The Lodger

The Lodger begins with a close-up of a woman screaming. A killer known as “The Avenger” is stalking London, preying on blonde women. Meanwhile, a young man, Jonathan Drew (Ivor Novello) takes lodgings at the house of Mr and Mrs Bunting (Arthur Chesney and Marie Ault), and becomes friendly with their daughter Daisy (June) whose policeman boyfriend Joe (Malcolm Keen) has been assigned to the Avenger case. However, soon suspicion falls on Jonathan – could he be the murderer?

By 1927, Hitchcock had directed two feature films. The first, The Pleasure Garden, is included in this DVD box set and reviewed separately. The second, The Mountain Eagle, has been lost since the late 1920s – something Hitchcock himself did not regret as he thought the film was “awful”. The Lodger, based on a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, did not begin auspiciously. There was some bad feeling towards the young Hitchcock from others at Gainsborough Pictures, and the finished film did not find favour with the company. However, they had invested money in the film, so decided they had to release it. The result was a hit, and critics acclaimed it as the best British film to date. Hitchcock later went on to say that it was his real first film. Of his nine silents, The Lodger is the one most often screened, and it’s easy to see why as it’s the closest to the suspense genre that Hitchcock was to make his own. What struck people at the time was the film’s atmosphere, largely derived from German expressionism, and some innovative Hitchcock touches. Most famous is the scene where Jonathan paces back and forth in his room – something not so easy to convey in a silent film, but Hitchcock managed it by shooting up through an inch-thick pane of glass.

The film’s star was Ivor Novello, best known as a singer and composer, but with his good looks a film star as well. Hitchcock does his best to create ambiguity about Jonatham Drew, but given the dictates of the box office the character’s innocence is not really in doubt. Hitchcock would use Novello again in his next film, Downhill. Novello, who unlike many silent stars had a fine speaking voice, remade The Lodger in 1932 with Britain’s most prolific director, Maurice Elvey.

This was Hitchcock’s third and last collaboration with the Italian DP Baron Ventimiglia. The screenplay was by Eliot Stannard, who wrote or co-wrote all of Hitchcock’s silents except The Ring. The assistant director was Alma Reville, by now Hitchcock’s wife. Another tradition began here, too: in the newspaper office, Hitchcock makes a brief appearance, seated and facing away from the camera. (There’s some dispute as to whether he makes a second appearance in a crowd towards the end.) These directorial cameos became a trademark.

The Lodger is historically important to both British cinema and Hitchcock’s career. In it you can see many of his preoccupations and style in an early form and – given an audience sympathetic to silents – it still plays well today.

The DVD

The Lodger forms part of Network’s ten-film Hitchcock: The British Years box set and is not available separately. It is presented on a dual-layered disc encoded for Regions 2 and 4.

There are two versions of the film on this DVD, both in the original ratio of 1.33:1. The one accessible from the main menu is a restored print, running at 90:11. This is tinted according to the usual convention of yellow for interiors, blue for exteriors. Picture quality is inevitably somewhat soft, but a bigger problem I had with this version is that it has no soundtrack at all. (I’ll return to this in a moment.) Among the extras is the version held by the National Film Archive – indeed, it begins with that organisation’s logo. This copy, also tinted, is generally sharper but shows more signs of damage and is of course incomplete. Both seem to be running at approximately the right speed though. Screengrabs follow, restored version first, then the archive version.




The archive print does have a music score, in Dolby Digital 2.0 mono. The lack of one on the restored version seems perverse: I’d imagine many people – myself included – would find it hard to concentrate on a completely silent film for an hour and a half in a domestic environment. The film would have been shown anywhere with a musical accompaniment, even if there wasn’t one especially composed for the film, as was the case with most silents, so it seems a misguided kind of purism not to include one. The audio rating only escapes a zero because of the presence of a soundtrack on the archive version.

Charles Barr’s introduction (3:11) concentrates on Alma Reville’s contribution to Hitchcock’s early work. A twenty-five second image gallery comprises seven black and white stills and the main title card.

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