No artist arrives fully formed. It takes time to develop a perspective, to hone a voice, to acquire the confidence and acumen needed to make something truly special. Even the greatest and most influential of masters, in any trade, needed time and practice to become as great and influential as they ended up being.
The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog (now available on Blu-ray from Criterion) was not Alfred Hitchcock’s first directorial effort. He’d been working in the film industry in one job or another for close to a decade by the time he got around to this 1927 silent chiller about a landlady who comes to suspect her reclusive tenant is a Jack the Ripper-ian killer. But The Lodger is the film where you can begin to see Hitchcock finding his feet and carving out a particular bit of territory that he would go on to own so thoroughly that “Hitchcockian” remains a genre unto itself.
At 90 minutes long, The Lodger is about as stripped-down a thriller as you are likely to find. There’s a killer stalking the streets of London, murdering blonde girls and leaving behind only a piece of paper identifying himself as “The Avenger.” Paranoia is running high (blonde ladies have taken to covering their hair in hats or dark wigs to throw off the killer). When a mysterious, reclusive gentleman who matches a description of the killer takes up a room in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting, it’s not long before they become deathly concerned that they’ve allowed a monster into their midst.
What’s perhaps most fascinating about The Lodger is seeing just how much of the material that would recur throughout Hithcock’s work, up to and including some of his final films, were clearly present from jump street.
Threatened blonde women? Check.
Ineffectual/untrustworthy authority figures? Check.
An innocent man being pursued for a crime he didn’t commit? Check.
(That last one represents a major change from the original text. The original story of The Lodger is considered one of the first works of fiction surrounding Jack the Ripper and was inspired by a real landlady who claimed to have rented a room to one Walter Sickert, a popular candidate for Jack the Ripper’s true identity. In the story, the Lodger was indeed the killer, an ending that was nixed by the studio upon the casting of Ivor Novello, who they considered far too charming and likable to ever be believable as a killer [which is HILARIOUS once you see the film. Novello could not look more like a knife-murderer if he was drenched head-to-toe in gore and carrying a lady’s scalp. Total creep. Anyway.] This may have informed Hitchcock’s later films like Shadow of a Doubt and Rear Window, which feature similar set-ups but actually go all the way and have the suspicions be true.)
It’s especially remarkable given that one of Hitchcock’s final films was Frenzy, which dealt with pretty much the exact same subject matter. Both films even feature sequences of London’s streets frothing with excited, terrified people running amok with news about the most recent kills. The world may have changed in the 50 years dividing the two films, but not by that much.
The Lodger finds Hitchcock trying out a whole host of new toys that he would sharpen as time went on. His early affinity for German Expressionism is represented in a number of shots and set designs. The arrival of the Lodger to the Bunting house is an especially potent bit of craft, as his silhouette announces itself before the door. When the door swings open to reveal Novello, face wrapped in a scarf and hand placed on his chest like a corpse in repose, audiences of yesteryear must have reacted with the same aghast expression as Mrs. Bunting.
In another sequence, Hitchcock uses a swinging chandelier to illustrate the frantic pacing of the Lodger, then turns the floor inside out so you can actually see Novello pacing back and forth. Throughout the film, Hitchcock returns again and again to that swinging light fixture, an early expression of his classic suspense rule to show the audience the bomb underneath a table before it goes off.
I’m focusing mostly on what The Lodger means to Hitchcock’s career because, on its own, The Lodger is a solid but not especially spectacular film. Unlike, say, Metropolis or The Last Laugh or some of Keaton and Chaplin’s best films, this is not one of those silent films possessed by so much craft and talent that its quality radiates across time. It’s a curiosity more than anything else, especially marred by being forced to rewrite around Novello’s casting. The conclusion of the Avenger mystery and the Lodger’s role in it is so arbitrary as to be almost comical, and it means the back half of the film deflates much of the effort that the terrific first half put into building up suspense.
(Weirdly enough, almost the exact same thing happened to Hitchcock again years later on the film Suspicion, when the studio refused to let Cary Grant play a murderer, forcing an overhaul to a story that had been all about how Cary Grant was a murderer.)
The person most let down by these changes is Novello. With his long frame and sunken features, he throws himself into the physicality of this character and recalls other great silent film freaks like Dr. Caligari or Count Orlock. He’s a great creepy presence and it’s too bad that the movie ends up undercutting him.
Still, any and all fans of Hitchcock owe it to themselves to give this film at least one look, and the fog-ridden pall over London is suitably Gothic. The Lodger may be a rough draft of genius, but you can clearly see the early signs that will evolve into a filmmaker unlike any other.