Hitch (10 page)

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.

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.