The Hitchcock 9 - 2


MARIE AULT AND IVOR NOVELLO IN THE LODGER

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Sept. 1926)

Lots of exciting street crowd scenes begin this thirller, which as is always pointed out, not only takes up for the first time Hitchcock's favorite subject of murder, but also includes the other favorite theme of a wronged innocent man, the lodger of the title, who is falsely accused of being the serial killer, The Avenger, an assassin, never seen, who repeatedly murders pretty blonde young women (another favorite theme) and leaves a note with this moniker with a triangle or delta sign. Unlike future Hitchcock thrillers, however, this film quickly stops focusing on the murders and zeros in on a handsome, apparently well-off young man who mysteriously comes to rent a room where most of the action takes place. He falls for the young woman there, and she for him, losing interest in the other young man in the house, who is a policeman who is put on the murder case. At the same time the Avenger's killings, which take place on Tuesdays and follow the patter of a narrowing circle around London, are coming closer and closer to the location of the house.

The actor who plays the lodger is like Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen, young, handsome, sensitive, attractive, but also a bit on the pale and ghoulish side, though he will kiss the resident blonde with a delicate passion Hitchcock is already skillful at staging. He is Ivor Novello, who turns out to have been gay in real life, was destined to have a long career beyond the silent era. What makes the story work for viewers is the way the initial suspicion of the strange but genteel stranger is shared by the elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Bunting (Marie Ault and Arthur Chesney) and by the young policeman in bow tie and rumpled suit Joe Chandler (Malcolm Keen) -- the lodger is much beter dressed, while their daughter Daisy (played by an actress known only as "June"), a fashion model, takes to the lodger immediately and gradually responds to his desire to kiss her and falls for him. But Daisy is blonde, and so we fear for her and wonder if perhaps the lodger is The Avenger and is going to kill her.

But it's only a mater of time when we begin strongly to suspect, especially if we are familiar with Hitchcock's "wrong man" themes, that the lodger is a good guy in disguise. And the (for us) predictable trajectory develops: the lodger is ganged up on, his room contains material that while it is explicable if he is trying to hunt down the killer, also makes him look suspicious, and he winds up being first searched, charged, and handcuffed by the police, then, when he runs out into the street, hunted down by an angry mob and barely saved at the last minute from being torn to pieces. A happy final scene shows him, after a period in hospital recovering from nervous strain, fully restored to form and descending the staircase of his family mansion to receive a fancily dressed up Mr and Mrs Bunting, their suspicions now replaced by admiring acceptance, who stand by approvingly while he lengthily kisses Daisy. Thus The Lodger begins as a murder thriller, morphs into a Wronged Man story, and winds up as a romance. What more could anyone want? Well, one could want more suspense and more Hitchcockisn twists and turns.

The greatest excitement in The Lodger, in visual, cinematic terms anyway, comes in the early and late exterior shots in the London streets. The fog stirs up an atmosphere of fear: the story banks on everyone's having some remnant of fear of the dark and of streets where one can't see more than a few feet in front of one's face. Hitchcock expressed admiration for Fritz Langs 1929 Destiny; The Lodger's beginning and ending both partake of the serial killer and mob vengeance atmosphere of Lang's M; however M is actually from a later date. The Lodger was a great success with the English public and started Hitchcock on his way to fame. But surely Lang's M is a far greater and more haunting film. Anyway, The Lodger has the influence of German expressionism in its use of closeups. But "expressionism" is a technique for Hitchcock to add emotional power to a basically naturalistic approach. Though later he was to rely on Salvador Dalí for a dream sequence (in Spellbound) and to be influenced by Freud, he does not resort to the kind of full-fledged fantastical expressionism and hauntingly distorted, angular sets that we find in, for instance, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Nosferatu. Hitchcock always makes effective use of the homely and everyday, represented in The Lodger by the old couple, Mr and Mrs Bunting, whose counterparts also exist in his previous film, The Pleasure Garden. He also uses closeups of everyday objects to imbue them with menace as potential weapons. Photographic tricks abound, including filming footsteps from underneath through a transparent floor. Note: there is a musical accompaniment of solo piano on the DVD of the BFI-restored version. The BFI's trailer for the restored Lodger indicates that there was a new orchestral accompaniment.

Reviewed as part of the US premiere of The Hitchcock 9 BFI-restored silent films by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, shown at the Castro Theater June 14-16, 2013. Screener DVDs provided by Larsen Associates.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.