Alfred Hitchcock (1927)
One of the ‘Hitchcock 9’ being restored through the BFI project, and Hitchcock’s first thriller. We saw it at the Barbican with Nitin Sawhney, who has written a score for the film, conducting the LSO and his own band. The combination of the live music and the venerable movie was very enjoyable. Sawhney’s score is obviously influenced by the Bernard Herrmann music for Psycho – and perhaps by other scores for Hitchcock films – but it has a real life of its own. Humorous and dramatic, the score’s dynamism never tries to compete with what’s on screen: it’s always supporting the images. (The only things that don’t work are the vocalised bits, which are incongruously anachronistic; fortunately, they’re only occasional too.) The Lodger itself is Hitchcock at his inventively entertaining best. The plot of the film – with a screenplay by Eliot Stannard, adapted from a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes – is simple enough. A serial killer – ‘the Avenger’ – is on the loose in London; every Tuesday night, he murders another blonde-haired girl. A middle-aged couple, the Buntings, have a lodger, a policeman called Joe. He’s on the trail of the Avenger; he’s also in love with the couple’s blonde daughter, fashion model Daisy. Shortly after the latest murder, a stranger arrives late at night at the Buntings’ front door, and asks if there’s a room to let. (There is.) When Mrs Bunting opens the door to him, the lower part of the man’s face is covered by a scarf – just like the face of the Avenger, according to a terrified woman witness who got a glimpse of him leaving the scene of his most recent crime. While Daisy takes a shine to the handsome new tenant, Joe is increasingly suspicious of him (for personal as well as professional reasons, of course). It doesn’t take long for Daisy’s parents to turn suspicious too.
Thirty years later, Hitchcock made The Wrong Man and The Lodger is the first of several of his movies that had that theme: the mysterious lodger[1] turns out not to be the Avenger. In fact he’s on the trail of the killer, whose first victim was the lodger’s sister: he promised his dying mother he would find the man who destroyed their happy family. I was taken in and assumed through most of the film that the lodger was the murderer; when Joe and his colleagues arrest him but Daisy stays loyal, I thought the film was turning into something subversive, a feeling reinforced by the flashback to the lodger’s mother’s deathbed. Here we see a dutiful son vowing to avenge the grievous wrong done to the family yet, I assumed, responsible for that wrong – killing his sister and deceiving his mother for evermore. I found the revelation of the lodger’s innocence disappointing and the denouement anti-climactic at first – not least because the apprehending of the real Avenger happens off screen and is merely reported. Yet this ending – with the lodger and Daisy set to live happy ever after, and jealous Joe written out of proceedings – means The Lodger is, in retrospect, a much stronger film about suspicion (and a much better film than Suspicion) than I’d realised for most of the time I was watching it. Hitchcock also demonstrates how a public appetite for lurid crime can turn people into a mob of avengers: the sequence in which a crowd turns on the lodger, although it’s a little protracted, is frightening.
Getting the wrong end of the stick means that I may also have been looking at Ivor Novello, who plays the lodger, in the wrong way. I loved Hitchcock’s scene-setting: the flashing neon repeatedly announcing a theatre show called ‘Golden Curls’ (there’s a beautifully witty reprise of this at the end); the pub regulars revelling in the latest Avenger killing, making a joke out of it at the same time as they’re scared (and enjoying that fear); the news of the crime emerging word by word on a telegraph machine; the production and selling of the Evening Standard with a report on the murder; the vivid domestic routine at the Buntings’ home. When Novello appears on the scene, the tempo slows and, for me, the drama didn’t increase. He’s every inch a film star and not much of an actor – a complete contrast to the other principals whose busy theatricality I found appealing. I wished – I still do wish – that Novello could have been more believably homicidal but seeing him out of context, as people watching the film inevitably do today, is very different from the way audiences originally saw him in The Lodger. Novello was a well-established matinee idol by the mid-1920s. The disbelief that he could be a murderer would have delivered an element of suspense at the time – now the disbelief seems to derive purely from his acting limitations.
The situation is complicated by the fact that Malcolm Keen (Geoffrey Keen’s father), as policeman Joe, uses his beady eyes in a way that makes him seem a superficially more likely culprit than the lodger. (Sally thought Keen gave a music hall performance and he’s certainly made up as if he’s going to deliver a stage routine – as Sally also said, he calls to mind Olivier’s Archie Rice.) I enjoyed Keen’s performance even so – Marie Ault and Arthur Chesney as the Buntings and the very pretty June Tripp as Daisy are all excellent too. The family live in a surprisingly large house (it’s not surprising they need to take in lodgers to pay for its upkeep). You’re especially conscious of this when Mrs Bunting spends a sleepless night as the lodger comes and goes and his landlady frets beneath the Caligari-like shadows of her vast bedroom. The richly expressive lighting by Gaetano di Ventimiglia is seen to full advantage in this restoration and the film includes some splendidly showy Hitchcock touches: the lodger’s feet pacing up and down his room and visible to Joe and the Buntings below in what has temporarily become a see-through ceiling; the eye-like windows at the back of a van carrying newspapers onto the London streets.
21 July 2012
[1] He’s unnamed throughout the film but the cast list on Wikipedia calls him Jonathan Drew.
