The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) | Presenting Hitchcock Podcast

Gooooood evening. In this months episode of Presenting Hitchcock, Cory and Aaron avenge some deaths and discuss “The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog.”

The Movie (its free on YouTube):

The Picture:

Picture Title: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog

Written by: Eliot Stannard (scenario) and based on the book by Marie Belloc Lowndes

Starring: Marie Ault, Arthur Chesney, June Tripp, Malcolm Keen, Ivor Novello

Directed by:Alfred Hitchcock

Year Released: 1927

Our Favourite Trivia:

DIRECTOR CAMEO: At a desk in the newsroom early in this movie. He also appeared in the crowd lynch scene. First cameo ever and simply because he didn’t have enough extras to fill out the background

Sir Alfred Hitchcock had just returned from Berlin where he had made The Pleasure Garden (1925) and The Mountain Eagle (1926) back-to-back. There, he had been exposed to German Expressionism having watched F.W. Murnau making The Last Laugh (1924), and was keen to incorporate this into his next movie, shot on home soil.

For the opening of this movie, Sir Alfred Hitchcock wanted to show the Avenger’s murder victim being dragged out of the Thames River at night with the Charing Cross Bridge in the background, but Scotland Yard refused his request to film at the bridge. Hitchcock repeated his request several times, until Scotland Yard notified him that they would “look the other way” if he could do the filming in one night. Hitchcock quickly sent his cameras and actors out to Charing Cross Bridge to film the scene, but when the rushes came back from the developers, the scene at the bridge was nowhere to be found. Hitchcock and his assistants searched through the prints, but could not find it. Finally, Hitchcock discovered that his cameraman had forgotten to put the lens on the camera before filming the night scene.

The book “The Lodger”, by Marie Belloc Lowndes, was the first book to offer a solution to the Jack The Ripper killings. The book is supposedly based on an anecdote told to the painter Walter Sickert by the landlady when renting a room. She said that the previous tenant had been Jack the Ripper. The book was quite popular in its day, was filmed numerous times, and adapted for the radio multiple times, once with Peter Lorre as the lodger.

Ivor Novello reprised his role in the sound adaptation (The Phantom Fiend (1932)), directed by Maurice Elvey. Sir Alfred Hitchcock was asked to serve as director, but declined.

Producer Michael Balcon was horrified by Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s progressive style of filming, not to mention the implications of homosexuality and incest. He called in critic Ivor Montagu to trim the movie. One of Montagu’s chief acts was to reduce the number of title cards from four hundred to eighty.

The Random Draw for Next Picture:

Next up, we’ll be discussing “North by Northwest.”

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