Free It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock by Charlotte Chandler

the huge success of his third film, The Lodger.
    Mrs. Marie Belloc Lowndes wrote The Lodger first in 1911 as a magazine short story, and then as a novel in 1913. It was based on the 1888 serial killings of young women in London’s East End slums, the notorious Jack the Ripper murders. In the novel, the landlady never finds out if her lodger is indeed the infamous killer.
    Hitchcock, with writer Eliot Stannard, emphasized that part of the novel which dealt with the fear and uncertainty the family feels about their lodger.
    A new boarder (Ivor Novello) arouses the suspicion of his landlady (Marie Ault), and her husband (Arthur Chesney), but their fashion model daughter, Daisy Bunting (June Tripp), is attracted to him. Daisy’s boyfriend, police detective Joe Betts (Malcolm Keen), becomes jealous.
    When Mrs. Bunting hears the lodger leaving late at night, she fears he may be the notorious murderer of young women, the Avenger. She tells Betts, who obtains a warrant to search his rooms.
    Police find a pistol, a map indicating past murders, and a picture of the first victim. Though the lodger claims the girl in the picture is his sister, and says that he is looking for her killer, he is arrested.
    He escapes, and Daisy helps him. His handcuffs are noticed at a pub, and he is pursued by an angry mob and finally cornered. At the last moment, he is saved by news that the real killer has just been arrested.
    The lodger is really a wealthy gentleman. He marries Daisy, and the Buntings adjust to their new station in life.
    Hitchcock said that the ending he would have preferred was to have the lodger really turn out to be Jack the Ripper, who goes free at the end, thought to be innocent, “while the audience knows he’s going to go on about his dirty business. At the very least, there might have been some doubt left as to whether he had done the nefarious deeds or not. But it would have been unacceptable to cast a leading man like Ivor Novello as a villain. I had the same problem later with Cary Grant in Suspicion. ”
    A memorable image in The Lodger is an overhead shot of a stairwell, with the lodger slowly descending the stairs, shown only by his gloved hand on the guard railing as the hand slides down.
    “This was a substitute for sound,” Hitchcock said. “Nowadays, we wouldn’t do that.
    “Later on, I show how he paces up and down in his room. I have the faces of the people below, looking up to the ceiling. So I dissolved the ceiling away to show this agitated man. I had a one-inch-thick plate glass floor made so his feet showed through. This was instead of sound.”
    The Lodger was the first film in which Hitchcock had a cameo appearance. He is in the newsroom at the beginning and in the crowd pursuing Novello near the end. “Two actors didn’t show up. In those days you used to be able to hop in and do a bit if necessary,” he recalled.
    Balcon brought in a young editor, Ivor Montagu, to work with Hitchcock. They recognized each other as fellow members of the London Film Society, and they were immediately compatible.
    “When The Lodger was ready,” Hitchcock said, “the distributors screened the film and said it was dreadful. C. M. Woolf particularly objected to the transparent ceiling. He wanted to give the story to another director to reshoot.
    “I was at a pretty low ebb in my career. The Lodger was shelved for several months, and then they decided to show it after all. They had an investment, and wanted their money back. It was shown, and acclaimed as the greatest British picture ever made. So, there, you see, is that thin line between failure and success.
    “If I’d made the story again as a talker,” Hitchcock told me, “I would have wanted to do something different. Perhaps Jacqueline the Ripper. ”
    “My father always referred to The Lodger as the first true Hitchcock picture,” Pat Hitchcock told me. With this film, Hitchcock led the emergence of the British cinema.

Great British Hope
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