The Lodger (1927)

 

 

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I am a relative newcomer to silent films, so I can not pontificate on all of the nuances and wonderful subtleties The Lodger surely showcases. I can say that I enjoyed this film very much; the story retained its vigor throughout, and some of my preconceived notions regarding the conclusion were proven quite wrong. The Lodger bears the unmistakable influence of the Jack the Ripper murders. A number of fair-haired young ladies have been murdered on successive Tuesday nights in London, and the police basically have no clue as to the killer's identity. On the heels of the sixth murder, a stranger comes seeking a room at the lodging house of an elderly couple. The woman is put ill at ease immediately, and who could blame her? The mysterious lodger makes his appearance standing at the door with a scarf covering the lower part of his face, looking amazingly just like Bela Lugosi would look several years later when he made his grand entrance in Dracula. He's a little strange, taking down all the pictures of fair-haired girls in his room, but the kindly old woman's suspicions are raised significantly when she witnesses her strange boarder sneaking out for a half hour on the next Tuesday night, returning just after a fresh murder had been committed down the street. The couple worries about their daughter Daisy, who has taken a definite shine to the strange young man (to the chagrin of her traditional suitor, who happens to be a detective assigned to the serial killer hunt). Determined to keep Daisy away from possible danger, her parents nevertheless manage to let her go out with the lodger the next Tuesday night, and this serves as the setup for the culminating scenes wherein Daisy's long-time suitor/detective accuses the stranger of being the wanted serial killer known as The Avenger.

It is something of a strange experience to watch a silent movie. I always wonder what the actors are actually saying; they talk up a storm, yet we are shown only scattered fragments of their conversations. The actors all play their roles to great excess, seemingly overemphasizing their expressions to help make up for the lack of actual dialogue. Sometimes their faces are completely bleached out as the quality of the picture varies. Frankly, I had not even thought about Alfred Hitchcock having made silent movies early in his career, but The Lodger, his third silent film (although Hitchcock essentially chose not to count the first two), displays the genius Hitchcock would become famous for. There are several scenes that seemed quite impressive for a film made in 1926: early on, there is an interesting montage of faces blending from one to another; in one scene, the camera pans up and we see the ceiling disappear to show us the pacing strides of the lodger up above; and toward the end we witness a series of images pan across the ground as a character looks down in deep thought.

I was quite impressed by The Lodger. The basic story is clearly delineated despite the lack of dialogue, the direction is masterful, and the ending is in no way anticlimactic. I admit I sometimes found myself making up dialogue for the actors and actresses, but by the midway point I was so absorbed in the story that I forgot about it being a silent movie and just sat back and let myself become absorbed in the growing drama. If you are going to watch a silent movie, Hitchcock's The Lodger is more than worthy of your consideration.

Hitchcock's ``The Lodger'' is a marvelous study in the obsessive behavior that lies latent in all of us, and sometimes boils up to the surface with disastrous results. The killer himself (note the nickname and the triangles) is clearly obsessed by something, though we never learn completely what. The lodger himself, the first victim's brother, is so dead-set on ``avenging'' his sister that he becomes a parody of the killer. The detective loses control of himself when his desire to catch the killer blends in with his anger over losing his girl to the lodger. And the crowd at the end - good people, but turned into ravenous wolves by their lust for the killer's blood as the lodger dangles Christlike between life and death. All in all, it's a profound, disturbing and thought-provoking film.

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