Hitch says that The Lodger was the beginning of ‘Alfred Hitchcock’, the first true Hitchcock movie. And not only, obviously, because it was his first thriller. It is, looked at today with some hindsight derived from his subsequent career, a very indicative film in its subtlety and moral ambiguity, as well as in the virtuoso display of sheer technique Hitch brought to it. About this latter Hitch has in recent years been rather apologetic, dismissing the stylistic flourishes as to some extent gimmicks forgivable in a young man flexing his artistic muscles for the first time. The famous shot of Ivor Novello’s feet through the glass floor, for instance (which conveys the worried family’s constant awareness of his movements, endlessly pacing overhead), he says was unnecessary, even in the silent cinema, where one had to find a visual equivalent for the sound of footsteps: he thinks now that just a shot of the chandelier swaying and maybe the eyes of the listeners downstairs following the track of the lodger’s walk would do the same thing more economically. But the fact remains that this sort of thing was exactly what struck critics and public most forcefully at the time and contributed vitally to Hitch’s instant reputation as a boy genius (very much as Welles’s putting all his goods in the shop window at once in Citizen Kane did for him). And often the most disturbing and memorable moments in his films are precisely these almost surrealistic details which have just caught his eye or seized his imagination and are there seemingly for some private reason which Hitch himself, never one for gazing at his own navel, is probably not fully aware of.
It is true, though, that the brilliant surface of The Lodger did tend to obscure from the conscious awareness of spectators what it is actually all about. Whether or not this is what Hitch intended, the success of the film and the precise way in which it succeeded showed him a lot about the possibilities of the thriller form for manipulating audience responses, getting them to accept ideas and share emotions which, if presented in any other way, would be disturbing or repugnant to them. In The Lodger there are already a number of themes and situations which recur constantly in Hitch’s later films, and which clearly mirror the man and the way his mind works, even if they are largely unconscious on his part and almost subliminal in their effect on others. In particular, the film does take a very dark view of human nature and traps us into accepting it by subtly but consistently distorting our moral perspectives and leaving us slightly disoriented, at the film-maker’s mercy. For example, the necessity of having the lodger innocent of the crimes of which he is suspected may have been dictated originally by the casting of Ivor Novello in the role, but all the same it serves Hitch’s other purposes very well. Maybe, as he says, no one in his right mind would even suppose that Novello could turn out to be a sex murderer anyway (romantic leading men don’t do things like that), but then no one in his right mind supposed that Pearl White would be minced up by the express thundering towards her, and that never stopped people from teetering on the edge of their seats, in an agony of suspense while awaiting the inevitable eleventh-hour rescue. Enough indications are planted to suggest that Novello may be ‘the Avenger’ who goes around killing girls with golden curls (the story is contemporary and the murderer is given only a general similarity to Jack the Ripper) for us to consider his guilt as a serious possibility, and to find, by a typical Hitchcock switch, that we sympathize with him and want him to get away with it long before we are clearly told that he is not guilty.
In tune with this sympathy for the outcast and the aberrant, the nice, healthy, normal surroundings into which he wanders are mercilessly shown up. All the comment at the time and since about the Germanic, expressionist qualities of the film has obscured the fact that it is actually made in two distinct styles, one corresponding to the dark, shadowy world of the lodger, haunted and mysterious, and the other to the orderly, respectable world of the landlady and her family. The outré angles and strange compositions which draw attention to themselves are confined to the lodger’s world; nearly all the bad things that happen, all the dark places of the human mind that are exposed, are located in the even lighting and plain, solid compositions of the everyday world. When it comes down to it, the lodger is not himself a source of menace at all, but mainly a catalyst who sets off reactions in others: in particular, in the policeman who is courting the daughter of the house. He deteriorates in the course of the story from a solid, slightly pompous, basically decent sort of character to become almost a murderer himself, in that through jealousy of his girl’s interest in the lodger he constructs a whole case against him as the Avenger and even virtually lets him be lynched before the news comes that the real murderer has been caught.
It is the first indubitable example of the famous ‘transfer of guilt’ so beloved of French commentators on Hitchcock’s work, which is all connected with the power of confession, supposed to be a preoccupation of Hitch’s derived from his strict Catholic upbringing. However that may be, it is certainly true that in Hitchcock films our sympathies are often found to lie in very peculiar places—he sees, and shows us, a charm and strange innocence in the heart of guilt, and, often even more forcibly, the rot beneath the decent surface. Or, more meaningfully, shows just how precarious is the conspiracy of ‘decent’ behaviour on which we all depend in order to exist. John Arden says of an ‘undistinguished but not contemptible’ middleclass family in one of his plays that ‘Their natural instincts of decency and kindliness have never been subjected to a very severe test. When they are, they collapse.’ Hitchcock also is inclined to believe that people’s instincts of decency and kindliness may be natural but do not often survive a severe test. The Lodger is just such a test, and no one comes through it with flying colours. The policeman is the most spectacular example of disintegration under pressure (and pressure largely self-generated), but no one in the family emerges completely unscathed. And what of those ordinary people outside whom we see panicking and spreading panic with an almost greedy relish in the film’s elaborate opening montage, and who turn up again at the end transformed predictably into a mob unreasoningly out for blood?
Hitch may have been all his life the perfect bourgeois, product of his class and background, but he has never given any indication of complacency, the characteristic bourgeois vice, about nature and the human condition, or about the possibility of simply separating and recognizing good and evil, right and wrong. In The Lodger we can see him already sketching out the moral ambiguities of Frenzy, 46 years later—the sympathy for the sex murderer, the unappealingness of the apparently virtuous, upright characters, and the tendency of people to exchange roles in the course of the movie. Frenzy of course pushes it further: the man we sympathize with actually is a sex murderer instead of merely a suspect; the innocent victim’s crusade of revenge is not excused, as it seems to be in The Lodger when the lodger turns out to be, not the Avenger himself, but someone seeking revenge on the Avenger who has murdered his sister. It is doubtful how far Hitch intended audiences to see the near-lynching of the lodger as a crucifixion, with the inevitable identification of the character with Christ—he was seemingly much more interested in the ritual-humiliation aspect of handcuffing—but the way the sequence is treated visually clearly suggests a martyrdom, and directs us to sympathize with the character as though, one would normally say, we were sure he is innocent, but perhaps we should say in the light of Hitchcock’s subsequent work, as though he is guilty.
It could hardly be expected that the first people to see The Lodger would recognize all this: for them it was just an unusually vivid, atmospheric thriller with a comforting happy ending. Hitch was obviously aware of the ironic overtones in the final scene: we see the landlady and her husband visiting the stately home in which their daughter lives with her husband, the strange lodger restored to sanity, and bowing and scraping like servants in these surroundings of unaccustomed grandeur. But it is doubtful whether anyone else saw this in terms other than virtue rewarded and all’s well that ends well. Still, whether or not critics and audiences picked up on everything in the film, they
picked up on enough to make it and Hitch an overnight sensation. Gainsborough rapidly seized the opportunity to show The Mountain Eagle to the trade in the month following The Lodger’s opening, and to urge Hitch to start work right away on a follow-up, also starring Ivor Novello, as the first of the films he was to make in 1927. Hitch was ready and willing. But first of all there was one thing he had to do. On 2 December 1926 he and Alma, who had meanwhile been converted to Roman Catholicism, became man and wife.
Chapter Five
It was deliberately a very quiet morning wedding, in a side chapel at Brompton Oratory, with only the immediate family of the bride and groom and one or two friends present. After the ceremony they adjourned to the apartment not far away which Hitch had been preparing for them, cut the cake, drank a toast or two, then packed the guests off in hired cars to a lunch in the West End while they made their escape to the boat train for France. Still punchy on their arrival in Paris, whom should they first run into but the redoubtable Nita Naldi, now living there with ‘Daddy’, the distinguished older gentleman who had accompanied her everywhere on The Mountain Eagle. Brooking no refusal, she bore them home to lunch in her elegant town house, and proceeded to press so much drink on them that they reeled back to their hotel in mid-afternoon with the carpet in the lobby lurching and heaving beneath them—it was the first and last time in her life, says Alma, that she has been conscious of being really, hopelessly drunk.
From Paris, Hitch and Alma headed on to spend most of their honeymoon at the Palace Hotel, St. Moritz. It was, and is, Hitch’s favourite hotel in the world. Still in the hands of the family who owned and ran it when he and Alma first went there, it remains one of the very few luxury hotels unaffected in its appearance or its service by the passage of time and changing standards. Or so Hitch says—and he should know, since he and Alma have returned sentimentally to the scene of their honeymoon over the Christmas-New Year season every year they possibly could since 1926. Such a romantic gesture seems curiously at odds with the conventional image of Hitchcock the cynical joker and ruthless specialist in the macabre. Of course, Hitch does profess himself mystified by the way the people he meets persist in identifying him with the materials of his trade (’If they did but realize it, I’m more scared than they are by things in real life’), but if this is really the case, like most scared people he goes to considerable lengths to disguise his own vulnerability. The fact remains that his marriage with Alma was unmistakably a love match from the start, and has been an exclusive dedication and devotion ever since, a personal and professional union on all possible levels.
Immediately on their return there were practical matters to be resolved. They were both due to go straight back to work on Hitch’s next film, Downhill. But before that they had the job of moving into their new married home, a top-floor flat at 153 Cromwell Road, in West London. The flat was a maisonette, up ninety-odd stairs (no lift, needless to say). Since Hitch had himself been an art director, and now had many contacts in the studio art department, he designed the interior himself with furniture and fabrics from Liberty’s and had technicians from the studio carry out his designs. It was the first time either he or Alma had lived away from their respective family homes—as unmarried children they had been expected to stay on at home, so all the time they had been working at Islington and courting Hitch and Alma had had to travel halfway across London, he from Leytonstone in the east, she from Twickenham in the west, to meet more or less in the middle. Now they had set up a comfortable, modest home in a conservative English style—solid, traditionally designed furniture, chintzes, polished wood and brass. It was from the first a charming, happy, lived-in home, cosy rather than imposing. The Hitchcocks entertained a lot, and remained happy in their first London home until they moved to America in 1939. By the mid-1930s Hitch was making a lot more money, and much in his life-style had changed. But though he had by then acquired an (also fairly modest) country home as well, he staunchly resisted all suggestions from Michael Balcon and others that he should move to fashionable Mayfair: ‘I never felt any desire to move out of my own class.’
As well as a new home, Hitch now had a reputation to keep up: that created by the phenomenal success of The Lodger, which had really confirmed his standing with the critics as the leading British film-maker. This, and the value of it, was something he understood very quickly: understood, indeed, better and more effectively than anyone else. At the time of The Lodger Hitch joined an informal club called the Hate Club, along with Ivor Montagu, Adrian Brunel, and various other people connected one way or another with films. The idea was that they should get together from time to time to blow off steam, discuss (often in the most inflammatory terms) people and situations which displeased them. On one occasion the question at issue was, who did they make films for? Some said that it had to be for the public; others said the distributors or the exhibitors, for unless you pleased them first how could you hope ever to reach the public? Hitch alone held out in silence. Finally, someone asked him what he thought. Oh, he said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world, for the press, of course. The critics were the only ones who could give one freedom—direct the public what to see, hold a gun at the heads of the distributors and exhibitors. If you could keep in well with them, keep your name and work in the papers, and so the public eye, the rest was easy.
Apparently everyone present thought Hitch was crazy—or, worse, cynical, admitting openly his own opportunism. Of course, it is easy to say now that the years have proved him right, but the question is not so clear-cut as all that. Hitch’s uniqueness resides not so much in his recognition thus early of the power and value of publicity, not even in his skill in exploiting it, but in his combination of this insight with the consistent power to deliver. There have been others who guessed the power of personal publicity and self-advertisement—Cecil B. de Mille and Orson Welles have been no sluggards in that regard—and there have been many highly talented artists who have never evinced any ability to sell themselves in the market-place. But no one apart from Hitch has been so consummate a master in these two complementary but not necessarily coexistent spheres of activity. The pattern was already beginning to form in the 1920s. But it could not yet be said that a clear image of Hitch, or the ‘typical’ Hitchcock movie, had emerged. The Lodger was a distinctive achievement, and looking back at it now one can see all kinds of touches which seem to point the way towards things to come, beyond the thriller element—the suggestions of sexual perversity in the relations of the lodger and the girl, for example, in which Hitchcock first explores a sado-masochistic pattern which recurs often in films as light as To Catch a Thief and as intense as Marnie: the girl is drawn to the lodger, he suggests, partially because she half suspects he may be the crazed killer, rather than in spite of this. All of which seems surprisingly sophisticated, or at least knowing, in one who had not yet gone, virgin as he says, to his own marriage bed. And already Hitch was conscious of the sexual overtones also in the situation of being handcuffed, the pleasures as well as the pains of bondage and humiliation, in the climactic scenes of the lodger’s arrest, escape and pursuit. For the first time in his films, but by no means the last, he found a way of channelling, exploiting and maybe temporarily exorcising his own anxieties and terrors faced with authority in any shape or form.
More noticeable, naturally, to spectators at the time was the purely technical adventurousness of the film. The elaborate montage of the opening scenes in particular was an immediate attention-grabber, and the famous individual effects later in the film, like the glass ceiling and the mysterious, menacing descent of the lodger represented by just a gloved hand seen gliding closer and closer down the banister rail of the curving staircase, were all instantly seized on. If they were a little too showy in their context, at least Hitch knew what he was doing. When a shot was really just too farfetched, like the one he laboured long but in vain to perfect in The Lodger, where a police van with two small round windows in its rear doors would take on the
appearance of a face with rolling eyes as a result of the swaying of its occupants seen through the windows, then he generally let it go—there was always method in his madness.
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 8