The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Gainsborough Pictures, Carlyle Blackwell Productions, Gaumont-British, filmed 1926, released 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” was the 1927 version of The Lodger (I believe it was actually shot in 1926 but released in 1927 in Great Britain, where it was made, and in 1928 in the U.S.), the third film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and the first in the mystery-suspense thriller genre in which he would eventually specialize. (Not at first; of his first 17 British films only four – The Lodger, Blackmail, Murder! and Number 17 – were thrillers.) Hitchcock trained as a commercial artist and got his first job in films in 1922, when he applied to design title cards for a short-lived attempt by Paramount to start a studio in London. That folded, but Hitch landed a job with Michael Balcon at Gaumont-British (so named because it was a U.K. subsidiary of a French company) and gradually worked his way up the ladder to assistant director on two films, The Rat and The Triumph of the Rat, featuring the company’s biggest star, Ivor Novello. Ivor Novello was a singer, songwriter and musical star who also had matinée-idol looks. Like Noël Coward, he was also a Gay man and, my husband Charles tells me, a legend in the British Gay community into the 1980’s even though he had died in 1951. Novello’s two Rat films were directed by Graham “Jack” Cutts, whom most Hitchcock biographers dismiss as a man who drank and womanized his way out of his career – people who worked with Cutts at the time said that part of the job of being one of his assistants was keeping his various girlfriends away from each other – though when I finally saw a Graham Cutts film, the 1932 Sherlock Holmes adventure The Sign of Four, I was quite impressed and wrote on my blog, “Cutts was a major talent with a flair for just the sort of film his former assistant specialized in.”

Apparently, Cutts was sufficiently unreliable that Balcon thought he’d better develop another director, and he set up a two-film co-production deal with a small German studio called Emelka to produce Hitchcock’s first two films as a director, The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle. (The Mountain Eagle, a story set in Kentucky but filmed in the Tyrol because the people at Emelka figured, “Mountains are mountains,” is the one Hitchcock film that is lost, though when Hitchcock biographer John Russell Taylor asked him about it, HItch said, “No great loss – the film was terrible!”) The Lodger – originally released with the subtitle A Story of the London Fog – was Hitchcock’s third film and the first he was truly proud of, though he had trouble with Balcon and his superior, C. M. Woolf, over the experimental nature of his movie. The Lodger was based on a novel by writer Marie Belloc Lowndes (though she’s credited only as “Mrs. Belloc Lowndes”) which in turn was inspired by an incident at a dinner party she attended in which one of the other guests said, “I think I had Jack the Ripper as one of the guests at my lodging house.” Belloc Lowndes thought about that for a while and finally decided to write a novel (and, later, a play) about a middle-aged couple who run a lodging house and start thinking that the mysterious guest who has taken the upstairs room might be a serial killer. Apparently Belloc Lowndes left it ambiguous as to whether the mystery lodger was really Jack the Ripper (or “The Avenger,” as he’s called in the film).

When he took on the story Hitchcock wanted to make Novello’s character “The Avenger,” but Balcom and the other executives at the company said that an actor as lovable in his other films as Ivor Novello couldn’t be revealed as a serial killer. (Hitchcock had the same problem at RKO 15 years later when he cast Cary Grant as a murderer in Suspicion; once again the studio bosses decided that Grant was too lovable to be a killer, so Hitchcock and his writers had to come up with a transparently phony “happy ending” that weakens, though it doesn’t destroy, the appeal of the film.) The gimmick Hitchcock and his writer, Elliot Stannard, came up with was to have the Lodger be the brother of the Avenger’s first victim. They wrote a preposterous flashback sequence in which Novello’s character literally has to swear to his mother on her deathbed that he will never rest until he finds the Avenger and brings him to justice. Nonetheless, The Lodger is a first-rate film in which Hitchcock really strutted his stuff, including shooting a scene from below a plate of glass on which Ivor Novello nervously paced up and down. The studio executives questioned that scene and Hitchcock himself criticized it later, saying he could have made the same point just by showing the light fixture on the ceiling just below Novello’s room shake without actually showing his footfalls.

The Lodger looks very much like a German film of the period; Hitchcock’s co-production deal with Emelka had allowed him to shoot scenes at the UFA studio, the largest and best equipped film factory in Europe, and he got to watch the great UFA directors, Friedrich Murnau and Fritz Lang, at work on their early masterpieces. (In 1928 Lang made a film at UFA called Spies from which Hitchcock borrowed liberally for his mid-1930’s films The 39 Steps, The Secret Agent and Sabotage, so much so that British critics reviewing those films called Hitchcock “our Fritz Lang.”) Though it was made well over a decade before film noir emerged as a genre, The Lodger definitely qualifies as noir: Hitchcock and his cinematographer, Baron Ventimiglia, shot much of it at oblique angles and gave the spare sets effectively shadowy lighting. When the folks running Gaumont-British first got a look at The Lodger, they decided that Hitchcock’s experiments had made the film decidedly uncommercial, so they called in a consultant to help re-edit it. Fortunately, the man they called in was Ivor Montagu, an intellectual critic who loved the film and considered it the only British film to that time that could compete with the best films from the U.S. or Germany. Montagu cut the number of intertitles from about 300 to 72, and it’s easy to see from watching the film exactly where the cuts took place: there are important dialogue exchanges that in most films would have been communicated with endless titles but here are shown far economically with just enough titles for the audience to understand the scenes. Montagu also brought in E. McKnight Kauffer to design the opening credits and various titles during the film; Kauffer’s unique style would also be on display 20 years later when he did the cover for the first edition of African-American writer Ralph Ellison’s anti-racist novel Invisible Man.

The Lodger certainly contains plenty of scenes that anticipate Hitchcock’s later films; not only is the heroine blonde – her name is Daisy and she’s played by an actress billed merely as “June” (her full name was June Tripp) – but she’s attracted to the mysterious lodger even though she already has a boyfriend, Joe (Malcolm Keen), and he’s the police detective assigned to catch “The Avenger.” (The film therefore anticipates the hero-heroine-villain love triangles Hitchcock would do later in Blackmail, The Secret Agent, Notorious, North by Northwest and other movies.) Daisy also works in a fashion show called Golden Curls, which puts her in the cross-hairs of “The Avenger,” whom we learn only kills blonde women and commits his murders only on Tuesday nights. In a scene director Edgar G. Ulmer and writer Pierre Gendron later copied for the 1944 film Bluebeard, also a movie about a serial killer of women, at least two of the women in Golden Curls put on black hairpieces or wigs as they leave the show to go home so they won’t attract “The Avenger”’s homicidal attractions. One of them even says she’s swearing off peroxide until “The Avenger” is caught. The film ends with a chase through the London streets in which various townspeople (one of whom is apparently played by Alfred Hitchcock in the first of his famous cameo appearances, though I didn’t recognize him and during his British years he only appeared sporadically; it was only when he came to the U.S. to make Rebecca in 1940 that he started doing a brief appearance in every film he made) chase Novello’s character after Joe has handcuffed him. Daisy tries to help him but he’s spotted and various Londoners give chase.

Fortunately, the real Avenger is caught that very night somewhere else in the city, and Joe learns this and sets off to rescue the lodger, but the lodger is nearly lynched and there’s a fascinating scene in which he is caught by his handcuffs as he tries to climb over a fence and Hitchcock seems to be evoking the Crucifixion here. (Years later Hitchcock would stage a similar scene at the end of one of his most underrated films, I Confess, in which Montgomery Clift played a Catholic priest who’s wrongly accused of murder. TSeennhe real killer confessed the crime to the priest, but because of the secrecy of the confessional, the priest can’t use any evidence he got from the killer to exonerate himself.) Seen today, The Lodger is a great film, not only full of anticipations of what Hitchcock would do later but marvelous in its own right. The print we were watching was a recent restoration from the British Film Archive, and Charles and I both liked the movie but think they way overdid the color tinting. Tinting (giving the black-and-white image an overall color tint) and toning (highlighting one part of the image so it was a different color than the rest) were basic effects in the silent era. They pretty much died out in the early sound era because they interfered with the sound quality of an optical soundtrack (though they were revived quite spectacularly for The Death Kiss in 1933 and the orphanage fire in Mighty Joe Young in 1949), but the tints in the “restored” version of The Lodger forced us to watch much of the film through a red or amber murk and both Charles and I decided we’d liked the film better in plain black-and-white in our previous viewings of it.