![]() According to lead actress June Tripp, the director's notoriously meticulous nature was already in play by 1927. Holding on certain shots instead of cutting isn't unusual for the silent era, but the technique is a match made in heaven with Hitchcock's developing sensibilities. Bunting creeps downstairs to investigate his room with similar slowness, and the camera travels with her, highlighting her pale hands as they grip the railing in the dark. ![]() She sits up in bed, listening with the acute awareness of a mouse cornered by a hawk, and Hitchcock ensures every step of Jonathan's measured, menacing exit makes it onto the screen: opening his room door, standing on the landing, walking the length of the staircase, closing the front door. Bunting as he leaves the house during the night. In arguably the film's best sequence, Jonathan accidentally wakes a sleeping Mrs. It's a tried and true "Hitchcockian" technique he repeats throughout The Lodger whenever he needs to stoke the embers of fear: when the Buntings hear Jonathan pacing back and forth upstairs hard enough to shake the light fixture above their heads, for example, they stare up with their own prolonged intensity. Jonathan enters the Bunting house agonizingly slowly, and Hitchcock lets these shots hold past the point of uncomfortable into disconcerting. Bunting opens her front door to a knock from a tall man with a scarf covering his mouth (Jonathan), it's dramatic irony in its purest "uh-oh" form. His famous differentiation between surprise and suspense (surprise = a bomb explodes out of nowhere suspense = the audience knows a bomb is ticking down, but the characters don't) takes center stage when an eyewitness to the murder describes a tall man leaving the scene of the crime with his face half-concealed. ![]() Since the film opens with a woman's screaming face right before authorities discover her dead body, Hitchcock wastes no time setting the tension to boil like water in a pot. Daisy, meanwhile, falls for the brooding Jonathan, an interest he ardently reciprocates. Psychological (and psychosexual) complications ensue when the Buntings rent out their spare room to Jonathan Drew ( Ivor Novello), a reserved and awkward young man whose odd nature and late-night departures from the house lead the Bunting parents to suspect him of the Avenger's crimes. Daisy works as a model and lives with her parents ( Marie Ault and Arthur Chesney), while her boyfriend Joe Chandler ( Malcolm Keen) is the lead detective on the Avenger case. A man calling himself "the Avenger" has killed seven blonde women to date, putting heroine Daisy ( June Tripp), the picture-perfect definition of a 1920s flapper with her curly blonde bob, at immediate risk. The Lodger's plot follows a small group of players as they navigate the fallout of an active serial killer. Characters who might be in peril walk straight into darkness, while characters who may pose a lethal threat are half-silhouetted by the kinds of melodramatic shadows one would never see in real life. It's the look that defined the days of classic black-and-white film noir, and The Lodger positively drips with the same brooding atmosphere and intense psychological trickery. German Expressionism was a European art movement that utilized highly stylized framing and stark, symbolic lighting to create a mood. Murnau ( Nosferatu) inspired The Lodger's aesthetic. It's fitting that leading German Expressionism directors like Robert Wiene ( The Cabinet of Dr. (One can imagine Hitchcock chuckling in delighted abandon.) The Lodger inches a step further out by providing very few dialogue breaks, essentially demanding that its audience exists in a constant state of discomfited uncertainty. There are interstitial dialogue screens, of course, but cues from the cinematography, editing, and an actor's facial expressions and body language become an equation. Hitchcock was a man who prioritized visual creation and its execution thereof, and a silent film automatically forces a viewer to figure out a scene based on context and implications. As a silent film, The Lodger allows Alfred Hitchcock to run wild with the mechanics of what he defined as "pure cinema," aka, everything captured by a film camera.
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