Hitchcock's emerging style is well demonstrated in this film. He used a variety of screen techniques to tell the story with a minimum of title cards, preferring instead to allow the film's visual narrative tell the story. The scene after Roddy leaves home opens with the title card "The world of make-believe" but everything else in the scene is conveyed visually. A closeup of Roddy in a tuxedo pulls back to show that he is waiting on a table at a restaurant, where he pockets a woman's wallet. The camera then follows him to reveal that he's actually playing playing a waiter on stage in a theatre. Hitchcock also incorporated shots of a descending escalator at Maida Vale tube station as a visual metaphor for Roddy's downhill descent. Although in a later interview with Francois Truffaut he called that scene "a naive touch that I wouldn't do today," Hitchcock also incorporated a later scene of Roddy going down in an elevator for a similar effect. Hitchcock played with shadow and light in much the same way as directors of German expressionist films of the time, especially F.W. Murnau, for whom he had worked as an assistant director. In the Parisian dance hall scene, Roddy winds up telling his life story to an apparently sympathetic older woman, but as the morning light comes through the windows, he is repelled by the tawdry, decadent scene and the woman's masculine-looking face. Hitchcock experimented with dream sequences by shooting them sometimes in superimpositions, but broke with the common use of blurred images to indicate a hallucinatory scene by " the dream in the reality, in solid, unblurred images." While delirious on the ship, Roddy envisions his father approaching him in a manner reminiscent of Murnau's vampire in "Nosferatu," and when he returns to London, Roddy envisions a Bobby's face as his father's.