About The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)
The story behind the film
The Lodger is where Alfred Hitchcock became "Hitchcock". It was his third feature as a director and his first thriller, and he later called it the first true "Hitchcock picture". It is also the earliest of his films to survive complete.
The story comes from Marie Belloc Lowndes' 1913 novel The Lodger, inspired by the Jack the Ripper murders. London is terrorised by a serial killer known as "The Avenger", who murders young blonde women on Tuesday nights. On a foggy evening, a mysterious young man arrives at the Buntings' house to rent their upstairs room. He is pale, secretive and goes out at night, he turns the pictures of blonde women on his wall to face the wall, and he takes an interest in the Buntings' daughter Daisy, a blonde fashion model — much to the annoyance of her boyfriend Joe, a police detective working on the Avenger case.
Cast & crew
- Directed by Alfred Hitchcock; adapted by Eliot Stannard and Hitchcock
- Ivor Novello as The Lodger (Jonathan Drew)
- June Tripp (credited as June) as Daisy Bunting
- Marie Ault as Mrs. Bunting, the landlady
- Arthur Chesney as Mr. Bunting
- Malcolm Keen as Joe Chandler, the detective
- Produced by Michael Balcon for Gainsborough Pictures
Why it's worth watching
Many of Hitchcock's lifelong obsessions are already here: an innocent-seeming man who might be guilty, a blonde heroine in danger, a jealous policeman, a mob turning ugly, and suspense built from what the audience suspects rather than what it sees. Hitchcock had recently worked in Germany and the film shows the influence of German Expressionism, with dramatic shadows, fog and unusual angles.
He also found ingenious visual ways to tell the story without sound. The most famous: the Buntings, downstairs, look up at the ceiling as the lodger paces in his room — and Hitchcock shows him walking above them as if the ceiling were transparent, by filming Novello on a thick sheet of glass from below.
Ivor Novello, a matinée idol and composer, was a huge star at the time, and his presence shaped the story's ending, which differs from the novel.
Fun facts
- The Lodger contains Hitchcock's first on-screen cameo: he is seen from behind at a desk in a newsroom, apparently because an actor failed to turn up.
- On release, the trade paper Bioscope suggested it might be "the finest British production ever made".
- The British Film Institute restored the film in 2012, and in 2017 the BFI listed it among 100 essential thrillers.
Public-domain status
The Lodger was published in 1927, so its US copyright has expired and it is in the public domain in the United States. We broadcast it with a public-domain (CC0) piano score; see "Rights & source" below.