Alfred Hitchcock Collectors Guide: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1926)

by Brent Reid
  • In silents no one can hear you scream: Investigating the Master’s take on Jack the Ripper
  • The elusive maniac emerges from the shadows in one of his earliest big screen outings
  • Often mistakenly called the first “true” Hitchcock film and his first crime thriller
  • But it was actually built on the solid, crime-driven plots of his earlier works
  • However, it lays claim to his first MacGuffin and cameo, along with Alma’s

Note: this is part of an ongoing series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles; any dead links are to those not yet published. Subscribe to the email list to be notified when new ones appear.

The Lodger, Part 1: Production, 2: Dispelling myths, 3: Home video, 4: Remakes

The Lodger aka Der Schrecken von London (Terror of London, 1926, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) Austrian poster

Austrian poster: the title translates as “The Terror of London” (UK)


Contents


Synopsis and novel

From the twisted mind of Alfred Hitchcock comes one of his beloved early masterpieces. As a serial killer known as the avenger terrifies London by ruthlessly killing blonde girls, Jonathan arrives to lodge at the Bunting home. The Buntings’ pretty blonde daughter, Daisy, is engaged to Joe, a detective on the Avenger’s case, and when Joe becomes jealous of her interest in Jonathan, he accuses the lodger of being the killer.

My favourite Hitchcock: The Lodger – Andrew Pulver, The Guardian


The Lodger was Hitchcock’s third film as director (after The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle), but he often referred to it as “the first true Hitchcock movie.” It is not hard to see why. It was the first example in his career of a genre he was to dominate as no one else has ever done: the thriller. It introduced themes that would become perennial Hitchcockian favourites – most notably, the wrongfully-accused innocent hunted down by a vengeful and self-righteous society. The Lodger was also Hitchcock’s first big critical and box-office success, bringing his name before the public as one of Britain’s most promising young directors.

Yet The Lodger almost did not get released. The film aroused the antipathy of the distributor C. M. Woolf, financial mainstay of Gainsborough Studios, Hitchcock’s employers. Mistrustful of what he regarded as the young director’s German-influenced ‘artiness’, Woolf declared the film incomprehensible and unshowable. The studio head, Michael Balcon, who had more faith in Hitchcock, suggested calling in Ivor Montagu, a noted film theorist, to re-edit the movie. Montagu tactfully made a few small changes, chiefly speeding up the action by cutting the bulk of the intertitles. Thus modified, The Lodger was released to rave reviews. “It is possible,” wrote one critic, “that this is the finest British production ever made.”

Given the mediocre quality of most British movies of the period [sic], such praise may have been less extravagant than it seems. And, although The Lodger clearly foreshadows Hitchcock classics to come, it scarcely looks like a masterpiece. Much of the acting is too broad: Ivor Novello, in the lead, gives a stagy, mannered performance, dragging out his reaction shots interminably. Hitchcock himself later expressed dissatisfaction with the casting of Novello, not for his acting but because, as leading matinée idol of the day, he had to be shown to be innocent in the final reel. The story, from a popular novel by Mrs Belloc Lowndes, tells of a family taking in a mysterious lodger who may be a Ripper-style killer. Subsequent remakes, like John Brahm’s 1944 version, have followed the novel in making the lodger guilty; Hitchcock would have preferred an ambiguous ending, leaving us unsure of the truth.

Even so, Hitchcock invests his story with a strong flavour of moral ambiguity. The lodger, after all, may not be the serial killer he is suspected of being, but he does plan to kill. The heroine’s detective boyfriend – a forerunner of similarly ambivalent figures in Blackmail, Sabotage and Shadow of a Doubt – lets personal jealousy distort his zeal for justice, so eager is he to dispose of a rival in love. And Hitchcock’s view of the general public is cynically realistic – pruriently licking their lips over reports of the killings, yet transformed into a lynch mob, seething with moral indignation, when a suspect is fingered.

The Lodger (1913) by Marie Belloc Lowndes, ed. Elyssa Warkentin

Definitive annotated 2015 reprint, with two versions of the story

But the most intriguing aspect of The Lodger is seeing Hitchcock flexing his muscles, trying out techniques and making use of ideas picked up from his viewing of Russian and Hollywood films or from watching Murnau and Lang at work at the Ufa studios. Perhaps for the first time, an unmistakably cinematic eye was at work in British films. Devices like the ‘glass ceiling’ have become famous: as the family gazes anxiously upwards at the sound of their lodger pacing back and forth, the ceiling becomes transparent to reveal his restless feet. But equally impressive is the narrative economy of scenes like the initial montage of news distribution, as accounts of the latest killing are rushed into print or flashed over the ether. Hitchcock makes eloquent use of his sets, especially the key visual element of the staircase, and traces of the Germanic influence that so alarmed C. M. Woolf can be detected in the ominous camera angles and foggy, claustrophobic lighting.

The Lodger also introduced the first onscreen appearance by the director. Two, in fact: once early on in a newsroom, and later in a crowd on the Embankment [sic]. It seems this was not a planned feature: another extra was needed to swell a scene or two, and Hitchcock merely made up the number. But it marks the origin of what would become one of cinema’s most famous personal trademarks. – Philip Kemp/BFI/Criterion, UK BFI VHS (1999)


This video was made to commemorate the live US première of Neil Brand’s score for the restored version.

Hitch’s third feature outing is often falsely considered his first “real” film, but that’s mostly due to his actual first being all but unavailable, while the second is lost. His own pronouncements to that effect haven’t helped, while having sour grapes is more palatable for most than ruing the lack of his first two. Nonetheless, The Lodger is certainly an accomplished, gripping drama that easily holds aloft the high bar set by its older siblings. It was often, alongside Shadow of a Doubt and Rear Window, cited by the director as one of his favourite own films. Retitled The Case of Jonathan Drew in the US, like its shadowy, unseen antagonist, this film is a creature of the night: it takes place entirely after dark, either indoors under artificial light or outdoors in thick, all-enveloping fog. Those of a nervous disposition may wish to think twice before venturing further…

Spoilers ahead: This was the first of a handful of big screen adaptations of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ immensely popular and still highly readable, eponymous 1913 novel. Said book is based on the evil activities of Jack the Ripper and expanded from her original 1911 short story. Iconic actor-composer Ivor Novello stars here in the first of his two back-to-back Hitchcocks, prior to his fall from grace in Downhill. Without spoiling it too much, I’ll just say this dark tale of multiple murders continues Hitch’s most beloved theme of the Wrong Man, one he’d already explored in The Mountain Eagle. My much-missed friend and film buff Allan Fish (1973–2016) sums it up very succinctly.

The Lodger (1913) by Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1927 UK Readers Library Film Edition with artwork by Albert Morrow.

1927 UK Readers Library Film Edition with artwork by Albert Morrow but no photos from the film itself.

Book vs Film: The Lodger – FictionFan

Much-translated (German, Italian) and reprinted, especially as tie-ins for each of several screen remakes, Lowndes’ novel is in the public domain and freely available online at sites like Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. However, if you desire a physical copy, the definitive reprint edition is from 2015, edited by Victorian literature scholar Elyssa Warkentin. Among many contextual additions, it includes the little-known incipient version of the story. In 2018, she also published a collected volume of Lowndes’ rare short stories. Note that both are only available in hardback. The Lodger is a brilliant, acutely observed and superbly evocative read that’s much better than all its filmic offspring, including Hitch’s, and it’s easy to see why it’s become such an enduring classic.

Whilst on the subject of books, a quick aside: the Ripper’s unfortunate victims, like those of most serial killers, for too long have been denigrated or at best overlooked, due to society’s morbid obsession with such heinous crimes. Hitch’s film was one of the first of countless screen adaptations to memorialise the exploits of the Victorian psychopath, but finally, in this long overdue #MeToo age, the true stories of their actual lives, rather than just their grisly deaths, are being told:

An opera, Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel, débuted at the English National Opera in a welter of publicity in 2018 and returned for a second run early the following year. Time’s up.

The women killed by Jack the Ripper are finally having their stories told – Moya Crockett

The Lodger (1913) by Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1935 US Longman, Green and Co. photoplay edition

This 1935 US Photoplay edition, reprinted to coincide with The Phantom Fiend reissue, is also photo-free.


Production and release

Ivor Novello in The Lodger (1926, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) The Picturegoer magazine, May 1926

The Lodger may have been Hitch’s third completed feature but it was the second to get a wide release in the UK. It’s well documented that his initial cut was vetoed as being unreleasable by Gainsborough’s distributor, C.M. Woolf, just as he had similarly adjudged the director’s first two films. Michael Balcon, Hitch’s mentor and the head of Gainsborough Pictures, came to the young man’s rescue by hiring newbie filmmaker Ivor Montagu to work alongside Hitch on re-editing the film. Montagu’s suggestions were to remove many superfluous intertitles, tighten the editing and order reshoots.

To that end, the scenes featuring the first victim, the showgirl victim and the lodger’s mother were all added after the fact. Montagu also enlisted the help of expatriate American artist and graphic designer Edward McKnight Kauffer, who’s best known for creating hundreds of iconic posters for the London Underground and, later in his career, American Airlines. His striking title cards, clearly showing strong influences of Vorticism and Constructivism, came to define the look of The Lodger. Montagu helpfully detailed his contributions to the remedial work in his autobiography, as also recounted in a couple of excellent essays:

Among the many nuggets revealed by Montagu are that The Lodger’s repeated use of the single-word intertitle “Daisy” was inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s similar usage in increasingly entreating the female lead in The Gold Rush (1925). Further, he supplied the much more credible explanation than the one later offered by Hitch that his cameo was actually inspired by Chaplin’s brief and heavily disguised appearance as a porter in A Woman of Paris (1923). Hitch was hugely impressed by Chaplin’s auterism and sky high, marketable profile, and sought to emulate his fellow Londoner’s career trajectory. In the event, of course, he succeeded, like no other filmmaker before or since.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1926, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) artwork by Edward McKnight Kauffer

Artwork by Edward McKnight Kauffer

The Lodger – Lyz Kingsley

The newly retooled work enjoyed extremely enthusiastic preview screenings, including at my local Nottingham Scala Theatre on 15 September 1926The Lodger was shown publicly in London from January 1927 and rolled out across the rest of the country in February. This has led to it often being given either release year, though both are technically correct, while in 1928 it appears to have been the first Hitchcock released in Paris.

Spoiler: Hitch frequently posited the notion that Novello was originally supposed to be guilty, as per the ending of the novel, but that he was pressured to make the matinée idol innocent so as not to upset Novello’s legions of adoring fans. This is very plausibly just another of Hitch’s many tall stories and if he himself is to believed at all, it’s more likely he didn’t read the book until long after he was familiar with the ending depicted in the film. Hitch was a keen theatregoer from a young age and often spoke of how impressed he was when he originally encountered the story via its 1915 stage adaptation, Who Is He?, also co-written by Belloc Lowndes. The lodger of the play had already been altered to make him a cultured gentleman, innocent of all wrongdoing, so in this and other respects the film is based equally on both sources. In much the same way, latter-day interpretations of The 39 Steps are usually based as much on Hitch’s drastically rewritten film as John Buchan’s source novel.

More Ivor Novello on home video: a complete rundown of all the thespian’s available screen works

The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (2007/2014) by Steven Jacobs

In 2007, The Wrong House, an expansive exhibition devoted to Hitch’s onscreen architecture, was staged at the deSingel arts centre in Antwerp. Its curator’s eponymous tie-in book, revised and reprinted in 2014, provides a thorough 12-page analysis of the Bunting house, complete with floor plans. Revealing how its layout is at once fiendishly clever yet devilishly inconsistent, he used his research for the basis of a fascinating featurette on Criterion’s release of the film. A later, similar book does not specifically cover The Lodger but is nonetheless equally indispensable.

On a related note but taking a broader view to incorporate Hitch’s love of liminal space, art and music, are:

The Lodger (1926, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) poster by Greg White aka TightywhiteArt, 2014

Poster by Greg White aka TightywhiteArt, 2014

The Lodger, Part 1: Production, 2: Dispelling myths, 3: Home video, 4: Remakes


This is part of a unique, in-depth series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles.

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Phoenix Swanson
Phoenix Swanson
15th October 2018 12:19

Yes, Al told me; “I was a young Novello.”

How
How
1st November 2020 23:25

You have an excellent page, Mr. Reid. I had 5 of the 6 radio programs you’ve listed but was unaware of one of them. I appreciate the fact you shared a link to that program. I will mention your fine site on mine.

Fr. Matthew Hardesty
Fr. Matthew Hardesty
11th April 2023 04:49

I was unclear why Man in the Attic was included on this page. You might add a brief mention that it’s based on the 1913 novel The Lodger.

Fr. Matthew Hardesty
Fr. Matthew Hardesty
30th June 2023 15:58

I also recommend Vincent Price’s Mad Magician (1954). It borrows heavily from The Lodger (upstairs rental), Hangover Square (disposes of body in bonfire), and Shadow of a Doubt (macabre casual conversation)

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