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Lodger, The (1926)
Casebook Message Boards: Ripper Media: Specific Titles:
Film / Movies (Fiction):
Lodger, The (1926)
Author: Ryan Edwards
Thursday, 19 November 1998 - 08:50 pm |        | The Lodger (Silent)
Alfred Hitchcock, 1926
The Lodger is perhaps the greatest silent movie of all time, displaying some of Hitchcocks finest touches, take for example the back of the news truck. Sheer excellence. 10/10 |
Author: Cindy Collins Smith
Monday, 20 January 2003 - 11:39 pm | | THE LODGER does indeed show great promise for the 27-year-old Alfred Hitchcock. But I would hesitate to say that it's "perhaps the greatest silent movie of all time." There are so many great silents, and Hitchcock himself matured as a filmmaker between THE LODGER (1926) and THE RING (1928).
Be that as it may, THE LODGER IS a fine film. It was Hitchcock's third movie, but his first film to make it out of the can and onto the screen. It caused an immediate sensation with the critics who screened it, and caused the young Hitchcock to become the most respected filmmaker in Great Britain.
A few interesting points:
Hitchcock had to change the ending from what's found in the Lowndes novel because the star, Ivor Novello, was a matinee idol. This is significant because it inadvertently introduced one of the primary themes in Hitchcock's subsequent film career. I won't say what the theme is because it's kind of a "spoiler" for this movie.
Hitchcock also made some changes to the character of "The Avenger" (a.k.a. The Ripper). In the Lowndes novel, the Avenger is targeting alcoholic women. (and ya know, so did the Ripper... though we don't know whether he targeted them because they were prostitutes, or because they were drunks, or because they were just easy prey). At any rate, in the Hitchcock movie, the killer is targeting blondes. If you know your Hitchcock, that's kind of significant because in his films he frequently kills off blondes or puts them in dangerous positions... so much so, that many people think Hitchcock had some sort of inner anger at blonde women.
A couple of years before shooting THE LODGER, Hitchcock had worked as Assistant Director on a British film shot at UFA in Germany. At the time, Murnau was filming THE LAST LAUGH and Lang was filming METROPOLIS. Hitchcock hung around with Murnau and learned from him "pure cinema"--i.e. the art of telling the story mainly through the use of screen imagery. In this regard, Hitchcock still had a lot to learn when he shot THE LODGER. He got more interested in trick shots and frame composition than in telling the story--largely because he wanted to create a buzz and eventually get control over his own pictures (something he finally achieved in the early 1940s, shortly after coming to the U.S.). Years later, though, he saw his focus on trick shots as evidence of his immaturity as a filmmaker.
Well, I could go on rather long about this movie. I wrote a chapter on it for an unreleased book on Alfred Hitchcock. So I have a lot of cool trivia about it. But I won't spill it all out at once!
At any rate, it's an excellent example of an early Ripper movie. I don't know about the earlier LULU films (which are buried in research archives), but I do know about WAXWORKS (1924). In that, the Ripper (or Spring-heeled Jack) segment has interesting imagery, but it's only about 5 minutes long. THE LODGER (1926) is certainly the earliest Ripper film I've seen which is also a fully realized piece of feature filmmaking. (And then there's Pabst's PANDORA'S BOX a couple years later... also excellent stuff). |
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