This electrifying early feature starring an ambiguously appealing Ivor Novello shows the young director marshalling a new medium's visual power
The Lodger, the silent film that Hitchcock directed in 1927, is generally acknowledged to be the one where he properly found his "voice": that distinctive combination of death and fetishism, trick shots and music-hall humour, intense menace and elegant camerawork that assured his place among cinema's giants. Hitchcock would go on to make more polished films, scarier films, more suspenseful films, better-acted films, funnier films and weirder films. But none, I think, as simply extraordinary.
The material, drawn from a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes (sister of Hilaire), is rather obviously inspired by the Jack the Ripper murders; they were still within living memory. Hitchcock himself claimed later that producing studio Gainsborough (including Michael Balcon) ordered him to remove any ambiguity that the central character, the mysterious room-renter of the title,...
The Lodger, the silent film that Hitchcock directed in 1927, is generally acknowledged to be the one where he properly found his "voice": that distinctive combination of death and fetishism, trick shots and music-hall humour, intense menace and elegant camerawork that assured his place among cinema's giants. Hitchcock would go on to make more polished films, scarier films, more suspenseful films, better-acted films, funnier films and weirder films. But none, I think, as simply extraordinary.
The material, drawn from a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes (sister of Hilaire), is rather obviously inspired by the Jack the Ripper murders; they were still within living memory. Hitchcock himself claimed later that producing studio Gainsborough (including Michael Balcon) ordered him to remove any ambiguity that the central character, the mysterious room-renter of the title,...
- 7/30/2012
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
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