266 - The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, 1927, United Kingdom. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock.
1927.
Hitchcock.
The Master of Suspense has directed his third feature film--or his fifth--which he considers his first film. His first Hitchcock film, anyway.
He first tried in 1922, with Number 13, but he never finished it.
Have you tried to write or film a movie but did not, or could not, finish? Try again. Hitchcock did. It worked out for him.
Three years later he directed what people know as his first film, The Pleasure Garden (1925). Then: The Mountain Eagle (1926), When Boys Leave Home (1927), The Ring (1927), and our film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927).
In 1888 the people of London were terrorized by a brutal serial killer known to officials as the Whitechapel Murderer and sensationalized by the press as Jack the Ripper.
Five women were killed that year and six more which may have been related, over the next two years.
In 1911 Marie Belloc Lowndes published a short story in McClure's Magazine, and in 1913 she published a novel, both based on Jack the Ripper, and both titled The Lodger.
In the novel, a man rents a room and is then suspected of being the serial killer. By the novel's end it is uncertain whether or not he is. In this movie, it is clear.
The novel has been made into at least five feature films, five radio plays, and one opera.
Alfred Hitchcock directed the first of the feature films.
And he made a choice. By the end of this film, you will know whether or not The Lodger is also The Avenger.
If you already know and love Hitchcock, you will be amazed by how much of his technical mastery is already present in this film.
So are his cameo appearances.
In The Lodger, he appears twice: first while sitting at a desk, with his back to us, directing the action in the newsroom, and in the second, as a member of the mob, taking the law into their own hands while chasing the Lodger and trying to exact street justice.
The Lodger is introduced as a shadow approaching the door. The shadow transforms into the back of the man. Later, the Lodger appears at the top of the stairs, with the same architecture and staging later used in Psycho, again as a shadow transforming into the back of his body, filling the screen.
The citizens of the community are afraid. The seventh dead body has been found, with a triangle drawn on a piece of paper, and the words, "The Avenger." Someone saw a man flee the scene. He was tall. He wore a scarf on the lower-half of his face. All seven of the girls have been blondes.
A man shows up at the Bunting House. He has come to rent a room. He is tall. He wears a scarf on the lower-half of his face. The Bunting daughter is a blonde.
Daisy. She is called a "mannequin." This means she is a fashion model. She is dating Joe, who just happens to be a detective for the police department. They have been reading about the crime spree. The models at the fashion show hide under brunette wigs when they go home.
The Lodger settles in his new room upstairs. Pictures of blondes hang on the wall. He turns them around to face the wall. Mrs. Bunting, the Landlady, sees him doing it. She asks. He says they bother him. He knows it makes the room look ugly, but . . . he just cannot look at them.
Mrs. Bunting grows suspicious of The Lodger.
Daisy does not.
She finds him charming.
He makes her laugh. They play chess. He goes to the fashion show. Surprises her. Buys her a slinky outfit. He approaches the door as she is taking a bath.
Wait. He only wants to talk to her through the door. He has been threatened. Told to leave her alone. Told that she cannot keep the outfit. He appeals to her. He likes her.
A love triangle ensues.
Joe catches The Lodger with his hands on Daisy. Up around her neck. In some menacing fashion. He challenges him. The men confront each other.
Later Daisy goes on a date with The Lodger. Against her mother's best wishes. She heard him sneaking out at night. Trying to be quiet. Coming home late. He is up to something.
They can all hear him walking on the ceiling. They stand and listen. As the gaslight chandelier swings to the vibrating.
We can see him walking on the ceiling! We see the bottom of his shoes pacing on his glass floor, from below looking up through our glass ceiling. He is up to something.
On their date, The Lodger and Daisy sit at the gas lamp on the city street.
Joe arrives.
He confronts The Lodger.
Take your hands off my girl.
Daisy surprises Joe. Earlier in the film Joe had flirted with her. He had taken a heart-shaped cookie cutter and cut out a heart-shaped cookie, given it to her, and smiled. When she had demurred, he had taken the unbaked cookie and torn the heart-shape in half, while still smiling. His efforts had worked enough to induce her to let him kiss her, and by the time The Lodger appeared they did indeed seem like a couple.
But now in the lamplight she reveals to Joe that her original response was the true one, and that she wishes to be with The Lodger. She and The Lodger leave, leaving Joe to sulk in his sorrow.
He looks down at street at his feet, and sees a footprint. And in the footprint he puts it all together.
Hitch in his 26-year old genius places a screen inside the footprint so that we see in the screen Joe's thoughts, and in that moment Joe puts it all together.
His personal problem, the other man, and his professional problem, the man on the lam, is the same man! Now he knows what to do. He will solve both problems in one step: a warrant. And he will win Daisy's heart again by saving her life.
Things progress. And the truth is revealed. And something big happens.
Hitchcock employs mirrors, lamps, birds, handbags, jewelry, keys, handcuffs, paintings, architecture, doors, staircase railings, circles, triangles, frames.
And suspense.
And people who suspect one another.
In other words, Hitchcock employs Hitchcock.
In one shot we see a series of faces listening to the radio on headphones, and they change from one to another in a similar manner to that later used in the music video for Michael Jackson's song "Black or White," lacking only the digital transitions available to a future generation.
In another shot we watch The Lodger with his back to a painting of a beautiful blonde woman, only to discover as he walks forward that he is facing the painting and that we see it in a mirror behind him.
Some of the film predicts elements of M, the classic German crime thriller directed by Fritz Lang four years later in 1931, featuring future Hitchcock staple Peter Lorre.
And The Lodger does to us what the newspaper, The Evening Standard, does to the people who live in its universe. It sensationalizes crime as it purports to expose it. It awakens the desire to watch what it ostensibly stands against. It induces desire alongside compassion. It uses fear to titillate.
That is the history of suspense.
And it thrives to this day.
As so much of what made Hitchcock great over the next half century is already on display here.
In a silent film.
That begins with a scream.
And ends with a kiss.
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