Join us for another classic silent film, 4pm ET 🙂
Hitchcock’s most successful silent movie, as he himself acknowledged to Francois Truffaut, was the first that could plausibly be called Hitchcockian. This variation on the hunt for Jack the Ripper features themes and motifs that would recur throughout Hitchcock’s career: the suspected killer who may be innocent (see Suspicion and The Wrong Man, just for starters); the heroine who loves him but who may yet become his next victim; the phantasmagoric nocturnal London that will reappear in Sabotage and Frenzy; the bravura set-piece sequences and a thirst for technical innovation (here it’s a glass ceiling through which we see from below the neurotic lodger relentlessly pacing his room); the first Hitchcock cameo appearance (two, in fact), and the familiar haze of sexual obsession that would overhang his career like another kind of fog.
Ivor Novello – the epicene, ivory-skinned idol of the 20s who is easily the most beautiful object in the film, takes a room with a family whose flaxen-haired daughter Daisy is being courted by a detective hunting the Avenger, a serial murderer of blondes. The lodger keeps odd hours, acts very secretively, and his first request is that all the portraits of blondes lining the walls of his garret be removed immediately. Daisy and he become enamoured of one another exactly as her parents’ paranoia and suspicion reach fever pitch, while the detective’s jealousy clouds his vision, and everything culminates in a mad pursuit of the lodger by an angry drunken crowd bent on rough justice.
Along with Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train, it’s one of Hitchcock’s most deeply Germanic movies. Hitch had made one feature at UFA in Berlin already, and observed Murnau and Lang at work while there. One might even argue that Lang’s big city sex-crime melodrama M is indebted to The Lodger’s baleful and pessimistic vision.
