The Lodger (1927)

I've been doing a sort of Hitchcock retrospective with a bunch of old British films directed by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1920s and 30s, before he was discovered and imported to Hollywood by David O. Selznick to work for the next twenty or thirty years.

These early Hitchcocks, despite being about 70 or 80 years old (!), are often still quite well preserved and considering the obviously low budget Hitchcock was constrained under he managed to make some indelible little scenes that prefigure his brilliance in the later blockbusters he would make like North by Northwest, Psycho, etc.

The Lodger is a silent film from 1927, early in Hitchcock's career. Still, you can see motifs that would recur in Hitchcock's oeuvre time and again as he made further films.

Despite my love of film, I am typically not a big proponent of silent films because they are usually so far removed from my experience I can't really relate to them. Further, they are often quite badly deteriorated and there is a reason they are called "fractured flickers;" because the film skips and the brightness fades in and out and it takes away from the viewing experience. In this case I made an exception because it was cited as one of Hitchcock's best works of the silent era.

The Lodger is a film that takes its impetus from the story of Jack the Ripper, the famous terroristic killer who murdered a half dozen or so of prostitutes in foggy London around 1889 or so. Till this day the mystery of the killer has never been solved and books and films aplenty have been made purporting to "prove" just who this madman was. The most recent I remember was From Hell, a weakly written attempt at trying to pin the rap on the English crown prince, with little credibility.

The Lodger opens with some expressionistic clips that show a screaming blond woman's face in closeup and neon flashing signs, intercut, and a body being pulled from the water. The lighting is stark; the camera angle is skewed; and hard shadows slash across the frame adding their own architectural substance. This style looks a lot like Fritz Lang's early work.

The story came from Belloc Lowndes' novel of the same name where a lady who took in boarders wondered if one of them wasn't Jack the Ripper. The film has its own visual rhythm and Hitchcock did many double exposures showing the chandelier on the ceiling shaking and going up through the ceiling to show the Lodger (Ivor Novello) pacing in his room. This was innovative for the time and Hitchcock did several of these through the architecture shots and also photo montages that were quite well done.

Instead of Jack the Ripper, Hitchcock's killer was called the Avenger and this killer left calling cards with his triangle logo on them on his victims just as Jack left notes with his victims.

Enter Ivor Novello, who rents a room from the landlady and soon the mystery begins to unfold. Is the moody, handsome young man the killer?

The landlady's daughter is a beautiful blond girl who has a police detective as a suitor. When she gets a load of good looking Novello, she soon ditches the boyfriend, especially as the cop begins harassing him because he is obviously jealous.

Lots of Hitchcock's themes appear in The Lodger like his "wrong man" theme, and his obsession with beautiful young blonds, he also understood the public's incessant interest in peeping and teased them without relent. These ideas and more he initiated early in his directing career and they carried through to his latest works.

The ending of the film was a studio mandate as Hitchcock had his own ideas how to end it but they were overruled.

The movie has a fair newly recorded soundtrack that frankly does not add a lot to the film because of the whimsical nature of some of the music that seems unsuited to the visuals. The video is deteriorated and the brightness fades in and out and the film skips. There are some title cards that may be an early example of Hitchcock's black humor. One of them said of the Lodger (Ivor Novello), "Even if he's a bit queer, he's a gentleman." Novello, in fact was a noted homosexual, and this is one of the few lines in the movie that is spelled out. The Lodger has very few lines of dialog, relying instead on actions and facial expressions of the actors.

The DVD is public domain and the film runs 90 minutes even.

You can see a modern-day version of the Jack the Ripper story in Hitchcock's Frenzy.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day