Madman has re-issued Alfred Hitchcock’s 1926 so-called 'Jack the Ripper’ silent picture with the 1999 score by Paul Zaza. Based on the novel by Mrs Belloc Lowndes, this film was a landmark for two reasons: One, it is the quintessential 'London fog’ movie. Here, great white clouds clog the streets, doggedly holding fast to terrible secrets, or else creating a maze for the wicked to escape into. The second reason has everything to do with Hitchcock and his style, and the genre that he would be forever associated with – suspense.
Since the plot concerns an innocent man accused of a crime he has not committed and must convince all of the fact, some critics and historians have seen The Lodger as the template for 'the wrong man’ narrative Hitchcock would return to obsessively over the following decades.
The film begins with an image that is still shocking today: a fair haired young woman screams (silently) right into the barrel of the lens. This is our introduction to the film’s plot device; a man police dub 'The Avenger’ is slaughtering young women in a series of crimes that have terrorised Londoners for some time. Meanwhile, in a nice middle-class boarding house, a lodger (Ivor Novello) takes up residence, paying a month’s rent in advance. Nervous, furtive, dark and a little hostile, the lodger insists on arrival that the paintings of beautiful women that adorn his walls be removed. Suspicions soon fall on the man; Daisy (blonde dazzler June) takes a shine to him, while her policeman boyfriend Joe (Malcolm Keen) gets jealous.
Brilliantly sustained by stunning directorial choices throughout, this is supreme cinema and a great introduction to the early work of Hitchcock. Zaza score is insistent, terse, lavish when necessary, and there’s a lot of it. Whatever the new score’s merits, The Lodger is worth seeing for Hitchcock’s visual wit.
