The Lodger:
A Story of the London Fog
 (1926)
review by Black Gloves

The Lodger" was Alfred Hitchcock's third silent movie and the first film of his to receive widespread public attention. His first, "The Pleasure Garden", had received mildly positive reviews but could not find exhibitors, while the second was shelved and didn't get shown until after "The Lodger" was released. This third film though, was lauded by the critics -- who praised it's showy style and Germanic emphasis on strange camera angles and shadowy lighting -- and was loved by audiences who made it a phenomenal success. But things almost didn't turn out that way. When the film was first shown to C.M. Woolf, chairman of Gainsborough's distributor, he pronounced it unshowable -- and it too was shelved, plunging Hitchcock into despair. Luckily, Gainsborough Pictures needed more films quickly to cash in on some recent successes, and although "The Lodger" seemed incomprehensible to the companies' studio executives, it did, at least happen to feature Ivor Novello -- the most popular British screen star of the day.

Gainsborough's managing director, Michael Balcon, brought in Ivor Montagu to re-edit the film into something that might be considered 'commercially appealing'. But when Montagu saw it, he recognised it as streets ahead of anything else coming out of Britain; he got together with Hitchcock to make a few cursory re-edits for plot clarification and the final chase scene was re-shot. Montagu also encouraged Hitchcock to make the film more extreme in one respect: all but the most essential of title cards were eliminated, with the film depending almost entirely on visuals to tell the story. This was in line with the latest trend in German cinema -- but it was a revelation for British audiences at the time.

Hitchcock had become interested in the story after seeing a play based on a best-selling novel by Marie Belloc-Lowndes which took the Jack the Ripper myth as its inspiration. In the film, London is in the grip of hysteria as a serial killer is on the loose. He always kills on tuesday nights and his victims are always blonde women; a note is left pinned to the victim with his name, "The Avenger", written inside a triangle. Witnesses describe a figure dressed in a black long-coat, carrying a black case -- his faced obscured by a scarf.

Backstage at a fashion show the models read about the latest murder. One of them, Daisy Bunting (June Tripp), feels particularly disturbed by the killers penchant for blonde-haired girls, since she herself is blonde. She arrives home late that night to find her father and boyfriend, Joe (Malcolm Keen) discussing the murders. Joe is a policeman and is gung-ho about capturing the killer. The house is plunged into darkness as the gas-meter runs out, but at that very moment there is a knock at the door. Mrs Bunting (Marie Ault) answers it to find a tall dark stranger standing in the doorway clutching a case, his face wrapped in a scarf against the cold, foggy night. He turns out to be there on account of the sign appealing for a Lodger displayed in the Buntings' window. Mrs Bunting shows the stranger to an upstairs room. Later on, the Lodger requests that some paintings be removed from his room; Mrs Bunting finds that he has turned them to face the wall. All of the paintings feature blonde haired women.

As the days pass, the lodger and Daisy spend more and more time together; but Mr & Mrs Bunting's suspicions are increasingly aroused by the stranger's reclusive ways. When Mrs Bunting discovers the lodger sneaking out of the house on a tuesday night she becomes even more worried -- especially when the next morning's papers reveal that another Avenger murder took place just around the corner that previous night. The lodger starts visiting Daisy at the fashion house and buying her gifts; this makes Joe increasingly jealous. He discovers a pattern in the sequence of murders which leads directly to the Bunting's house. Joe and several colleagues converge on the lodger's room where they confront him and search the place. They find his black bag, which contains a picture of one of the victims, a gun and a map indicating each murder. The lodger tries to explain that his sister had been a victim of the Avenger and that he'd been tracking the killer himself, planning to avenge his sister's death. Now consumed with jealousy (Daisy has since broken off their engagement), Joe refuses to believe him. The lodger is handcuffed, but manages to escape -- Daisy eventually finds him shivering on a bench where the two often met and she takes him to a tavern to warm him up with some brandy. Unfortunately, some of the patrons realise that there is something odd about the couple; later, when Joe and some other policemen arrive and mention they are looking for a handcuffed man, the tavern's customers turn into a lynch mob and rush out to accost the fugitive. The angry mob gets bigger as the chase quickens; meanwhile, Joe receives a phone call from head office telling him that the real Avenger has in fact been caught red handed ten minutes previously. The mob though has caught up with the lodger and as he tries to vault a fence his handcuffs get caught on a spike, leaving him dangling as the angry crowd paw at him. Then, just in time, Joe arrives to save the unjustly persecuted stranger, as a newspaper boy's billboard announces the real Avenger's capture.

After his recuperation in hospital, we next see the lodger after his wedding to Daisy. Mr and Mrs Bunting, who once regarded him with suspicion, now greet the lodger and their daughter with deference in the unaccustomed grandeur of the couples' stately home.

At the time of the film's release, audiences and critics alike were excited by it's expressionistic style and clever use of visual effects (the very things that confused Woolf and Gainsborough's studio executives). Some of the standout sequences include the Bunting family nervously listening to the lodger pacing up and down upstairs (which Hitchcock portrayed by having a one-inch-thick glass floor/ceiling made, and filming the soles of Ivor Novello's feet as he paced back and forth); the lodger's descent down a staircase, filmed with just a single white hand visible as it slides down the bannister; and the film's elaborate opening montage.

These scenes still stand out today, but the film also inevitably resonates in the light of the subsequent reputation of it's director. This was Hitchcock first thriller, and it is noticeable just how prominent already are the themes and devices that would later become associated with him: the fear of authority figures, especially the police, and a preoccupation with confinement -- in this case, expressed in the ritualistic handcuffing of the Lodger -- are the most obvious examples (most famously, handcuffs play a prominent role as a plot device in "The Thirty-Nine Steps"); and, of course, the theme of the innocent man on the run became synonymous with the name Alfred Hitchcock. If anything, this latter theme is almost overplayed here, with the lodger being portrayed as a Christ-like figure in the climatic lynching scene. Ironically though, this motif only played a role in "The Lodger" out of necessity -- it was a requirement of having Britain's leading matinee idol as the lead, that he should be exonerated at the end of the film! In the original novel the lodger is indeed the killer, and Mrs Bunting is happy to collude in his escape from justice as long as she is paid her rent each month. However, Hitchcock managed to use the changes forced upon him to his own ends. Novello's audience appeal is used throughout, deliberately to induce a certain degree of moral ambiguity. His possible identity as the killer is signalled to the audience long before the characters in the film pick up on it and yet we are manoeuvred to sympathise with him nonetheless. It is also suggested that part of Daisy's attraction to the lodger is based on precisely this possibility that he might, indeed, be a murderer. By the time Novello's character has been found to be innocent, the audience has already been made complicate in the accusation against him (although it was Hitchcock who manipulated us toward that conclusion in the first place!).

Instead of being a study of the psychology of a serial killer, the film becomes an examination of the dubious facade of moral decency in the 'man on the street'. We never learn anything about the real Avenger -- instead the film concentrates on how the public (mostly represented by Joe the policeman and the Buntings) are themselves almost corrupted by the climate of fear and paranoia whipped up by killings. The film's opening montage lets us know where Hitchcock's interests lie: a title card flashes up on the screen repeatedly: "To-Night, Golden Curls, To-Night, Golden Curls!" The image of a screaming blonde girl in the process of being murdered then fills the screen. A series of images then follow that show how the news of this brutal event is spread and turned into a 'product' to be consumed by a public eager for sensation. We see a reporter scribbling down a wide-eyed witness' description while the bustling crowd around them joke and lark about; we see the hurly-burly of the newsroom as the copy phoned in by the reporter is prepared and printed; the news being broadcast over the airways, and people eagerly buying the latest papers, or listing to their radios to find out the latest details. Already it is apparent that it is not so much the murderer, but the general populace -- and their consumption of murder as entertainment -- which is under Hitchcock's moral microscope.

Hitchcock later called "The Lodger" the first real 'Hitchcock' film as it was the first project developed specifically by him rather than being just an assignment. And for anyone interested in Hitchcock's early career it is well worth tracking down; and although its flickering, scratchy, silent images may take a bit of getting used to at first, in the end, this aspect actually adds to it's macabre atmosphere. An early Hitchcock gem from the silent era.