The landlady has an admiration for him that you feel is a kind of hero-worship for all gentlefolk. Most of the action takes place in an old London house in which two rooms are let to a mysterious stranger, played by Ivor Novello. Women are in such terror that some of them going into the streets at night hide their golden locks and wear side switches of dark hair. We see London on tenterhooks owing to a series of murders of fair-haired women every Tuesday night, within a narrow area of the city. Belloc-Lowndes, which must have been suggested by the Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel thirty or forty years ago. It is a lesson to the United States in its power of suggestion by picture it needs hardly any captions. “The Lodger” is good enough not only to fill British cinemas night after night, but to leap over the barriers into many foreign countries. I urged in notes on “Mademoiselle from Armentieres” that British producers should abandon the ranting emphasis of melodrama, show the drama within the mind, study technique of tension, and make their incidents speak to us with not only surface vigour but also symbolical inwardness – in a word (one so popular in my youth that now I fear it is too readily despised) they should aim at subjectivity.Įvery one of these essentials has gone to the making of “The Lodger,” and we have beyond question a distinguished piece of British work. It was exciting to trace how they permeated the whole work. I looked for certain qualities which I have thought essential, though often lacking, in British films. I suggest to my friend that my enjoyment was all the keener because I watched the film critically. I have just seen “The Lodger” at the Scala Theatre. This friend will be delighted to find for once that I can praise a film, and a British one at that, with gusto. I’ll bet when the Last Day comes you’ll say the trumpet music isn’t ’stately enough for so important an occasion.” I love to see gorgeous frocks and champagne drinking in jazzy American mansions, and I don’t care a bit if the story has been murdered to get in these scenes.īut you- you are always carping. I am one of the great uncritical British public, and I glory in my shame. I’m sure that I enjoy films much more than you do. You can’t see a picture or read a book without wanting to take it to pieces. Someone said to me the other day after reading impressions of a film: “What a dreadful critical mind you have. That film was Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Lodger,” and the newspaper’s critic was impressed by all aspects of the movie:- A REALLY EXCELLENT BRITISH FILM The Leeds Mercury, on Tuesday, 26th April 1927, was fulsome in its praise of a new film that just been released.
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