“HITCH BEGINS”

By Raymond Benson

The British silent film period of director Alfred Hitchcock is simultaneously interesting and frustrating. It’s the former because it allows one to view a genius at the very beginning of his career—the kernels of motifs and themes, as well as stylistic choices, can be spotted and analyzed. It’s the latter because only one or two of the nine silent pictures he made are truly memorable and most are available today solely as poor quality public domain transfers.

The Criterion Collection has just released a bang-up, marvelous new edition of Hitchcock’s most celebrated silent work, The Lodger—A Story of the London Fog. The disk also contains one of the rarer silent titles, Downhill (also 1927), which might be reason enough for Hitchcock enthusiasts to purchase the package.

A bit of history: Hitchcock was working for Gainsborough Pictures under the auspices of Michael Balcon (one of the major studio heads of early British cinema). The young filmmaker was sent to Germany in 1925 to make his first two pictures so that he could “learn” the craft from the then-masters of expressionistic storytelling. He made The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle, both of which were deemed not good enough to release in the UK (interestingly, they were both released in the US in 1926, making America the first English-speaking country to see a Hitchcock film!). Hitch’s third completed title, The Lodger, almost suffered the same fate. Balcon and others at the studio didn’t like it, and it was only after a film critic named Ivor Montagu came in and made suggestions for changing some title cards and reshooting some scenes, that The Lodger was finally released.

It was an immediate success, both critically and financially (prompting Gainsborough to release The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle in the UK, almost two years after they were made). The Lodger is also considered to be the first true “Hitchcock film” in that it’s a crime picture that presents many visual and thematic elements to which he would return (including but not limited to—the notion of the “wrong man,” blondes, handcuffs, sexual fetishism, and expressionistic lighting and camerawork). For a silent film, The Lodger is totally engrossing and fascinating, guaranteed to entertain even the most jaded viewers who can’t abide movies without talking.

The story is loosely based on the Jack the Ripper case (adapted from a novel by Marie Belloq Lowndes). A serial killer of blonde women known as “the Avenger” is loose in London. A mysterious stranger (Ivor Novello) rents the upstairs flat in the home of Daisy, a blonde fashion model and her parents. Daisy’s boyfriend is a cop, but she’s not really that interested in him—she’s more attracted to the stranger—the lodger who asks that all portraits of blonde women be removed from his room. Of course, it isn’t long before the lodger is suspected of being the Avenger.

Novello, who was a matinee idol at the time, is striking in the picture. Granted, in 1927, movies of this ilk were melodramatic, the acting exaggerated, and the pacing meticulous. Nevertheless, Novello’s good looks and pained expressions contribute to the building of suspense. The boarding house itself also becomes a character in the story, as outlined by art historian Steven Jacobs in an interesting supplement on the disk that discusses Hitchcock’s use of architecture in his pictures.