Out of the Fog

Alfred Hitchcock gave one of his most endlessly quoted remarks—“The Lodger was the first true ‘Hitchcock movie’ ”— in the interview sessions that produced François Truffaut’s invaluable book (Truffaut 43). It is quoted again in the title of film historian Henry K. Miller’s new study of Hitchcock’s early career, The First True Hitchcock, which is subtitled The Making of a Filmmaker, although the volume travels far beyond Hitchcock’s beginnings and the particulars of The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), the picture that set him on several of the paths he would follow forever after. Unlike that movie, with its multilayered but linear narrative arc, Miller’s book is fond of byways, detours, and excurses, tracing a route as varied and unpredictable as Roger O. Thornhill’s itinerary in North by Northwest. This contrasts with The Lodger itself: as Miller notes in his preface, “The distance between the studio where The Lodger was made and the cinema where it opened is about three and a half miles, and the scene of the action is laid, for the most part, between these two points” (ix‐x). Cinematically speaking, however, Hitchcock proved to be a king of infinite space on nearly all occasions, whether a story had the peripatetic range of The 39 Steps and Saboteur or the single-set inventiveness of Lifeboat or Rope, and the imaginative scope of The Lodger is emphatically larger than its relatively modest geographical reach. Similarly, while Miller’s volume is in many respects a “making of” book, the chapter called “The First True Hitchcock” doesn’t arrive until the reader has passed the halfway point. The aim is partly to scrutinize and analyze The Lodger and even more to place the film into an array of historical and cultural contexts. It succeeds on both counts.

The news that Hitchcock was embarking on his third directorial venture, following The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle, first broke in a 1925 column by journalist Walter Mycroft, who wrote that Hitchcock planned to adapt “a certain stage play,” this being Who Is He?, the 1915 comedy-drama by Horace Annesley Vachell based on Marie Belloc Lowndes’s 1913 novel The Lodger. Mycroft added that the movie would attempt two “definite but difficult” feats: certain scenes will be shot “in precisely that London fog which is supposed to be such a handicap to [English] film production, and it will be without sub-titles” (77). As things turned out, the finished film contained quite a few intertitles, despite Hitchcock’s admiration for the title-free storytelling of F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924). But fog was definitely a leading character in the picture, which was being anticipated with considerable interest, since the very young director was already “expected to do big things,” according to Mycroft’s account of the first day of photography—or rather the first night, since Mycroft expressed his surprise that “there was such a number of people with nothing to do at 2 a.m.” (2) but serve as unpaid extras for a crowd scene, surrounding a bevy of professional extras and four actors (one playing a corpse).

“The fog in which they were all enveloped . . . had to be simulated,” Miller reports, even though the shoot was happening “at the heart of a city synonymous with the stuff” (1‐2). In the sort of detail that often enlivens his book, we learn a little later that Famous Players-Lasky, the American company where Hitchcock had served a brief apprenticeship, developed a mechanism for suppressing the ever-present fog during the two years of its short-lived London operation, which ended when the studio realized that movies could be made pretty much anywhere, foggy or not, thanks to the growing reliability of artificial light. Plenty of that was also present as Hitchcock set to work in February 1926, equipped with six massive arc lights...