Hitchcock’s British Films

The Lodger (1926)

Despite the expertise of at least The Pleasure Garden and perhaps The Mountain Eagle too, it is The Lodger that most—including Hitchcock—consider the first characteristically Hitchcock film.1 Certainly the director’s lighting and editing effects have richened. More to the point: in The Lodger Hitchcock works for the first time in the suspense genre for which he grew famous. Reportedly, Hitchcock had some problems with The Lodger, to the point that Ivor Montagu was given the print for polishing. Montagu recut some sequences, possibly had Hitchcock reshoot others, commissioned poster artist E. McKnight Kauffer to design the titles, and trimmed the volume of titles down to a total of eighty, low for the time. Particularly in light of Hitchcock’s later development, however, one still must consider The Lodger a Hitchcock film. Happily, neither the critics nor the paying public shared the distributor’s reservations about the film. The Lodger was Hitchcock’s first booming success. “It is possible that this film is the finest British production ever made,” enthused Bioscope (September 16, 1926) in a typical reaction. The plot is based on Marie Belloc Lowndes’s novel The Lodger about a Jack the Ripper figure, who in the novel and in the film goes about murdering blonde ladies on and off the streets and leaving a calling The Lodger 1926 21 The Lodger card as “The Avenger.”2 In the novel the mysterious lodger turns out to be the murderer, but in the film the lodger is innocent. He is the victim of the suspicions of the detective, the landlady, indeed, of the entire cinema audience. The suspense, shock, and romantic elements subserve the movie’s central theme: the deceptiveness of appearances, the injustice of judging by the senses alone. To the quiet Bloomsbury household of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting (Arthur Chesney and Marie Ault) comes the mysterious lodger, Jonathan Drew (Ivor Novello). He seems like a nice, albeit strange, fellow, but the city is in a panic over the Avenger’s murders of blonde ladies, moving closer to the Buntings’ neighborhood. When Drew begins to date the Bunting girl, Daisy (June), her parents’ suspicions are bolstered by those of Daisy’s boyfriend, policeman Joe (Malcolm Keen). Drew’s hidden valise reveals a mass of incriminating material—a gun, a map, and clippings about the Avenger’s murders. Joe has Drew arrested but he escapes, handcuffs and all, and meets Daisy. The police alert alarms the community, who chase Drew until they trap him by his cuffs on a picket fence. Meanwhile, Joe learns that the real Avenger has been caught red-handed elsewhere. He saves his rival, Drew, from the mob. Drew explains that he has himself been tracking down the Avenger, having promised his mother to avenge the Avenger’s murder of his sister. The film closes with Drew and Daisy together in his posh quarters , the Buntings sidling off in deference and tact. Before we meet the central characters, we get a graphic survey of the panic that the Avenger’s murders have caused London. Neither novel nor film is concerned with the psychology of either the murderer or the lodger.3 Mrs. Lowndes’s novel focuses on the psychology of Mrs. Bunting, the landlady, as she drifts into a sentimental complicity with the killer, finally allowing him freedom to pursue his murders elsewhere. Hitchcock subjects his audience to the test Mrs. Bunting faced (and morally failed). He so rigs the evidence against the innocent man that the audience misjudges him and commits the double error of presuming the innocent man guilty and siding with him nonetheless. All of Hitchcock’s bravura technical devices in the film serve this function, to trick the audience into a judgment on circumstantial evidence. So the film dramatizes the variety of ways in which one’s Hitchcock’s British Films 22 perception can mislead one’s judgment. The first shot is a neon sign flashing “Tonight Golden Curls” that promises us a story about blondes, expresses the Avenger’s monomania, and promises young ladies a more glamorous life. At the end of the film, Drew and Daisy kiss by the window where, just within our vision on the left, the same advertisement flashes again. What filled our vision at the beginning is now a peripheral detail. The lovers have risen above the Avenger and his victims, his obsession and their trivialities, and the camera cuts out the sign altogether by moving in on the lovers. The sign...