In 1913 English author Mari Belloc Lowndes published her bestselling novel The Lodger, inspired heavily by the crimes of Jack the Ripper. It’s arguably the first piece of published fiction to be directly inspired by The Whitechapel Murders, so it’s interesting that it focuses more on the psychological effects of the murders on her characters rather than the killings themselves. I’ve only skimmed the book so I can’t say for certain, but I’m pretty sure that all of the violence is kept off-page, as it were, referred to by the characters rather than directly described. It focuses on a married couple, the Buntings, suspecting that their new lodger, Mr. Sleuth, is a mysterious serial killer of women calling himself The Avenger. While never stated outright it’s heavily implied by the novel’s end that the titular lodger was indeed the murderer, although it’s never confirmed.
Before Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 version it had already been adapted into the play ‘Who is He?’ by Horace Annesley Vachel, a performance of which Hitchcock reportedly attended in 1915. A 1932 sound adaptation (starring the same lead as this one) changed the ending of the book to reveal the killer as the lodger’s brother. In a 1944 version, simply called ‘The Lodger’ with no fog mentioned, the titular character is confirmed to be the killer but escapes the grasp of the police by throwing himself out of a window to his death. There was also an American film released in 1953 starring Jack Palance as the suspicious gentleman, more or less keeping the changes from the 1944 update. In 1965 the ITV anthology program “Armchair Mystery Theatre” broadcast its adaptation, and in 1967 a German TV movie entitled ‘Der Mieter’ was aired. There was even an update in 2009 with Alfred Molina, Hope Davis, and Simon Baker which moved the setting to modern day Hollywood.
Hitchcock himself remained interested in the material for many years. It was adapted several times for his radio series ‘Suspense,’ including the very first episode in 1940 which actually kept the novel’s ambiguous ending, and then again in a 1948 episode entitled ‘The Black Curtain’ starring Robert Montgomery. In 1942 it was stated in the trades that Hitchcock wanted to do a new sound and color adaptation of the film but was unable to secure the rights.
This is the first film Hitchcock made that he later considered to be worth anything. It was the third film he ever directed, having made ‘The Pleasure Garden’ in 1925 and ‘The Mountain Eagle’ in 1926, the latter of which has been lost to time. Production took six weeks, which was considered notable at the time, the long shoot blamed on Hitchcock’s interest in the contemporary German Expressionist film movement which necessitated much more time to set up shots and lighting than the nascent British picture industry was used to. It was his first thriller and first commercial success. It’s also the first time on record that he arguably abused one of his female stars, Daisy actor June Tripp blaming his insistence on repeated takes for aggravating a previous surgery and requiring a return to the hospital.
The actors run a fairly interesting gamut. The couple renting the lodgings are only credited as The Landlady and Her Husband, played respectively by Marie Ault and Arther Chesney. Ault was a prolific character actor, her career stretching from 1921 to 1951, and Chesney had been a stage actor for many years before the film industry even existed and kept acting until his death in 1949. The character of Joe, the rather thankless role of both suspicious police detective and jilted fiance of the female lead in a nice bit of plot compression, was played by Malcolm Keen. Keen started acting on stage in 1902 then transitioned to films in 1916 and played many roles before retiring in the early 1960’s. Daisy, the daughter of the Landlady and Her Husband and the Lodger’s love interest slash potential victim, was the aforementioned June Tripp, credited under the stage name of just June. She only starred in a handful of films before her retirement in 1951, having married a department store heir in 1937 and apparently deciding to just enjoy herself.
The ostensible star of the movie and the titular Lodger himself was played by Ivor Novello, a name possibly still familiar to a British audience but almost certainly completely unknown to an American one. Born in 1893, he would go on to be a stage and film actor, a lauded composer and songwriter, and one of the biggest stars of the early years of British cinema. He first rose to prominence in 1914 by composing the patriotic song “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” a British anthem during the First World War. He contributed songs to a number of successful stage revues and eventually started writing his own, such as “Symphony in Two Flats” and “Glamorous Nights.” He was a contemporary of and a friend to Noel Coward and the corresponding social set and has been stated by some to be one of the preeminent British entertainers of the twentieth century. He also had an intensely brooding air about him in addition to his very good looks, having been cast in his first film role in 1920 based soley on a publicity photo. As openly gay as one was allowed to be at the time, he remained vital in the industry until his sudden death from coronary thrombosis at the age of 58. He’s remembered by The Ivor Novello Awards, established in 1955 (and still running) to honor the best in British songwriting and composing.
The only problem with casting Novello as the titular Lodger was that it was quickly determined that such a big star would have to be shown as innocent of the crimes by the end of the film, so the producers mandated to Hitchcock that there would have to be a happy ending which showed his character as fully exonerated. While he reportedly bristled under the mandate Hitchcock did comply, and although I watched the movie after having this production fact already spoiled for me I don’t think the movie ever really tries to paint his character as particularly suspicious. I haven’t done the research but all of this had to have influenced the production and ending of 1941’s ‘Suspicion.’
Before getting into the film itself I have a confession to make: apparently I don’t like silent films. I’m able to intellectually admire them for their imagery and ability to convey character and meaning through physical acting and film language, but in the end I prefer my characters to be able to speak with their words. At no point during the movie was I lost or having trouble with a character’s motivations, but I often interpreted the broad acting as mugging and the interpersonal interactions as arbitrary when I didn’t have access to any of the conversations these people were silently having. I’m more than willing to chalk it up to a fault within myself.
The movie opens very directly: we open to a flashing sign in lights announcing ‘To – Night “Golden Curls.”’ Cut to a crumpled dead woman in the street, then to an old lady giving witness testimony to an English bobby taking down her statement while a reporter stands next to him making just as many notes. The camera makes a point of showing a piece of paper on the body with block letters reading The Avenger, surrounded by a drawn triangle. Soon the officer takes the lady to get her a calming drink while the reporter rushes off to a phone booth to call the story in. They leave the lady lying there unattended, completely swarmed by the curious public. We then get a set of newspaper headlines stating that this is the seventh victim of the killer known as, guess what, The Avenger, and that all of the victims have been young blonde women killed on subsequent Tuesdays.
We then cut backstage at a fashion show where we meet Daisy, one of the models. In the opening credits the character is listed as being ‘a mannequin,’ which apparently was an old-timey term for fashion model. Many future adaptations would change these to be brothel workers, but that didn’t exactly fly in 1927. Daisy is blonde and upbeat and seems like a perfectly nice person. She hurries home where her parents are entertaining her boyfriend, Joe, a police detective. They joke around in the kitchen when the gas lights go out, and while the father is getting them relit there’s a knock on the door.
Our eponymous Lodger thus enters the house under cover of darkness, dressed in a black coat with a scarf wrapped around his lower face, matching the description of the killer given by the witness. He inquires after the ad in the window offering a room for rent, and after the lights go back on the mother is happy to walk him up to show him. At this point I got very confused about the class status of the family, because everything up to that point made me think working poor but it’s now revealed they live in a three story house where the room for rent is in fact two massive rooms, a bedroom and a parlor with a working fireplace.
There’s also ample furniture, a chess set, and numerous paintings hanging on the walls. Of course the lodger says he’ll take the place and nonchalantly pays an entire month in advance. His first request is to get rid of the paintings. They’re all portrait of young women with blonde hair, which is supposed to make us suspicious of him but made me wonder where the family got them all and why so many. Also removing the paintings reveals clear spots showing how soot-stained the rest of the walls are, which I guess is what you get when a society has been smoking non-stop for several hundred years. Daisy is instructed to go upstairs and take down the paintings, and from the moment she and the Lodger lock eyes the rest of the story becomes fairly predictable. The family’s first moment of unease happens when they’re all back downstairs in the kitchen, listening to him pace back and forth above their heads. Hitchcock has a neat little effect where he has a shot upwards at the kitchen ceiling showing the swaying chandelier which fades into an upward view of the Lodger pacing on a glass floor.
Of course Daisy and the Lodger start spending time together, flirting over chess games, making eyes in the hallway, that sort of thing. Joe starts growing slowly disgruntled by the stranger’s attentions to his girl. We’re shown the Lodger doing supposedly suspicious things, like hiding a bag in a locked drawer and carelessly leaving money out, but nothing overt until late at night during the first Tuesday after he moves in. The Husband is out working late and Daisy seems to be at her jb as well so it’s just the Landlady who hears the Lodger stealthily slip out of the house at night. She takes the opportunity to snoop around his room and doesn’t find anything except the locked drawer, which she seems to think is suspicious in and of itself. While she’s doing that we’re shown a quick scene of the killer striking again. The Lodger returns around midnight and the Landlady worriedly goes back to sleep.
The next morning Joe, having been earlier assigned to the Avenger task force and forcefully bragging about how easy the madman was going to be to catch, is in a foul mood. It’s immediately made worse when they hear Daisy scream from upstairs. They burst into the Lodger’s room to find her laughing in his arms, apparently spooked by a mouse. This causes Joe to confront him and for the Lodger to demand he leave his quarters. He angrily tells The Landlady that is he’s interrupted like that again he’ll be moving out. Downstairs The Landlady finally brings up his absence the previous night to her husband, and they both grown fearful of their upstairs neighbor, vowing never to leave Daisy alone with him. There’s also the first scene that actually ties the Lodger directly to the murders: Joe is shown at police headquarters marking a map with the locations of the all the killings. He says it shows steady movement in one direction, allowing them to estimate where he’ll strike next. We then cut to another map in the possession of the Lodger with those same map locations marked.
The next night the Lodger attends one of Daisy’s fashion shows. They flirt across the room at each other. The morning after a package arrives for her at the house, containing the dress she’d been wearing. She’s delighted, but when her parent find out who the gift is from the husband instantly packs it back up and then haltingly takes it upstairs. He returns it to the Lodger, shakily saying that they don’t allow their daughter to receive gifts from strangers. Later on the Lodger talks to Daisy through a bathroom door to confirm that she at least didn’t mind, and their flirtation continues.
On what must be the next Tuesday, considering what happens, Daisy and the Lodger are both headed out of the house when they run into each other in the foyer. They decide to spend a little time together outside. When The Landlady notices that Daisy isn’t in the house she wails to her husband that the two of them went out together. The couple embrace under a streetlight, which is where Joe catches them during his patrol for the Avenger. He confronts the Lodger, only for Daisy to make it clear she’s tired of him and loves this guy now. They stomp away and Joe sinks to the bench under the streetlight, head in hands. He stares at a shoe print left by the Lodger when he suddenly sees within it a montage of previous scenes including the Lodger and Daisy embracing, the swinging kitchen chandelier, and the only bit of relevant information, the way he didn’t like the paintings of blonde women in his room. I’d spent the previously forty minutes waiting for The Landlady to tattle on him to the police in order to set up the film’s climax but apparently Joe just magically came to the exact same suspicion on his own.
The Lodger and Daisy return to the house and make with the smooches up in his room, her parents crouched fearfully downstairs, until Joe shows up with backup and a warrant. They search his quarters, forcing him to open the locked drawer to reveal a satchel containing a gun, the map, newspaper clippings of the murders, and a portrait of a young blonde woman. The Lodger collapses at the sight of it, and after Joe snarls that it must be his first victim he turns to Daisy and tearfully admits it’s his sister. He’s arrested and marched down the stairs in handcuffs. The Landlady collapses and in the confusion the Lodger mutters to Daisy to meet him by the streetlight then runs off into the suddenly foggy night (this is the only time I recall seeing any fog in the entire film). The police run after him and Daisy runs after them.
Daisy and The Lodger meet at the streetlight and he tearfully fills her in on his backstory. He and his sister were dancing at her coming out ball when the lights suddenly went out. When they came back up she was lying murdered in the middle of the floor with a note from The Avenger. The shock was terrible for their mother’s health and she made him swear to her on her deathbed that he would seek justice for his sister. He agreed and she died. He says he noticed the pattern of the killings and sought out their flat in an attempt to get ahead of the madman, thus the map and gun.
She decides he’s in shock and that the smart thing for them to do would be to go into a bar to get him a drink. She drapes a coat over his shoulders to hide the fact that he’s in handcuffs and walks him into a busy pub. She buys him a drink and has to hold it to his lips, which seems to disturb everyone at the bar. It seems to me that a late night pub in 1927 wouldn’t really give a shit, but I guess I wasn’t there. They leave and mere moments later Joe and the police thunder in, asking if they’ve seen anyone in handcuffs as it’s totally The Avenger. Everyone instantly realizes the Lodger must be the guy and pile out into the night after him. Joe stays back to ring headquarters only to find that another patrol caught the real killer in the act less than ten minutes ago.
To his credit Joe is horrified that he arrested the wrong man and, judging from the mood of the pub-goers, might have just gotten him killed. He rushes out of the bar to save him. We cut to the Lodger fleeing in the night from what suddenly seems like a couple hundred people. He eventually tries to climb over an iron fence but catches his cuffs on a decorative spike. He’s trapped as the crowd starts to pummel him while Daisy silently wails that he’s innocent. In a few moments the police are there and attempt to beat back the mob, but it’s a late edition of the paper stating that The Avenger is in custody that calms the crowd down and lets them rescue the improbably still-alive Lodger. It’s been maybe twenty minutes since the killer was caught, that’s some fast newspaper printing.
We next see a hospital where a worried Daisy is at the Lodger’s bedside. A doctor briefly says he’ll be totally fine before we then cut to the interior of a stately manor, where Daisy and her nervous parents are waiting. The Lodger, all smiles and sharp suits now that he’s back to being rich and not grieving, sweeps down and embraces Daisy. He doesn’t seem at all resentful towards her parents, even after they flinch at hearing his footsteps then laugh as if it’s actually funny that they thought he was a serial killer. The parents make themselves at home on the fancy furniture while the Lodger and Daisy move away to a window to smooch in front of, though which we see a nice view of the city and also that flashing sign from the beginning advertising ‘To – Night “Golden Curls.”’ I’ve wracked and wracked my brain and I’m just not sure if that means anything.
I was originally flabbergasted that we didn’t see the capture of The Avenger on screen, or get any kind of explanation for who he was or why he was killing. Aside from the two flashes of murder we were shown (and mainly it was just women screaming towards the camera lens) the movie was about another group of people that wasn’t involved at all. The only policeman we actually met wasn’t even part of the arrest. When I rolled it around later it did make more sense because the movie isn’t about the killings at all, it’s about the effect that paranoia can have on otherwise decent people. The Landlady and Her Husband turn completely against their guest based on nothing more than him leaving the house one night and pacing a bit loudly overhead. It’s implied at least that Joe suspects The Lodger because he’s jealous over Daisy. The instant mob that developed at the end is perfectly happy to beat a man to death just because someone heard he might be guilty. I can see why the story was of interest to Hitchcock with his lifelong fascination for wrongly-accused men.
Hitchcock was only twenty-eight when he directed ‘The Lodger,’ which lines up nicely with my final impression of the film as an early sketch of what the director would go on to make. There were themes and images that are absolutely of a piece of later movies such as ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much,’ ‘Notorious,’ and even ‘Psycho.’ Dialogue would only give him another tool with which to build suspense, and with higher budgets and larger crews his ability to create tension would only increase. I’m not sure how highly I regard the film itself but I’m glad I saw it. It’ll be useful to be able to watch later Hitchcock films and be able to use this one to judge his creative growth against.
No comments:
Post a Comment