The Lodger (1926)

(On Cable TV, March 2020) Director Alfred Hitchcock had a very long career, and it’s movies like The Lodger, his third feature film and arguably his first suspense movie, that drive the point home. Produced at the height of the silent movie era, it’s far closer to the ideal we have of silent movies than Hitchcockian ones, with the title cards, broad overacting, static cameras and tepid simplistic plots we associate with the era. It is, as a result, far more interesting to put in context than as an actual movie by itself—although I’ve seen far worse from the era. For Hitchcock historians, The Lodger does have its fair share of attraction—it clearly heralds the director’s favourite motifs of an innocent man at the wrong time, echoing Suspicion and The Wrong Man later on. (Although the perspective is far closer to the first film in at least entertaining some ambiguity as to the alignment of the protagonist.) Compared to other silent films, there is some panache in the way Hitchcock leads his film even at this early juncture in his career. Considering all this, The Lodger is best suited for Hitchcock or silent-era completionists.