitchcock's dismissal (and perhaps Truffaut's suspicion of studio involvement) of the film knowing his attention of having control of every detail with the production of his films but having an uncompleted script seems very unlike what Hitchcock would have done.
The Manchester Guardian liked Balfour's performance saying she was the "same delightful Betty" despite her character being an American and not the cockney she'd been so many times in movies. The Variety review was more harsh saying it was a waste of 7000 feet of celluloid with legs and close-ups. While personally I can see why Hitchcock didn't like the film, I wouldn't rank this the worst (Downhill and Easy Virtue went down to the bottom), but I think it should have been better.
The movie was restored in 2012 by the British Film Institute in an effort to preserve Hitchcock's surviving silent films. Apparently the original camera negative was lost and a backup negative using second takes & alternate camera angels used often for foreign release prints was used for the restoration. The film was released as part of 5 film set on DVD and Blu-Ray in December 2019 by Kino Lorber and can be purchased here.
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