Constance: How horrid. And who turns out to have done it?
Weissman: Oh, I couldn't tell you that. It would spoil it for you.
Constance: Oh, but none of us will see it.
- Gosford Park
screenplay by Julian Fellowes
You are wondering, perhaps, what the heck happened to Alfred.
The answer, of course, is that I happened, and the result was none too good for either of us. You see, I'm just coming off an exciting month-long project to convert a steamer trunk full of videocassettes into DVDs. For those who are interested, the project was mostly successful; I'm down to a banker's box of videocassettes, and very soon, we should have regained several cubic feet of closet space. On the minus side, however, is that this took up a significant portion of my free time, and made me extremely uninterested in watching more movies with what little time I had. My Netflix friends will have noted that I've had Hard Boiled an awfully long time.
But now that this particular endeavor has shuttered for the summer, I find that there's a portly Englishman who has been waiting upon me patiently. Best not to keep him waiting, then. Especially when he's turned out the first film that critics are willing to label "a masterpiece": The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog.
I suppose another thing that might have kept me from jumping right into this film was the lousy quality of the print Netflix had available. The Lodger is actually an extra feature on the DVD of a later Hitchcock film, Sabotage (which we'll get to in it's time). As the disc's ugly stepchild, The Lodger clearly didn't get a lot of love from Laserlight or Vintage Films. The print skips, brightness changes wildly from shot to shot, titles vary so much that it's impossible to tell which ones comes from the original and which ones are more recent substitutes, and most criminally, the opening credits are so butchered that Hitchcock's own credit is cut off before it ever gets the chance to appear. I know it's an 80-year old movie, but this is the best we could do? I've got a project in mind for the film archivists out there.
Get past that, and we're in pretty familiar territory. A serial killer called "The Avenger" is murdering the curly-haired blonde women of London, and a creepy houseguest may be the culprit – or he might just be wrongfully accused. It even has the first Hitchcock MacGuffin, in the form of the hunt for The Avenger. It's almost like a parody of a typical Hitchcock plot. Although if you think about it, for Hitchcock to have found so many variations on this basic story over his career, it makes sense that he would start right at the source.
Hitchcock gets a lot of mileage out of his star. The mysterious tenant is played by Ivor Novello, who was a popular songwriter (Jeremy Northam plays him as the only real-life character in the abovementioned Gosford Park) and actually something of a heartthrob of the era (despite being homosexual; marketing gay men as sex symbols has always been the way of the entertainment industry). According to our old friend Patrick McGilligan, Hitchcock was a little concerned about the casting
of Novello, as the star was renowned for striking over-the-top romantic poses in his stage performances. Whatever his method, Hitchcock clearly found a solution. From the moment he first walks through the door, the mood is not romantic enchantment but extreme unease. Deathly pale, nervous, barely able to carry on a conversation, Novello's Lodger is a remarkable creation, especially knowing that an audience would completely assume he was the hero.
Whether it's Novello's performance or Hitchcock's directing, the character of the Lodger certainly comes out better than his prospective love interest, Daisy, who -- in another ahead-of-its-time gesture -- is played by a woman calling herself June. June doesn't do much in the way of acting. She laughs a lot. I mean a lot. Like a strangely uncomfortable scene wherein her father has fallen off a chair and she continues to laugh and laugh. Mmm, awkward. Every now and then, she's called upon to look vaguely uncertain. That's usually just a segue to a laugh, though. I wasn't a big fan of June's.
I wonder if audiences of the day identified more with Joe, the useless cop portrayed by Malcolm Keen. Quite frankly, Clair and I found him at least as creepy as Novello. With irises so pale as to make his eyes look hollow, a hilariously inept sense of romance (he slaps a pair of handcuffs on Daisy as an expression of interest), and a terrible crime-solving technique, he's just as unsettling as the guy being set up as the potential villain. In a way, the movie puts us in an unusual position from the get-go, with two possible bad guys and a heroine with no range. With no one to necessarily like, this is not a recipe for a great thriller.
This is where Hitchcock really asserts himself. With no vested interest in any of our leads, he still builds the suspense. It's never daytime in The Lodger's London. The populace is following news of the murders with rabid interest. Someone we suspect is actually innocent. Hitch knows how to play to the crowd. Sometimes I got bored during the movie, but I never lost interest in the outcome.
Did I say bored? Yeah, that's the real problem. Perhaps one of the greatest tricks as a viewer today is to get into the mindset of a viewer back then. Because even to an open-minded fellow like myself, The Lodger moves at a positively glacial pace.
There's very little dialogue (and for a silent film, that's saying something) and almost no action, so we're left with a great many static shots of people looking, waiting, building up a sense of importance that doesn't always pay off.
This is what kind of makes me think I enjoyed The Pleasure Garden a little bit more. This story is less melodramatic. The acting -- June aside -- is better. But The Lodger doesn't move. When the climactic chase scene finally comes, it ought to be the culmination. Instead, it's a relief.
Still, he's learning. Hitchcock told the famed director and journalist François Truffaut that he considered The Lodger to be his first movie. If so, it's a very assured debut. And it bodes well for things to come.
Of course, I don't want to give anything away.
