When he was a teenager, Alfred Hitchcock enrolled at
Goldsmiths’ College, an arts branch of London University. Already a fan of
film, Hitchcock learned composition, the uses of light and shadow, and the
principles of narrative construction. His imagination flared. He began writing
short prose horror stories influenced by Lowndes and Barrie, and regularly
attended plays. He consumed American cinema, especially the films of Griffith
and Chaplin, and fully immersed himself in film culture.
In 1918, Hitchcock moved from the sales department at
Henley’s Telegraph Company, an electronics manufacturer, to the advertising
department where he honed his visual and communication skills. His dream of
crafting art never left him. Starting in 1919, several of Hitchcock’s short
thriller stories were published in magazines. By 1921, Hitchcock had left his
position at Hanley’s to fully pursue his life’s ambition. He entered the film
business as the head of an art department for British Famous Players-Lasky,
Limited, the newly formed British offshoot of the massively successful American
Paramount’s Famous Players-Lasky. Hitchcock created title illustrations for an
unknown number of films before receiving his first official art director
assignment on George Fitzmaurice’s 1921 comedy THREE LIVE GHOSTS. It was during
this period that he met Alma Reville, a script supervisor/continuity manager.
They began a relationship that would last until Reville’s death in 1982.
In 1922, British Famous Players-Lasky all but collapsed. As
the studio tried to stay afloat, Hitchcock would direct his first features, the
now-lost ALWAYS TELL YOUR WIFE and NUMBER THIRTEEN. Shooting on NUMBER THIRTEEN
ceased when the studio finally went under. Without funds, only two reels of the film were completed. Hitchcock remarked decades later that he might
have been able to complete NUMBER THIRTEEN if he would have planned better. Every
film Hitchcock would shoot after that would be painstakingly storyboarded,
every single shot planned out months in advance of filming.
Hitchcock would spend the next couple of years doing the
occasional art directing and screenwriting job, earning meager paychecks from
films like WOMAN TO WOMAN and THE PASSIONATE ADVENTURE. A break would come in
1924 when a British-German co-production company was set up by Michael Balcon,
The UFA-Gainsborough Company would employ Hitchcock as an art director. Working
in Germany, he experienced the creation of German expressionism first hand,
witnessing Murnau directing his films and spending time with some of the
greatest German camera operators of the time. He fell in love with the work of
Lang and Lubitsch. Hitchcock didn’t just discover expressionism in 1924. He was
swallowed by it.
Hitchcock’s next directorial opportunity would come from
another British-German co-production deal. The first of a five picture deal
produced under the Gainsborough-Emelka company, THE PLEASURE GARDEN was a mess
of a production. His second feature, THE MOUNTAIN EAGLE fared no better,
although each picture marked a significant development of Hitchcock’s
burgeoning skills as a director. In 1926, Gainsborough purchased Islington, the
studio Hitchcock worked at under his earlier employ. Taking full advantage of
their newly acquired studio space, Gainsborough announced a spate of nine new
productions. One of the projects
Gainsborough announced in 1925 was a new Hitchcock film, THE LODGER: A STORY OF THE LONDON FOG, based on
the stage adaptation of the Marie Belloc Lowndes novel.
THE LODGER opens on a shot of a woman’s face locked in a
silent scream. A quick dissolve later, we see that she is dead. As bystanders
surround her, we see a note attached to her clothing. On the note is a drawing
of a triangle and a signature, “The Avenger”. Cops come and go, reporters speak
with bystanders, someone mentions the killer was a “tall man” with a “scarf
across his face”, reporters call their stories into their editors, bylines are
typed out and a newspaper carrier remarks that the killer only strikes on
Tuesday and only kills blondes. Lapse dissolves show a range of faces, all
hearing the news, all in shock over yet another murder by a serial killer
stalking the streets of London.
We meet Daisy, a pretty young blonde working as a fashion
model. The models hear news of the murder, prompting some of the women to don
brunette wigs. Daisy returns home, greeting her parents, Mrs. And Mr. Bunting.
We meet her boyfriend, a police officer named Joe. As the night goes on, a man
appears at their doorway. He’s tall, thin and is wearing a scarf over his face.
He inquires about the room they have for rent. Taking him inside, Mrs. Bunting
shows The Lodger (he is unnamed in the film) the room. It’s modest, covered in
paintings of pretty blonde women. He answers no questions, asks for something
to eat and then pays Mrs. Bunting a month in advance for the room. When Mrs.
Bunting returns with his meal, she finds that The Lodger has turned all the
portraits around, facing the wall. He asks for them to be removed and she
complies, asking Daisy for help. The Lodger and Daisy meet, their gazes barely
masking a shared attraction.
Daisy and The Lodger begin to grow closer, much to the
chagrin of Joe. Daisy seems to enjoy his company but her mother is suspicious.
When The Lodger sneaks out one Tuesday night, she goes snooping in his room,
finding nothing of interest save a locked cupboard. The next morning, another
victim of The Avenger is discovered and Mrs. Bunting puts two and two together.
The Lodger is the killer the police are looking for. Sharing her fears with her
husband, Mr. Bunting refuses to allow Daisy to see The Lodger, even if the
meeting is purely platonic. Daisy ignores her father’s wishes and agrees to see
The Lodger on the following Tuesday night. They meet outside in the cover of dark. Unable to contain their mutual
love, they attempt a kiss only to be interrupted by Joe. Daisy breaks off her
relationship with Joe and she returns home with The Lodger. Joe, in a moment of
clarity, realizes that The Lodger is The Avenger.
When Joe and his fellow officers arrive to arrest The
Lodger, they search his room. Discovering a bag inside the locked cupboard,
they examine the contents. Inside is a gun, a map of the attacks, some
newspaper clippings and a picture of a smiling blonde woman. After being
handcuffed, The Lodger attacks Joe before escaping into the night. Daisy finds him lying on a bench, shivering from the cold. He confesses but not to the murders. He’s
hunting the killer himself. The picture of the woman they found was a picture
of his sister, a victim of The Avenger. Daisy takes The Lodger to a bar so that
he may sip some brandy and warm himself. Carefully covering his handcuffed
hands, they enter the bar and leave just before Joe arrives. The police ask the patrons if they
have seen a tall man wearing handcuffs. As Joe makes a call to the station, the
patrons quickly form a lynch mob, running after The Lodger and eventually
corning him on a bridge. Joe is informed by the station that The Avenger has
been apprehended, caught red handed. Realizing that he has put The Lodger’s
life in jeopardy, Joe rushes off to find him before the mob can tear him to
pieces.
The Lodger tries to jump from the small bridge but catches
the chain of his handcuffs on the railing. As people kick and hit him, drawing
blood, Joe attempts to quiet the crowd. Just as things look grim, a newspaper
carrier finds the crowd, spreading the news that The Avenger has been caught.
The Lodger’s life is spared and he is cradled by Daisy. A short epilogue shows
the two in the home of The Lodger, her parents finally accepting him as a
suitor for their daughter.
This is the first true Hitchcock film. It contains many of
the elements that would inform his later sound work. The fascination with
pretty, high fashion blondes, the fetishizing of feet, shoes and weapons, the
use of handcuffs as symbols of repression, the innocent man accused of horrible
crimes… All find their origin here. Even the famous Hitchcock cameos start
here, with Hitchcock playing both a telephone operator and an angry mob member.
Hitchcock’s admiration for the films of Sergei Eisenstein (in particular, his
editing and composition) and adherence to the montage theories of Kuleshov and
Pudovkin are also front and center. Silent films, especially those made in
Britain, were usually stoic, slow paced and had very little editing. In
comparison, THE LODGER looks and feels downright European. Hitchcock uses a chiaroscuro lighting
scheme, a mixture of high and low level photography, and quick edits to produce
a mood that feels uniquely Hitchcockian. Even at this early stage in his
career, his auteur status is evident.
The European feel of THE LODGER nearly cost Hitchcock his
job. Several high level Gainsborough members disliked – even hated – the film.
Concerns from Graham Cutts and C.M. Woolf led producer Michael Balcon to shelve
the film and cancel all screenings. Financial concerns eventually led Balcon to
contact Ivor Montagu, a noted British filmmaker and critic. The two discussed
how they could save THE LODGER. Though Hitchcock resented the interference,
Montagu left the majority of the film intact, only recommending a few slight
changes to the ending and to a couple of unimportant dramatic scenes in the
second act. Hitchcock went through with the re-shoots and Balcon, satisfied with
the finished product, released THE LODGER to great critical and financial
success. Hitchcock would go relatively unchallenged in the production of his
next few films, only ever coming into major conflict once he reached the shores
of America and filmed an adaption of REBECCA for the notoriously temperamental
David O. Selznick.
Even though THE LODGER is a silent film, it is as engrossing
and interesting as anything Hitchcock made in the sound era. It has a pacing unusual
for silent films, a real internal tempo that pushes the film forward. The
overly dramatic nature of silent film acting is tossed aside for somber,
natural performances from a uniformly great cast. The photography is simply astounding
with the German expressionist influence shining through every single frame (the
arrival of The Lodger strongly resembles Murnau’s staging of Max Schreck’s
arrival in the doorway in NOSFERATU and the interior of Mrs. Bunting’s bedroom
has a definite Robert Wiene look to it). The visual ingenuity of Hitchcock is
already apparent. The best example is the famous moment of the family hearing the
heavy pacing of The Lodger upstairs, with Hitchcock using a camera dissolve and a
glass floor to show us a man pacing from the floor below. The film is littered
with these kinds of Hitchcock moments.
One of the great joys in watching THE LODGER is seeing just
how little Hitchcock changed over the years. His films got slicker and more
thematically rich, but all the familiar elements already existed here in 1927. The
French film critics of the Cahiers du Cinéma (and later, Robin Wood) used to refer
to Hitchcock’s films as “therapeutic” films, that is to say that they are
concerned with a character or set of characters overcoming inner struggles and
fears, achieving a kind of inner calm or order by the end. As a result, these
films are also therapeutic for the audience. As film characters are made to be
magnets for audience sympathies, audiences relate to the struggles and
concerns. Their personal therapy comes vicariously. It’s interesting to see
Hitchcock’s films as a catalog for his own fetishes, desires and ambitions.
They’re also catalogs of his fears, regrets and nagging, almost obsessive,
concerns. By the time Hitchcock reaches VERTIGO, a film that is as much of a
condemnation of his own neuroses as it is a celebration of them, Hitchcock’s
entire psyche has been laid bare. For someone watching his films, especially in
order of release, Hitchcock’s oeuvre feels very much like a personal
conversation between a therapist and a patient. THE LODGER is the start of that
conversation and is an invaluable piece in the remarkable puzzle that is Alfred
Hitchcock.
