Thursday, November 1, 2018

Silent Film of the Month: The Lodger (1927)



Run Time: 74 minutes. Studios: Gainsborough Pictures, Carlyle Blackwell Productions. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Writer: Eliot Stannard. Based on a book by Marie Belloc Lowndes. Main Cast: Marie Ault, Arthur Chesney, June Tripp, Malcom Keen, Ivor Novell. Cinematographer: Gaetano di Ventimiglia.


Note: There is a bit of interesting history involving how this film ends, that I feel obliged to include. So keep in mind there may be spoilers.


In François Truffaut's incredible book long interview with Alfred Hitchcock, Hitch referred to The Lodger as the first real Alfred Hitchcock film. In many ways this is true. Though this was not the first Hitchcock film, it may be the first that truly shows what the master would become known for. This was his first suspense movie and even at this early stage Hitch shows a mastery of genre. It would also introduce one of Hitch's favorite story elements, this was an innocent man being accused of wrong doing and being made to suffer for it. Hitch would keep using this plot element as late as Frenzy (1972).  Even today when audiences have seen Psycho, Rear Window, Notorious, Vertigo and North By Northwest, The Lodger has lost none of its power and is still a fantastic film on all levels.

Hitch had seen a play entitled Who is He?, which was based on Belloc Lowndes' book The Lodger. This gave him a certain amount of inspiration for this film.

The star of this movie, Ivor Novello, though not an especially well know actor today was considered a huge star in London around this time. Because of this the character was not allowed to actually be Jack the Ripper. Hitch wanted to leave the ending ambiguous so that we would never know for sure whether or not he was the murder. However with this in mind the movie clearly tells us that he is innocent. The reason he did not want this is he did not feel wondering whether or not this man the killer was not very exciting. Instead what was exciting was how the story was told and the fear the characters around him felt. Hitch ran into a similar problem of the main character not being the villain because of the actor's star power with Cary Grant's character in Suspicion (1941).


If you read the book Hitchcock/Truffaut (which ever movie fan should), you can easily see Hitch's proudness for this film. He states in that book, "As a matter of fact, I took a pure narrative and for the first time, presented ideas in purely individual terms." He then went on to describe some of the early sequences in great detail, and just how visual they are. Hitch credited the visual flair of this film to a brief period he spent in Germany. He did some of this work in Germany thanks to his early producer Michael Balcon who created a partnership with the famous German studios, UFA and Emelka. Hitch worked for Balcon as an assistant director before becoming a director himself, so he had worked on a few of these German films. Those familiar with German films of the 1920's know that many of them were quite brilliant as visual storytelling. They used striking images that often brought the audience further into the characters' inner psyche. The Lodger uses its visuals in a similar way.  

One of the best examples of the visual filmmaking in this movie is the opening scenes. The movie starts with a woman screaming. We are given no context at this point of why the woman is screaming, and shortly afterwards the screen turns to back. This completely grabs our attention as we are shocked by this image and the abruptness in which it disappears. We become uncomfortable and completely intrigued. We have to know why this happened and what we are going to see next. The words "To-night Golden Curls" appear on screen. This lets us know where we are, a nightclub with a show involving beautiful women. After this we see the dead body of the woman who was screaming earlier. We then see an old woman staring at this body in horror. Then we see a policeman taking notes. Without any dialogue we know perfectly what has happened. A young show girl was murdered in a night club. This information is given to us in the most fascinating way possible. We get the clues of what has happened little by little making us more and more intrigued along the way. Hitch plays with both our curiosity and what we have grown to except from movie storytelling (something that was already firmly in place with 1927 audiences). The film kept this visual storytelling through out the whole movie. There are many clever visual ideas. I love the scene where the lodger is pacing in his room. We see the family below look up when they hear it. We see the chandelier moving back and fourth reacting to this. We then see a shot from the floor of the lodger's room (at a very low angle). This makes the transition seem unnoticeable. We see the family looking up at the ceiling for them and the floor for him. It then looks as if we are seeing through the floor we were looking at earlier. Even though there are some traditional intertitles. The truth is the story for the most part could be followed quite well without them. This is because the story is told as visually as possible, as is done in many of the best silent movies.  

Another first of this movie is that it marked the first time Alfred Hitchcock made a cameo in his own movie. This came about because of necessity. There had to be a lot of people on screen and there weren't enough extras. For those curios Hitch is one of the members of the mob that chases the lodger during the climax.

When first shown to the studio, this film did not win Hitch any friends. First to see it was the distribution company and the publicity department. Both thought it was horrible and could not be shown. Two days later it was shown to the boss, who hated it as well. The film then was put on the shelf for a few months. Later the studio picked it up again and asked Hitch to make some changes. Hitch later told Truffaut, "I agreed to make about two." However when picture was finally shown to the public, it was a huge box office success and many British critics considered it the greatest British film made by that time. American critics didn't like the film as much as one reviewer for Variety wrote "They took a smashing theme, gummed it up with cheap and shoddy catering to the lowest taste of what they supposed to be their public, and then further smeared it with acting and photography that belongs to the American studio of 10 years ago." The same reviewer also referred to Novello's acting as "unbelievably stilted." A reviewer in The New York Times wrote, "The picture has a very, very, excellent beginning, a mediocre middle and a most deplorable ending." 

 To read a 1927 article talking about the state of British movies in 1926, including quite a bit about this film click here.


-Michael J. Ruhland 

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