The Lodger (1927)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Film Review

The best known and most popular of Hitchcock's silent films is The Lodger, a skilfully woven concoction of suspense thriller and romance which presages many of the director's subsequent great works.  The 39 Steps, North By Northwest, Psycho, and many others all have their roots clearly visible in this groundbreaking masterpiece of early British cinema.  The film was based on the famous novel The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes, which was inspired by the Jack the Ripper killings.  This novel has been adapted several times for cinema, one of the best being the 1944 American film of the same title, directed by John Brahm.

Hitchcock liked to describe The Lodger as his first film, although he had in fact made a few others prior to this (none of these had yet been released).  It was made at Islington Studios in London for Michael Balcon's newly created company Gainsborough Pictures.   The film was initially shelved when its distributor judged that it was too complicated and arty for a British audience.  Producer Michael Balcon hired film critic Ivor Montagu to try to salvage the film.  At Montagu's suggestion, Hitchcock shot a few extra scenes, removed several intertitles and tightened the editing to make the narrative easier to follow.  When The Lodger was released in February 1927, it was both a critical and commercial success, prompting Balcon to release Hitchcock's previous two films - The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle - which had also been held back.

Setting a trend that Hitchcock would adhere to throughout most of his career, the film's lead part was taken by one of the biggest stars of the day - in this case Ivor Novello (who was also a renowned singer and composer, as well as an actor).   Hitchcock justified casting big name actors by saying that this heightened the tension, since the audience would have greater sympathy for a character who was played by an actor they knew well.  The downside of this is that such actors were often reluctant to play villainous parts.  In The Lodger, it was originally intended that the character played by Ivor Novello would not be proven innocent of the killings.  This had to be changed through fears that Novello's popular matinee idol image would have been destroyed if he had played the part of a murderer.   The same thing happened several years later with Suspicion (1941), when RKO refused to allow Cary Grant to play a character who would be revealed to be a killer.

Stylistically, The Lodger is quite different to most British films of its era and shows the influence of contemporary German cinema.  For his previous two films, Hitchcock had been based in Munich, and so he would have been aware of such films as Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), Robert Wiene's Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (1920) and Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922).  The striking visually expressionistic design of these films can be seen in The Lodger - claustrophobic sets, tilted camera angles, harsh lighting, exaggerated shadows - all working to create a sense of mental derangement and profound anxiety, suggesting a world tumbling into paranoia and anarchy, which fits the narrative beautifully.

Even in this first "true Hitchcock" we see glimpses of the director's genius and flair for innovation - most notably in the arresting shot where the Buntings "see" their mysterious lodger pacing up and down in his room through a transparent ceiling.  Hitchcock made his first cameo appearance in this film - playing the part of a newspaper editor, seated at a desk, with his back to the camera.  The story goes that he was taking the place of a bit part actor who failed to turn up.

Today it is hard not to regard The Lodger as the prototype for most of Hitchcock subsequent films.  There is the innocent man who is wrongly suspected of committing a crime and who faces death unless he can clear his name; there are beautiful blond women who become the victims of flawed men who cannot control their primitive urges; there are gruesome murders and overt eroticism, linked in a grotesque coupling of sex and death.  Those themes that interested and inspired Hitchcock the most are clearly visible in The Lodger, themes that would be explored in greater depth and with more subtlety in his later films.  The dark path that would take us to the Bates Motel and beyond starts here...

Film Synopsis

A killer stalks the foggy streets of London.  The victims are all young women with fair hair, on whose bodies there is a card signed: The Avenger.  A police investigation is underway, but no one yet knows the identity of the mysterious killer.  On the night of the seventh murder, Mr and Mrs Bunting take in a new lodger, a quiet young man who values his privacy.  The Buntings' daughter, Daisy, takes a liking to the handsome lodger, much to the chagrin of her boyfriend, Joe, a policeman who is looking for the elusive serial killer.   One night, the lodger slips furtively out of his rooms, not knowing that he has been seen by his landlady.  Within a few hours, the Avenger has struck again.  When they hear of this, the Buntings draw the obvious conclusion...