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Every great career starts somewhere. In the case of Alfred Hitchcock, his directorial career started with a couple of romances. He really came into his own with The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog (hereafter referred to as simply The Lodger), the first of his movies to take a deep dive into suspense. The Lodger is a silent, but even here there are the clear beginnings in what would eventually be many of Hitchcock’s signature themes and ideas—mistaken identity, murder, and obsession with blondes, just for starters.
The Lodger is very clearly a riff on Jack the Ripper, as is evident from the opening scene when a young woman is murdered. As we will discover, the young woman is the seventh victim of a serial killer known as “The Avenger” based on a calling card the murderer leaves at the scene of the crime. The killer acts every Tuesday night, and only kills young, blonde women.
One such young, blonde woman is Daisy Bunting (June Tripp), who works as a fashion model and show girl. Many of her blonde coworkers have taken to dark wigs or hats to prevent themselves them from being a potential victim. Daisy, because she is our central character in many ways, is naturally going to be more emboldened, at least in part because her cop boyfriend Joe (Malcolm Keen) lives with her family, who run a boarding house, and because Joe has recently been put on the Avenger case. And because it’s a boarding house, we’re going to get a new tenant, a man named Jonathan Drew (Ivor Novello).
Drew immediately becomes suspicious for a number of reasons, piquing the interest of Daisy’s mother (Marie Ault). His room holds a number of pictures of blonde women, which he turns to the wall and wants removed. Mrs. Bunting is awakened when she hears Drew leaving the house the next Tuesday night and she searches his room, but finds a locked cabinet…and of course there’s another body discovered, this time very near their house.
So what’s going to drive the meat of the film are the suspicions regarding Jonathan Drew. Are they real suspicions of him being the Avenger? Or is it the fact that Daisy seems to be attracted to him despite (or perhaps because of) the danger to the point where she breaks up with Joe over his suspicions. When the police search Drew’s room and discover a map of the different Avenger murders and what seems to be an obsession with the first victim, Joe’s accusations seem confirmed, but is there more going on?
The Lodger isn’t Hitchcock’s first film nor his first feature-length film, but it is very early in his career and while not rudimentary in any way, is a bit unpolished in some respects, which is only to be expected. Film was still a relatively new medium in the late 1920s in some respects and audiences were still learning how to interpret what was being shown on film, and Hitchcock himself was only in his 20s when making this.
Regardless of this, there are some indications of what would become Hitchcock’s signature style—use of camera angles, for instance, and control of what the audience is able to see in any frame to tell the story specifically as he wants it told. There are also many of his eventual themes that are going to play a major part in The Lodger, things that become near obsessions with him in terms of plotting through the next 40 or so years of his career. The Lodger is centered around the idea of identity, both mistaken and not, an idea that Hitchcock never really stopped playing with in one way or another. Hitchcock loved to experiment with how the audience perceives the story and the people involved as well, and The Lodger is nothing without that plot point—the entire film rides on how we see Daisy, Joe, and especially Jonathan Drew.
Is this great Hitchcock? Not really. It is, though, very good Hitchcock, the kind of film that shows you the talent that was nascent and aching to get out. There are moments of real tension and real suspense here that still work nearly 100 years after it was created. It’s worth seeing for that reason if no other, like seeing an early Picasso, but the story is a good one as well, and even made by a lesser director, there’s a good chance that it would be worth seeing on those merits, too.
Why to watch The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog: It’s arguably Hitchcock’s first thriller and first foray into many of his themes.
Why not to watch: Silent dramas can take a lot of work to watch.
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