The answer was, that they started right away. Balcon’s gesture was not one of impulse: he had been watching Hitch for a couple of years, he liked him, but more importantly he was impressed by what he could do and how skilful he was at selling other people on his ability to do it. A confidence trick, perhaps, but if so it was a confidence trick Hitch had played on himself first of all. He not only seemed confident; he really was confident. He knew with remarkable clarity what he could and could not do. If he was in any doubt, he would go away, think about it, and come back with an answer both sensible and correct. Balcon had no doubt that Hitch could direct a film because Hitch had no doubt.
Balcon’s opinion was not shared by some of those around him. Cutts was jealous of the attention Hitch had been getting, and made it very clear that he wanted Hitch stopped. However, after his erratic behaviour on The Blackguard and The Prude’s Fall, he was in no position to insist. The company’s activities were expanding to such an extent that Cutts could not possibly direct all their films himself, and, Balcon argued, it would be silly to bring in a possibly expensive outsider when they had in their employ someone who might have been specifically trained for this purpose. Anyway, Cutts had his hands full with The Rat, which turned out when released late in 1925 to be a sensational success, so honour was satisfied all round.
The other problem Balcon had over the Hitchcock project was to raise money for it. None of the English distributors was willing to put up money for a film directed by an unknown. His German contacts were more enterprising—or not so choosy, depending which way you look at it: in collaboration with a Munich-based company called Emelka, Balcon was able to raise the shoe-string budget envisaged for The Pleasure Garden, adapted from a melodramatic novel by Oliver Sandys, about the contrasting temperaments and fates of two chorus girls. Although the action of the story took place mainly in England and the Far East, it was part of the deal that the film must be shot in Europe, and that the female stars, as usual, should be American: this time Virginia Valli and Carmelita Geraghty. To add to the international tone of the picture, the script-writer was English, the cameraman was Italian (the Baron Ventimiglia) and the art directors were respectively English and German. The assistant director, though, was a reliable friend and ally, since it was none other than Hitch’s fiancee, Alma Reville.
The actual shooting of the picture was a succession of nightmares, most of them connected with money, or the chronic lack of it. Though the production was centred on Munich, the film actually started shooting with location scenes in Genoa, San Remo and on Lake Como. Hitch and Alma went out to Munich for some pre-production work with the English male lead, Miles Mander. There they were to separate, Alma heading back to Cherbourg to pick up the American star, Virginia Valli, and her friend Carmelita Geraghty, who was to play the second lead, from the Aquitania, while Hitch went on to the Mediterranean locations to get a few incidental sequences in the can. First he, Miles Mander, and the cameraman, Ventimiglia, were going down to Genoa with a newsreel cameraman and a girl playing Mander’s native wife, who had to get drowned in the sea in a sequence they would shoot immediately afterwards at San Remo. The newsreel cameraman was to enable them to cover from all angles the departure of a liner from Genoa, one camera being on the ship and the other on the shore.
Almost immediately, problems. Shortly before the train is to leave for Genoa Miles Mander suddenly realizes he has left his make-up case in the taxi and goes scooting off to get it, with Hitch shouting instructions after him about how to get to Genoa the next day in time for the filming. But then the train is ten minutes late in leaving and suddenly through a commotion at the end of the platform Hitch sees his leading man sprinting towards the train and managing to leap on just as it picks up speed. So far, so good. But then as they approach the Italian border Ventimiglia gives Hitch a nasty surprise. Because the camera and the unexposed film they are carrying are liable to duty, he says, they must smuggle them through. And where are they to be hidden? Right under Hitch’s berth in their sleeper, of course. Hitch, with his famous terror of the police and authority, is instantly in a cold sweat, and rightly so, as it turns out, since though the customs do not find the camera they do find the 10,000 feet of film and confiscate it because it has not been declared. The unit arrives in Genoa on a Sunday, prepared to shoot the sequence at noon on Tuesday, with no film.
All day they search Genoa for some, to no avail. Monday in desperation Hitch dispatches the newsreel cameraman to Kodak in Milan with £20, a sizeable sum in relation to their tiny budget, to buy the necessary film. He has just arrived back with it when they are informed that the confiscated film has also arrived and they now have to pay the duty on it. So they have wasted the £20 and have, as far as Hitch can judge with all the complicated juggling from pounds to marks to lire, scarcely enough money with them to get through the location scenes. Comes Tuesday, everything seems to be going smoothly: the ship, a Lloyd Triestino liner, will leave for South America at noon, and the unit succeed in hiring a tugboat to pick up the members on board ship just outside the harbour and return them to land. But it’s another £10, and when Hitch reaches for his wallet to pay he discovers that he has been robbed during the night at the hotel and has no money left at all. Frantic, he borrows the necessary £10 from his cameraman, another £15 from his star, and shoots the first scene of his career as a fully fledged director.
Delight. Euphoria. And then a bumpy return to earth. Whatever are they going to do? Hitch composes two letters, one to London urgently requesting an advance on his salary, the other to Munich tactfully conveying to Emelka that they may need a little more money. On consideration, he posts the first and tears up the second—for what an instant indication it would be of the incompetence he suspects they attribute to him if he must admit, for whatever reasons, to going over budget so early in the shooting of his first film. This decision taken, they have lunch at the Bristol Palace before setting off for San Remo to shoot the drowning. But then another complication comes up, one hitherto absolutely unexpected by Hitch, but undeniably educational. He finds his cameraman, the newsreel cameraman and the actress who is to play the native girl in this scene deep in a serious discussion. Ventimiglia breaks the news: she can’t go into the water. Why ever not? Well, you know, it’s that time of month.… What time of month? asks Hitch innocently. And there and then he gets a careful and detailed description of periods and the physical processes of women. Aged twenty-six, and already himself engaged to be married, he has never heard of such a thing. And all he can think of is, why the hell couldn’t she have told us before we spent all that money bringing her down from Munich?—Whither, along with the newsreel cameraman, who has now completed his work, she is instantly shipped back.
But this means they have at a moment’s notice to find another girl who looks vaguely right and is willing to be dunked in the Mediterranean (standing in for the tropical seas of the Far East, where the film’s climax takes place). Fortunately, all that is needed is a back view and some distant action: the heroine’s husband, depraved by life in the tropics, decides to dispose of his native ‘wife’ and make it look like a suicide, so he has to swim out after her, hold her head under water, and then drag her body back to shore claiming he could not save her. But alas, the replacement girl they have found is decidedly heftier than the original, and though the drowning can be accomplished effectively enough, when it comes time for Mander to lift her out of the water and bring her back to shore, he cannot do it, and keeps dropping her, take after take, to the great delight of a hundred or so interested onlookers on the beach. And when at last he does manage it, a little old lady gathering shells wanders right in front of the camera, gazing straight at it, so they have to do it all again.
Now for the third sequence of the film to be shot: it is a romantic one, of the heroine’s honeymoon at the Villa d’Este on Lake Como with the rotter who is subsequently to give her a few nasty shocks in the tropics. It is at Como that Hitch is to meet Alma, and be introduced to his two American leading ladies. The first thing he asks Alma, of course, is whether she has any money. The answer is no: it transpires that she too has had her troubles. To her alarm, both the actresses arrived with tons of luggage and expected big-star treatment (understandably, since Virginia Valli was one of the biggest stars at Universal in those days, but very different from Betty Compson with her cheery practicality.) The wardrobe Alma was to buy them in Paris ended up costing a lot more than expected, and all attempts to get them into the modest but comfortable Hotel Westminster in the Rue de la Paix were brushed aside: it was the Hotel Claridge or nothing. Hitch dares not let Virginia Valli know this is his first film, and tries throughout to cut the confident figure he feels he should. Only Alma is allowed to see his doubts and perplexities: each time he makes a shot he turns to her to ask urgently, ‘Was it all right?’
Somehow the Lake Como sequence gets shot: the advance on Hitch’s salary arrives, and his leading man, mistrustful, insists on getting back his £15 immediately, on the rather improbable grounds that he has to pay his tailor. By now Hitch has screwed up enough courage to wire Munich for more money, and more—a very little more—does arrive. But the hotel bills are mounting (Carmelita Geraghty is not in these scenes, and her presence was not accounted for in the budget), there are motorboats to be hired and all kinds of incidentals. Hitch meanly manages to exert some emotional blackmail on Alma by giving her to understand it’s really her fault Carmelita Geraghty is there at all, and so persuades her that she must borrow $200 from Virginia Valli. Naturally he can’t, because the star must not suspect either how inexperienced he is or how short money is. Alma, practical as ever, thinks up some story and gets the money, so that at least Hitch can pay the hotel bill and buy their sleeper tickets back to Munich. He can even, just, pay the excess-baggage charge on the Americans’ impressive array of carriage trunks.
On board the train he slyly asks the American actresses whether they really want to eat in the restaurant car, implying that only an idiot would drink the water in these dangerous foreign parts. Mercifully, they have come to the same conclusion, and opt for staying in their compartment and eating sandwiches from the hotel; this means that the rest of the unit can afford to have dinner. Then Hitch starts figuring again and discovers that they will lose money by changing lire into Swiss francs. Luckily they have only to change trains in Zurich, so that should not be much of a problem. Except that their first train is late, and they arrive to see their connection slowly steaming out of the station. Another extra expense: a night in Zurich. But then, miraculously, the departing train comes to a halt. Waving away porters (too expensive), Hitch begins desperately loading the unit’s luggage through the train windows himself. More haste, less speed: there is a terrible crash of breaking glass and again he is hauled up, quaking, before authority and fined 35 Swiss francs by the stationmaster for breaking the window. They arrive in Munich exhausted with literally one pfennig in the kitty.
After this baptism of fire things could only get better. And once safely back in the studios the rest of the shooting went off without any major difficulties. The early sequences of the film at any rate took place in a world with which Hitch was very familiar: the workaday English theatre—the ‘pleasure garden’ of the title, where Virginia Valli, the apparently hard-boiled but really idealistic showgirl, gets a job for Carmelita Geraghty, the wide-eyed innocent from the country who instantly goes to the bad, steals the man her benefactress really loves and leaves the theatre for a life of gilded excess paid for by a gallery of male admirers. Even working away from home, in Munich, Hitch has no trouble in vividly recreating this very English scene. But Munich, anyway, was very different from the bustle of Neubabelsberg, much quieter and more provincial. Hitch was able to go his own way with a minimum of interference or even outside influence. In fact, the only noticeable professional differences he had were with Alma, the hot-shot editor, who edited the film in what Hitch considered an unduly flashy way. She did not think so, but their first big argument ended, like most others, in a happy compromise. When Michael Balcon came over to the first screening of the completed film he was amazed that it did not look at all like a German film: in its lighting and its cutting style it seemed completely American. But this, as Hitch points out, was only to be expected: all his formation in films had been American.
Balcon was enthusiastic: his judgement of the young man’s potential had been amply borne out. The feelings of the German backers were rather more complex. Surprisingly, considering the romantic melodrama of the story, far removed from the kind of thriller with which Hitch later became associated, he already on this first venture found himself acquiring a reputation for inhumanity on screen. At the end of the film, the rotter (Miles Mander), drunken and haunted by visions of the native girl he has murdered, goes completely crazy and is just about to kill his wife (Virginia Valli) with a scimitar, when the local doctor arrives in the nick of time and shoots him. Hitch, somewhere in his omnivorous reading, had come across the theory that in death the insane return momentarily to normal, and decided to use this for dramatic effect. So at the moment the character is shot the insanity apparently leaves him, he turns and says in a very matter-of-fact way, ‘Oh, hello, doctor’, then notices he is bleeding, looks down in slight mystification, and collapses and dies. The German producer was so shaken by this that he leapt up during the screening shouting, ‘It’s impossible. You can’t show a scene like this. It’s incredible and too brutal.’ Nevertheless, it was shown just that way, and Hitch remembered the effect to use it again, brilliantly, near the beginning of the first Man Who Knew Too Much.
Getting the, film completed was one thing; getting it shown was quite another. Exhibitors back home were still dubious, and though the success of The Rat did raise Gainsborough’s stock in their eyes, The Pleasure Garden was not trade shown until six months later. Its reception was gratifying, if not sensational: the Daily Express hailed Hitch as a ‘young man with a master mind’, and the picture was shown around a bit, though not very extensively until after Hitch’s third film, The Lodger, had really made his name. Meanwhile, there was more work to do, another film contracted with Emelka to be made in Munich. That film, The Mountain Eagle (called in America Fear o’ God), is the only one of Hitch’s works which does not seem to survive anywhere, though it is difficult to believe it will not turn up somewhere, sometime, mislabelled in a private collection or an East European archive. Anyway, Hitch stoutly maintains that it can be no great loss, as the film was terrible.
Its oddities started with the locale of the story versus the locations for the film. It was based on a plot outline by one Charles Lapworth, one of Balcon’s lieutenants who had formerly worked for Goldwyn in London, and concerned a virginal schoolteacher in old Kentucky who escapes the clutches of an evil shopkeeper and hides out with a mysterious recluse whom she eventually marries. Since there was the co-production deal with Germany, said Balcon, why shouldn’t the Tyrol stand in quite adequately for Kentucky—who had ever been to Kentucky anyway …? Hitch went out to Munich to scout locations, but had no idea where to start. One day he saw in a shop window a painting of just the sort of village they needed—an anonymous huddle of roofs, a church spire—and pointed this out as a model to his German associates. With typical simple-mindedness the Germans traced the painter, asked him where the village was and came proudly back to Hitch with the information that it was Obergurgl, in the Urz valley, and that they had arranged for him to go there. What they did not tell him was that it was a two-hour train journey followed by five hours on a road which at best was too poor for motor traffic and at worst, the last stretch from the neighbouring village (called Zweizimmern and just about that big), required them to go on foot. Finally, they arrived in Obergurgl, decided that it seemed fine, checked on the weather calendar to be told categorically that the first snows always came at the beginning of November, and started back on foot. About a mile from Zweizimmern Hitch was suddenly attacked by a violent fit of nausea, which he could not understand at all. Later it was diagnosed as a specialized form of claustrophobia; just before, he had been aware of wanting to scream wildly to the mountains, ‘Let me speak English to someone’, finding the strain of having to speak German to people who spoke no word of English suddenly unbearable.
Back in Munich they set up production and returned to Obergurgl with the unit to start shooting, still without a leading lady. They had scenes with snow and scenes without, and were counting on shooting those without first. So of course during the first night an unprecedented foot of snow fell, a month early. A quick reshuffle of the schedule took care of that, but the problem of the leading lady remained. From London Balcon kept bombarding Hitch with telegrams (rather slow-motion telegrams, of course, by the time they had been carried on foot up the mountain tracks) suggesting all kinds of Hollywood stars—mostly, like Agnes Ayres, rather démodée by this time. Eventually came the curt announcement that he was being sent Nita Naldi, best known for her vamp roles in De Mille’s first Ten Commandments and opposite Valentino in Blood and Sand. Not very likely casting, Hitch thought despondently, and he was not much comforted when she arrived with a big-star wardrobe, a distinguished-looking (and rich) white-haired escort who accompanied her to the set every day, and scarlet fingernails over an inch long. The fingernails were the biggest problem, but finally Hitch persuaded her to shed them for the role. And at least he found her a very amusing woman, with a tough, somewhat bawdy sense of humour and a broad Brooklyn accent bizarrely at odds with her statuesque screen presence.
Relieved to be back in England early in 1926 after their German experiences, Hitch and Alma (who had again been his assistant on The Mountain Eagle) plunged with enthusiasm into preparing a third film, this time to be made close to home, at Islington. At least they were busy, but things did not seem all that rosy. The Pleasure Garden had finally been trade shown, but had not exactly set the Thames on fire. The Mountain Eagle was finished and shelved—it was not trade shown till a month after the opening of The Lodger in September 1926. The company had again been reorganized, and was now to distribute through something called Piccadilly Pictures, which had the none-too-cooperative C. M. Woolf as chairman, Balcon as managing director on the commercial side, and the actor Carlyle Blackwell as joint managing director in charge of production. Cutts was the star director, under a long-term contract. And though it seemed Cutts did not harbour any malice towards Hitch—at the moment he was riding high on the success of The Rat and preparing a sequel, The Triumph of the Rat—it was not the most comfortable situation for Hitch to be working side by side with the man who just a few months before had been trying determinedly to get him fired.
But for the time being all these troubles were to fade into the background, since Hitch, for the first time, had found a subject which really turned him on. It had all come about because he had gone to see a play called Who Is He?, which was based on a bestselling novel by Mrs. Belloc Lowndes called The Lodger. The idea of the novel, and the play, was suggested by the Jack the Ripper murders, which had happened in 1888 in Whitechapel, not very far from London Wall, where Hitch had worked for Henleys. At the time, the idea of the ghoulish killer, apparently a man with some medical training, going undetected about the streets killing and dissecting prostitutes had caused something close to panic throughout London, and the resultant outcry had been an important force in a campaign to improve conditions in the East End slums. But as time passed and there were no more murders of this kind interest inevitably slackened; when Mrs. Belloc Lowndes’s novel first appeared in McClure’s Magazine in 1911 it excited very little attention. But gradually sales built up, and by 1923 the cheap sixpenny edition had sold over half a million copies.
The young Hitch, living as he did not very far from the scene of these crimes when they were still fresh in the popular imagination, must have known something about the Ripper. But what caught his imagination in this fictionalized treatment of the story was its focus on the everyday surroundings of the killer, the sudden, unpredictable incursion of terror into an unimpeachably safe, sober, respectable home not so different from his own. Mrs. Belloc Lowndes had got the inspiration for her story from a snatch of conversation at a dinner party in which one of the guests told another that his mother’s butler and cook, who let rooms, thought they had had Jack the Ripper as one of their lodgers. In the book and the play ‘the Stranger’ is just such a person, in just such a setting, and the whole thing is seen from the point of view of the family he stays with, their dawning suspicions and fears. There seemed to be the makings here of a great film subject, and one to which Hitch particularly responded: a combination of crime, about which he had a timid, painfully law-abiding person’s slightly voyeuristic curiosity, and the bourgeois world of his own childhood, set in the London he knew so well instead of the Far East or Kentucky.
The big advantage the project had was unfortunately also its biggest problem. The star assigned to play the leading role of the Stranger was none other than Gainsborough’s biggest current asset, Ivor Novello, who had shot to fame on the screen in The Rat and was now working on the sequel which Jack Cutts was directing. Novello was more of a personality (and a profile) than an actor, but it was early in his career and his image had not yet been set. In The Rat he had played a picturesquely louche character, an apache who uses women in the way apaches were supposed to do, and that was all right—millions of women secretly wanted to be slapped around by him. But a pathological killer—that was something else again. Clearly, if he was to play the role he had to be exonerated. Well, Hitch reasoned, that was not too bad after all. The real subject of the story was fear and its effects, not the psychology of the central character, who even in the original remains a mystery. So, going straight back to the book, Hitch began to fashion a free adaptation in collaboration with Eliot Stannard, who had scripted his two previous films. There were rumbles at the studio: Jack Cutts was not at all happy to see ‘his’ star assigned to the upstart assistant, and made his feelings quite plain. But under Balcon’s protection the film was ready to shoot in early May.
It was essentially the team as before: including again Alma as assistant director and Ventimiglia behind the camera. But this time, in keeping with the subject, the style was very different. If the two films Hitch had directed in Germany were very American in style, The Lodger, ‘A Story of the London Fog’, was very German: dark shadows, strange angles and disconcerting compositions in order to convey an atmosphere of neurosis and ambiguity. The German cinema at this time had a special corner in atmosphere, and had built up a repertory of visual language—mirrors and reflections, for example, are usually deceiving; stairs are inescapable, the movement of characters on them creating a feeling of elation or dejection, their spiralling up into the shadows strangely unsettling the spectator, he cannot quite say why. All these elements had cropped up in connection with the character of Jack the Ripper two years before in the third episode of Paul Leni’s Waxworks, a picture which Hitch had certainly seen, either in Germany or at the showings of the new Film Society, which Hitch had joined shortly after its foundation in London in 1925. They crop up again in The Lodger, but in almost all respects Hitch’s treatment is otherwise very different: Leni’s account of Jack the Ripper is all hallucinatory expressionist fantasy, while Hitch’s is clearly rooted, like all his later work, in everyday reality.
Of course Hitch’s own everyday reality was constantly expanding. He was moving more and more in theatrical circles, and making friends elsewhere. During the making of Woman to Woman, for instance, he met another young man just starting out in the business, Sidney Bernstein (ultimately Lord Bernstein) who was to become one of his few close lifelong friends. Bernstein was in the exhibition side of cinema, his family controlling what was to become the very extensive and important Granada chain of cinemas. But whereas most exhibitors at this time (and since) were strictly businessmen, part of the material for their business being films, though it might just as well be soap or used cars, for all the specific interest they took, Sidney Bernstein was seriously interested in the film itself, its making, its artistic possibilities and its impact on audiences—he was one of the first people in Britain not only to observe the numbers of people who went to the cinema, but to want to know why they went and to do something practical about finding out, by organizing the first systematic national surveys of picturegoing habits. He and Hitch immediately hit if off, as Bernstein was the first person Hitch had met who looked at films in much the same way he did. In other respects they agreed to differ—Bernstein had strong left-wing political convictions, Hitch was always resolutely non-political—but when Bernstein became a founder-member of the Film Society in 1925 and a member of its first council, Hitch naturally knew all about it and attended such meetings as he could when he was not out of the country working on his own films. And he made a number of other friends and acquaintances through that connection, among them the writers Angus McPhail and Ivor Montagu, the film director Adrian Brunel, and Iris Barry, a film critic later to be a leading force in the creation of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s film collections and programmes. For the first time Hitch was moving in circles which would seriously discuss the potential of the film as an art form, and with people who cared about the cinema as passionately as he did.
Back at Islington these new connections were looked on rather dubiously. Hitch seemed a practical enough sort of fellow, but was he perhaps, horror of horrors, going to go arty? He was not, for the time being, interfered with, but the shooting of The Lodger was quite closely observed, and did not, from the tales filtering back, do much to put such doubts to rest. One day, for instance, word came that he had had a floor built of one-inch-thick plate glass, about six feet square, had put the camera underneath it, and was photographing only the soles of Ivor Novello’s feet as he paced back and forth across it. On another occasion he spent a day setting up a shot which, once it was printed, no one could work out the mechanics of: what was seen on the screen was a moving-camera shot without a cut which made it appear that the camera had moved away from a couple dancing in a ballroom, across a table between a couple sitting facing each other, out through a window which then proved to be set in a solid wall, then back right across a courtyard. The secret was that everything possible was placed on a movable dolly, not just the camera; and then at the strategic moment first the table with its occupants, then the window frame, was dropped, the walls which framed the window being brought in at the same time, so that all these elements appeared to be stationary while only the camera moved in a way which common sense told one was impossible. To add to the studio’s doubts, after expending all this ingenuity on the solution of a purely technical problem Hitch decided not to include the shot in the final montage of the film.
What the hell was he up to? Balcon was damned if he knew, and the others at the studio, not having Balcon’s interest in films and how they were made, but only in commercial results, were hardly likely to be any more sympathetic. To make matters worse, Cutts was busy sniping, just waiting for the new genius to fall on his face: ‘I don’t know what he’s shooting,’ he told someone in the studio. ‘I can’t make head or tail of it.’ (A decade later he would still refer to Hitch patronizingly as ‘that talented boy’.) Finally the film was shown to C. M. Woolf, and Hitch and Alma spent a nervy afternoon walking all the way from Tower Bridge to Islington while the showing was going on, in hopes that everything would go well. Unfortunately it didn’t. Woolf did not like or understand the film, it was pronounced unshowable and consigned to the shelf for a couple of months. Again, Hitch’s career seemed to have come to an untimely stop. His first film had had no very spectacular success; his second was still waiting to be shown, and now his third, the first which was on a subject of his own choosing rather than an assignment, and into which he had thrown himself with complete enthusiasm, was apparently hated by everyone and would not even be distributed. Hitch was in despair, wondering desperately what else he could do, given that there was nothing else he wanted to do, and how and when, if ever, he and Alma were going to get married.
Fortunately, base commerce stepped in where loftier aesthetic appreciation was lagging. Gainsborough needed more films to follow up their successes with The Rat and a Betty Balfour comedy, Sea Urchin, also directed by the busy Jack Cutts. They had the two Hitchcock movies completed and shelved, and of the two The Lodger seemed, for all its incomprehensibility, the better bet, since it did star Ivor Novello, rated by opinion polls the most popular British screen star of that day. There must, surely, be something that could be done with it. And it was at this juncture that Balcon called in the services of Ivor Montagu, one of the new generation of bright young men from University who were getting themselves involved in film, and a distant acquaintance of Hitch’s from the Film Society. He and Adrian Brunel were running a small film company, and Balcon asked him to look at the film and see if it could be re-edited into a more presentable form.
Montagu saw the film, and was completely bowled over by it: it was technically and artistically streets ahead of anything made in Britain up to that time, and indeed the only British film that could be taken seriously by someone steeped in the new German and even newer Russian cinema. He was in something of a quandary, since he could hardly say that he didn’t think the film needed anything done to it. Finally, his solution was to get together with Hitch and suggest a couple of points in the film where something might be clarified by re-editing, plus some re-shooting of the final chase sequence where it was originally too dark to see details (Hitch willingly complied with this, since apart from anything else it meant an effective addition to his budget and shooting time for the film). The only radical modification Montagu suggested was to make the film more extreme in one area where Hitch had experimented cautiously. British films at this time were very heavy on the titles, and British film-makers knew little or nothing of the movement abroad in favour of telling the story as completely as possible in visual terms. Hitch had seen this done in Germany, but he knew how conservative his employers were, and so had left little to chance in verbal explanations of what was happening. Montagu told them that they should go all the way, reduce the titles to an absolute minimum and make those that were left as punchy and to the point as possible. Since he qualified as an outside expert whom they were paying good money (if not very much of it) to advise them, they took his word for it. He went ahead eliminating and tightening the titles, and brought in E. McKnight Kauffer, the painter and poster-designer who was at that time considered very advanced, to design the credits and the title backgrounds. Thus slightly but significantly worked over, the film was trade shown in September 1926, and had an instant success. It received a press the like of which had hardly been known for a British film before. The Bioscope said, ‘It is possible that this film is the finest British production ever made’, and there was a chorus of praise from the daily and weekly press—it was the beginning of what was to prove an enduring love affair between Hitch and the critics.
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.