Alfred Hitchcock (16 page)

And for the first time a film was signed—literally, with a scrawled autograph—by Alfred J. Hitchcock, the formal billing he finally decided on.

The enthusiastic reception of
The Pleasure Garden
fanned the growing interest in Hitchcock’s new project. It didn’t hurt that a stream of items describing
The Lodger
was being churned out by Cedric Belfrage, one of the Cambridge circle, now Gainsborough’s new publicity director.

The Lodger
began photography in March 1926. Baron Ventimiglia returned as Hitchcock’s cameraman, shooting on the lavish sets (including a multilevel lodging house) designed by C. Wilfred Arnold; Alma was the film’s assistant director and editor. Hitchcock cast Malcolm Keen in another pivotal part as Daisy’s boyfriend, Joe, the not-too-bright policeman on the trail of the killer. (Joe’s jealousy of Daisy’s relationship with the lodger was another “triangulation” original to the film.) Daisy’s parents, the landlords made nervous by their strange tenant, were played by Marie Ault and Arthur Chesney, whose younger brother was actor Edmund Gwenn. (Chesney and Gwenn “looked alike as two peas in a pod,” in Hitchcock’s words.)

The curly blonde Daisy was played by June, the stage name of June Howard-Tripp, a dancer and musical comedy headliner. Ivor Novello may have asked for her; years earlier he and June had done a screen test, and they had appeared together onstage. Then again, it may have been more Hitchcock countercasting, as well as a chance to launch a new personality into film. Like Novello, June was probably cast before the script was done: Daisy was made to order for her blond, vaguely nubile looks.

Hitchcock could be testy about his supposed fixation with blondes. “It’s not my attraction to them,” he told the BBC in one interview. “I think it’s tradition. Ever since the beginning of movies, starting with Mary Pickford.” After Pickford, blondes became “a symbol of the heroine,” he said in another interview, or—one of his odd phrases—“the amplification of identification.” He also liked to point out, with justification, that blondes photographed in sharper contrast, especially in black and white.

On other occasions he admitted to being a gentleman who sometimes preferred blondes. More than once, he expounded on his favorite qualities in a leading actress. Above all, he invariably mentioned, she ought to be ladylike. During the English half of his career he described the ideal as sleek and petite. “Smallness is a definite asset,” he wrote in a 1931 article. (They were taller in America.) If the actress was a blonde, well, she should be a frosty blonde, he said, evoking a snow-covered volcano, whose sexuality smoldered underneath. It was up to the film, and the director, to stir the dormant fires.

“I more or less base my idea of sexuality on northern European women,” he said. “I think the northern Germans, the Scandinavians and the English are much sexier, although they don’t look it, than those farther south—the Spanish, the Italians. Even your typical Frenchwoman, the provocative one, is not the epitome of French sex. The girl who lives in the country, always wears black on Sunday, is guarded by her parents, wrapped in her family—that’s your typical French girl, and it’s nothing like what they give the tourists.”

Harping on blondes was an interview convenience. Actually, there was surprising variation among the Hitchcock blondes—and he also cast a number of intriguing brunettes. June herself was flaxen-haired; the curling was Hitchcock’s idea.

Yet June helped set the mold for Hitchcock women, as Novello helped set the mold for the men. Hitchcock men could also hew closely to type. Like Novello, most were long, lanky specimens, with dark eyes, raven hair, perfect teeth. These were conventions of stage and screen, to be sure, but equally the wishful projection of a director who was short, fat, with sparse hair, and dubious teeth and breath. “I have always dreamed of being slim as a reed,” Hitchcock once said. All the greatest directors dreamed themselves into their leading roles.

Gainsborough’s publicity team celebrated the glamorous stars of
The Lodger;
the film itself was a celebration of beautiful camera work. Though Hitchcock liked the congenial Novello, he was wary of the actor because of his acting limitations and his homosexuality, unknown to his cult of female fans but no secret to those around him. As Hitchcock filmed Novello—and June—he took pains to work around those twin challenges.

Some of the film’s most famous images were transferred dutifully straight from the novel—among them Novello’s looming, Nosferatu-like appearance in the lodging-house doorway as a “tall, thin shadow of a man” with a “dark, sensitive, hatchet-shaped face” who is “clad in an Inverness cape and an old-fashioned top hat.” But whenever possible the two stars were anatomized into body parts, latticed with light or shade—pictures drawn first in Hitchcock’s mind, and then on paper, before they were transferred to film.
The Lodger
would be full of hands reaching, clutching; giant lips, wide, darting eyes, and cubist ears; treading feet and naked legs.

When Hitchcock’s camera wasn’t anatomizing, it was gliding restlessly, up staircases, into bathrooms, hovering from the rafters or rising even higher, as though the camera were perched in the heavens—as if to remind audiences that God was also watching. (Few directors resorted to overhead shots as insistently, as effectively, as Hitchcock.)

“Fresh from Berlin,” recalled June, “Hitch was so imbued with the value of unusual camera angles and lighting effects with which to create and sustain dramatic suspense that often a scene which would not run for more than three minutes on the screen would take an entire morning to shoot.” Once, she said, she was forced to carry “an iron tray of breakfast dishes up a long flight of stairs” some twenty times before Hitchcock was “satisfied with the expression of fear on my face and the atmosphere established by light and shadows.”

The film’s most bravura sequence—where the landlords fearfully listen to the lodger as he paces back and forth in his room overhead—was also plucked from the book, then masterfully planned and executed by the director. The lodger is seen from below, the camera pointing up through a glass floor. The landlords fret as the lights sway, and the hypnotic footfalls grow almost audible. The apparent stars of the sequence were Novello’s feet—“restlessly walking up and down his sitting room” with “the cautious, stuffless tread of his rubber-soled shoes,” in Mrs. Lowndes’s words. But the real star was Alfred Hitchcock.

With Hitchcock meticulously collecting numbered shots and angles from his annotated script, photography was completed in six weeks. The editing took place concurrently, and by May the trade columns were already reporting that studio insiders who had previewed
The Lodger
thought it might be a masterpiece. But that was Cedric Belfrage’s publicity speaking; inside Gainsborough, opinion was intensely divided about the picture, which had emerged more stylish and edgy than anyone had anticipated.

Graham Cutts—Hitchcock’s former friend, now his diehard foe—continued to bad-mouth his onetime assistant; after seeing an early screening
of
The Lodger
, he told “anybody who would listen that we had a disaster on our hands,” said Michael Balcon.

Another diehard was C. M. Woolf, who still held Hitchcock partially responsible for the fiasco of
The White Shadow.
He had opposed Hitchcock’s promotion to director; now, paranoid that an “artistic” picture could not easily be launched into the maximum number of English theaters, Woolf convened a high-level screening. Hitchcock and Alma “couldn’t bear to wait in the studio to know the results, and we walked the streets of London for an hour and a half.” After hailing a cab back to the studio, they learned that Woolf had walked out, declaring he would shelve
The Lodger.
Bookings were canceled.

Between Woolf and Balcon, alas, hung a maddening gray zone of authority. Balcon equivocated, and time went by; then the producer appealed to Ivor Montagu, considered a statesman of the Film Society, though he wasn’t yet intimately acquainted with Hitchcock.

The Lodger
“was supposed to be highbrow, the most scarlet epithet in the film trade vocabulary,” recalled Montagu. “Hitch, indeed, was deeply suspected by the distributors of this damning fault. Had he not even been trained in an art school, and entered the film world drawing the lettering and little decorative pictures on titles?”

The studio ran another private showing for Montagu, who “fell enthusiastically in love” with the embattled film. “Now, the hackneyed treatment of the plot and a weakness in characterization make it look primitive,” Montagu reflected fifty years later. “Then, by contrast with the work of his seniors and contemporaries, all Hitch’s special qualities stood out raw: the narrative skill, the ability to tell the story and create the tension in graphic combination, and the feeling for London scenes and characters.”

Montagu went to work. There were too many intertitles—“in the region of 350 to 500”
^*
—so he whittled them down. Montagu brought in another Film Society stalwart, E. McKnight Kauffer, an American who helped revolutionize British poster art, to design the main titles and cards. Kauffer’s bold Neuland typeface would reinforce the German aesthetic.
^**

The final sequence, which finds an aroused mob pursuing the lodger through the streets of London, trapping and nearly pummeling him to death as he dangles by his handcuffs from a bridge, was more Soviet-influenced. But the sequence didn’t build properly, in Montagu’s estimation, and as a montage expert who had visited the Soviet Union and discussed editing ideas with Eisenstein himself, Montagu thought that perhaps
Hitchcock should shoot some new footage to heighten the feverish effect.

What could Hitchcock—“five years older than I,” in Montagu’s words, and with “three pictures already tucked under his belt”—do or say when confronted by criticism from this novice, without a single film to his name? But Hitchcock’s “It’s only a movie” maxim was more than a clever quip—it was a statement of deep-seated philosophy.

To his surprise, Montagu found Hitchcock “ungrudgingly warm” and “eager to hear of anything that, even by chance, might make his work more acceptable.” The retakes were filmed in August, and the reedited mob sequence was improved. It was mid-September before everybody felt satisfied, and Gainsborough hosted a press and trade screening.

It was a breakthrough screening. Iris Barry, who had joined the
Mail
, called
The Lodger
“brilliant”; going overboard, the
Bioscope
hailed it as possibly “the finest British production ever made.”

The film was spellbinding for its time. Its eerie tension and periodic jolts of violence seemed perfectly calibrated. The story gaps—the false finger-points, the sugary ending that finds Daisy and the lodger engaged to marry—the director privately disdained, and most critics overlooked.

Four months later, in January 1927,
The Lodger
was released to the public, and Novello’s rabid following made the film a hit across England. All of Woolf’s dire predictions came to naught.

With
The Pleasure Garden
and
The Lodger
Hitchcock had arrived, fullblown, at the tender age of twenty-six. He was touted as the boy wonder of British film. Considering the industry’s inferiority complex, he also loomed as a “Great White Hope,” in June’s words: a wunderkind who might grow up to bring maturity to British film, and drag the entire industry out “of its superannuated swaddling clothes” and “into long trousers.”

With
The Lodger
, Hitchcock displayed his incipient mastery of something besides suspense: he was also a budding master of the press.

His relationship with journalists and critics developed in stages. During the first half of his career, until 1939, the bulk of Hitchcock’s press coverage focused on his work and films. Before Hollywood, before the publicity lessons he learned from David O. Selznick, before his American television series, there was no Hitchcock cult of personality. In England, the publicity he received was normal for such an important director.

In these early years, moreover, Hitchcock wasn’t unduly attracted to, or flattered by, press attention. Gainsborough’s publicity department was in fact notoriously ineffectual, according to publicity director Cedric Belfrage, and the stars received most of its attention. In the case of
The Lodger
,
Hitchcock “was unconcerned when my efforts brought more newspaper space for Novello than for him. The director felt no need for artificial publicity, and was right,” Belfrage recalled in notes for an unpublished memoir.

In England (and later in America), the film press crossed back and forth between Fleet Street and studio jobs, mingling incestuously. Hitchcock counted many journalists and critics among his friends, one reason he was usually comfortable with the press.

When he wasn’t functioning as Gainsborough’s publicity director, for example, Belfrage was also publishing bylined articles in film magazines extolling “Alfred the Great.” Two of London’s most powerful critics, Iris Barry and another woman, C. A. Lejeune of the
Observer
, were welcome visitors to Hitchcock’s home. Not that friends (including Barry and Lejeune) weren’t capable of disliking his films, but knowing critics demystified their opinions.

Hitchcock’s colorful personality was an asset with the press. While a minority of journalists and critics may have been put off by him (as a vociferous minority were by his work), most found him as entertaining and provocative as his films. Drinks, dinner, and conversation with Hitchcock couldn’t be bettered. He loved gossip and idle talk about show business. He saw the critics and journalists as sounding boards for his ideas. They were usually intelligent about film, and always brought gossip and news of their own.

Self-advertisement was a crucial step in Hitchcock’s evolution. But when he first appeared on the screen in
The Lodger
, his cameo was intended as a wink at the press, rather than an attempt to launch himself as a public figure. It was a moment of self-advertisement for a small circle.