The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog

A killer is murdering fair-haired young women in London. On a foggy night a new lodger arrives at a family boarding house: quiet, going out at odd hours, turning the pictures of women on the wall to face the plaster. The landlord's daughter is fair. The film is not interested in who the killer is. It is interested in how suspicion spreads: the family, the neighbours and finally a crowd reach a verdict without a single piece of evidence. The attempted lynching at the end states the real subject. The form is silent cinema built under German influence: shadows, reflections in glass, and staging that turns space into an instrument of suspense. Hitchcock assembles his visual language here for the first time, and would later call this his true first film. There were two fights during the production. The distributor C. M. Woolf watched it at a private screening, found it too arty and said it would be shelved; it reached cinemas only because Michael Balcon and Ivor Montagu championed it, and Montagu cut the number of intertitles by three quarters. The second was the ending: Hitchcock wanted to leave it unclear whether the lodger was the killer, but Ivor Novello was a major star and the studio would not allow him to remain a suspect. Who it is for: viewers interested in silent cinema and in where Hitchcock began. Who it is not for: anyone wanting the mystery solved. The resolution was decided by the studio and undoes the ambiguity the film builds.