In 1966, Hitchcock commented that The Lodger "was the first time I exercised my style...you might almost say it was my first picture" (Spoto, 1992: 5). Indeed, one can view The Lodger as a veritable collection of Hitchcock firsts:

first film in which Hitchcock made a cameo appearance (two appearances, some claim)

first film in which Hitchcock introduced an unnamed central character (Rebecca)

first film in which the Police were depicted as occasionally inept, and possibly as untrustworthy as the villain (The 39 Steps, Blackmail)

first film in which brandy was taken for "medicinal" purposes

first film to feature Hitchcockian visual effects (the sound of the lodger’s footsteps illustrated visually through the use of a glass floor; Joe’s ruminations reflected back to him in the lodger’s footprint)

first film to be loosely based on a novel about a real-life serial killer (Jack the Ripper); Hitchcock repeated this with Psycho which was based on Robert Bloch’s novel about Ed Gein - and Frenzy, of course

first film to depict the relations among the major characters as triangular (Hitchcock even used stylized triangles on his titlecards for the film)

first film to portray the consequences of evil being brought into the safe refuge of the middle-class family (Shadow of a Doubt)

first film in which lovers are linked together with handcuffs (Saboteur, The 39 Steps)

first film in which a male character attempts the transformation of a woman by dressing her in clothing of his choosing (Vertigo)

first film in which Hitchcock was forced by studio pressure to alter his intended ending (he wanted the lodger to be guilty – or at least to leave his guilt or innocence unresolved - just as he wanted Cary Grant to be guilty in Suspicion)

The list could be extended further, but this gives some evidence of the significance that The Lodger came to assume in Hitchcock’s cinematic development. With The Lodger Hitchcock established the foundations for an artistic vision - and a philosophy of technique - that was to sustain his cinematic work for the next five decades. Indeed, there are few technical or thematic elements of Hitchcock’s mature work that cannot be found in nascent form in this black-and-white, silent film. Hence Rothman’s contention that "The Lodger is not an apprentice work but a thesis, definitively establishing Hitchcock’s identity as an artist" (Rothman, 1982: 7).

But even as The Lodger prefigures much that was to form the core of Hitchcock’s cinematic sensibility, the film is a product of a developing mind, and should not be taken as an inflexible template for the subsequent evolution of Hitchcock’s imagination. Its artistry lies not merely in the way in which one can read into its images and style evidences of Hitchcock’s later techniques, but in the manner in which Hitchcock revealed his talent for exploiting the potentials of the cinematic medium. Unlike Citizen Kane, which established a high-tide mark to which Welles’s was forever forced - unsuccessfully - to reach, The Lodger established a kind of cinematic framework within which Hitchcock would hone his artistry. The Lodger was Hitchcock’s arrival, not his departure.

For all of its artistic ingenuity, however, The Lodger was an exercise in frustration, for although he completed the picture with relative dispatch, Hitchcock was faced with a number of obstacles in releasing the film. A nearly vindictive lack of support from C. M. Woolf, who headed the distribution company for Gainsborough Pictures, and the personal jealousies of a rival director at that studio, were formidable impediments standing between the film and the public. Despite the fact that the work had excited critics at a special screening in September of 1926 - The Evening News described it as "an essay in film technique" (20 Sept. 1926) - Woolf declared the film "too ‘highbrow’, and too involved with ‘art’" to be suitable for theatrical release (Kapsis, 1992: 18). This was hardly the sort of criticism that was to be Hitchcock’s fortune over the years. Nonetheless, it is important to point out that Woolf highlighted early in Hitchcock’s career a theme that was to accompany - and perhaps plague - his development every step of the way: the conflict between high art and popular culture. It is easy today to forget that despite the mass appeal of films like North by Northwest, Psycho, and It Takes a Thief, a profound artistic perception was firmly in control of the production.

The Lodger is an exceedingly artistic film, combining the eerie, atmospheric aspects of German expressionism in its mise-en-scène, with the conventional narrative of the British murder mystery. Ivor Novello’s over-the-top performance hampers the film in some respects, but as an historical allusion to the traditions of live theater his acting has a peculiar charm nonetheless. And the occasionally heavy-handed staging in some sequences - such as the lodger’s initial appearance at the Bunting’s home in which Novello emerges as a ghostly apparition with vampiric intents - clearly date the movie.

Working from Eliot Stannard’s screenplay of Marie Belloc Lowndes’s novel, Hitchcock and an illustrator sketched out each scene of the film in advance of shooting, indicating on paper everything from set design to props. This penchant for preplanning - some might call it an obsession - would characterize Hitchcock’s work forever after. But when Woolf decided the film was an inferior effort, unworthy of studio support, the production crew’s labor appeared to be a waste of time - and a waste of 12,000 pounds. Woolf, who seemed incapable of appreciating Hitchcock’s sense of cinematic exposition, was concerned chiefly with ensuring that his films were structured according to conventional narrative intelligibility. Hitchcock’s style, clearly at odds with Woolf’s view of what made a picture palatable for a mass audience, involved a form of complexity that pushed the film in several directions at once. As Taylor has pointed out, Woolf simply did not understand the film (1996: 73). Where Woolf wanted explicit signposts directing the viewer, Hitchcock strove to multiply the different levels of meaning in the film, creating a more deeply textured work than Woolf thought necessary. Hitchcock, too, wanted to tell a story, but not at the expense of excluding the unique style of narrative the cinema permitted. "My models were forever after the German filmmakers of 1924 and 1925," Hitchcock told Spoto. "They were trying very hard to express ideas in purely visual terms" (Spoto, 1992: 75). In like fashion Hitchcock labored to present his ideas cinematically - to make the film’s visual aspect the major component of the storytelling. Hitchcock prized the disequilibrium that could be achieved with unusual camera angles, intense contrasts in lighting, and the way that characters could be placed in the cinematic frame - the way, in other words, in which the art of the cinema could be used to evoke (and perhaps manipulate) the audience’s emotions. In his quest to produce art, Hitchcock was unwilling to accept that his audience could understand nothing of the nuances of cinematic reality. "Isn’t it a fascinating design?" he once said to Truffault speaking of Strangers on a Train. "You could study it forever." C. M. Woolf, however, had no interest in distributing pictures an audience might wish to study.

That The Lodger was eventually released was due chiefly to the interventions of the film’s producer, Michael Balcon. Recognizing Woolf’s intractability, Balcon enlisted the assistance of Ivor Montagu, who, though only 22 at the time, was a founding member of the Film Society in Britain. Montagu suggested reshooting several scenes and helped Hitchcock to pare the intertitle cards from nearly 300 to around 80. The result was a leaner film than the one Hitchcock had shot, but one that was superior in its dramatic narrative. It was not by Montagu that Hitchcock was introduced to the idea that a purely cinematic methodology was possible, but the experience with Montagu (about whose contributions Hitchcock was less than generous in his later reflections) consolidated the young director’s growing appreciation for the discursive potential of a visually-driven narrative. Even today the film transcends the putative limitations of silence with its typically Hitchcockian motifs and innovations. As Spoto comments, The Lodger "may be the noisiest silent picture ever made" (1992: 5).

The film begins with a lengthy montage. A brief glimpse of a hand appears, and then the screen fills with a close-up of a young, blonde woman screaming in terror before a third cut brings us to the flashing lights of a theater marquee. As with many of Hitchcock’s films, there is an immediate joining here of the "real" action of the film - the woman’s murder - with the pretense and artifice of the theater. The lights of the marquee which flash out the words "To-Night, Golden Curls," hover in the blackness, disconnected visually from anything but the young woman’s panic-stricken face. We cannot be certain, in fact, that the flashing lights are a part of a theater marquee until some minutes later, for no context is offered for interpreting the words that illuminate the otherwise blackened screen. Hitchcock then cuts back to the woman who now lies dead on the ground, a victim, we learn, of a serial killer who has been terrorizing London, preying only upon blonde women. His card has been left on the body, the words "The Avenger" framed within a triangle. Triangular configurations will continue to play a conspicuous role throughout the film.

The montage carries us forward through the police interview with a witness, the mocking of her report by a bystander who mimics the killer’s description, and the subsequent reports on the killing filed by reporters. In this latter sequence Hitchcock shows the mass media’s operations in detail, with images of reporters, newspaper production, and radio broadcasts (there is some stock footage included here, as well as Hitchcock’s first cameo appearance as an editor – or possibly news director - at the newspaper office). This fascination with detail will later be repeated in The Wrong Man, and even in Psycho, underscoring a life-long interest with documentary film.

We then cut to the interior of the theater already mentioned to find a group of young women returning backstage from an evening’s performance; each woman wears a curly blonde wig, a detail that explains the illuminated words on the marquee while forcing a further connection between the Avenger (who preys only on blonde women) and the theater. The chorus girls’ jovial mood dissolves, however, with the appearance of a late edition of the paper and its headline announcing that the avenger has struck again - as he does every Tuesday evening. This weekly performance by the killer is a strained kind of expediency, a sign, one might argue, of a poorly contrived plot. Yet it suggests an additional relation between the murders and the theater, giving the homicides a kind of staged, theatrical quality. Moreover, the cyclical repetition of the crime also provides a deliberately measured pace not only to the killer’s behavior, but also to the rhythm of the film’s suspense. In The Lodger, Tuesday’s approach brings with it not the surprise of the unknown, but the suspense of inevitability. Indeed, the inevitability of evil, rather than the shock of the unexpected, is the primary structure for Hitchcock’s suspense. The inevitability of the Avenger’s attacks reaches out not only into the audience’s field of expectations, but folds back again into the narrative of the film, for it is the Avenger’s orderly movement across the geography of London that eventually suggests to the police a means for his apprehension. The nightmarish quality of predictability overshadows the fear of uncertainty.

None of the chorus girls featured in the scenes backstage is a major player in the subsequent drama, although one of the performers does become a victim of the killer later in the film. However, their varied reactions to the tragic news are a central part of Hitchcock’s montage, giving us an important glimpse into their lives, and revealing in candid fashion their fears and insecurities. Several of the women joke about the Avenger, one momentarily concealing the lower portion of her face with a scarf in imitation of the witness’s description as told by the news report. Another shows how she will camouflage herself by tucking two false ringlets of brunette hair beneath her hat. The irony that is expressed here neatly encapsulates these women’s position in the world first as entertainers, and second as potential victims. In the first instance, the women have adorned themselves with blonde wigs as part of a production number in order to appeal to what must be a largely male audience; the anonymous men inside the theater are entertained by women who transform themselves according to dominant conventions of attractiveness. In the second instance, however, the performers contemplate disguising themselves with different wigs to be protected from a serial killer outside the theater; again, the anonymous male must in some way be appeased. The putting on and putting off of makeup/wigs/costumes in order to make themselves presentable/invisible to the anonymous male gaze has become the defining activity of both theatrical production and the production of everyday relations for the women. The tension that is developed in the juxtaposition of these competing motives - attracting and repelling the male Other - accounts in part for the obvious expression of powerlessness as displayed on the faces of the women who pass through the montage. As Spoto writes:

The whole film has a delicate poise between this kind of repulsion and attraction, between paranoia (the murder is on the prowl) and laughter at that paranoia (people in the street, and in the chorus girls’ dressing room, frighten each other for fun and for the sense of relief). There is an underlying fear of the little things of everyday life, which are seen as menacing. (Spoto, 1983: 101)

The opening montage establishes the film’s problematic with economy and wit. The combination of terror and morbid humor underscore the public’s psychologically varied responses to the Avenger. Moreover, the consequences of the killer’s actions are revealed primarily in the way that these actions affect those who have become victims of fear; that is, while we never actually witness the Avenger at work nor dwell on the immediate results of his actions, we are given a lengthy montage in which mass-mediated versions of the killer’s activities are recounted.

Yet the fear to which we are introduced is shown to be produced not simply by the Avenger’s brutality, but by the performances of the mass media. Indeed, the mass media are curiously dependent on the Avenger and his weekly ritual, a fact that is revealed in the words of one newspaper vendor who proclaims Tuesday to be his "lucky day". Images of paper vendors clamoring the latest grisly headline appear throughout the film, as do scenes of the film’s main characters gathered about the newspaper. Even the lodger, at that point in the film where audience suspicion that he is the killer is being stoked by Hitchcock, is troubled greatly by the sound of a newspaper seller announcing the evening’s murder from the street below the lodging house window.

The film’s action is not with the Avenger’s stalking of his victims, nor with the police effort to track him down. Indeed, that all of this happens offscreen suggests that The Lodger is not so much a film about murder or police work as it is a film about insecurity, fear, and suspicion. And these insecurities, fears, and suspicions are more directly the results of mass mediated information than they are the products of the actual slayings. As Lesley Brill has commented:

Hitchcock devotes the opening of the film - second in rhetorical importance only to its end - to social reactions because the murders have great significance for the whole society; they are not represented as an isolated aberration.... London’s response to the murders is to make of them entertainment, a source of titillation for the idly curious. Details both in the opening and in later sequences indicate that the amusement of the people of London find in the Avenger’s murders is related to the voyeurist pleasures they take in fair-haired young women more generally. (Brill, 1986: 72).

Brill’s analysis is made more complete by the additional observation that Hitchcock’s film is itself directly implicated in the realm of the mass media’s tendency to transform the macabre and the horrific into entertainment; The Lodger is precisely just such an act of transformation. Furthermore, to insist that we must respect the difference between the film as fiction, and the representation of the murders within the film as fact, is to fail to acknowledge the way in which Hitchcock has shown us that the news is produced; in other words, the point of the opening montage, one might argue, is to erase the boundary between fact and fiction - not so that we might confuse The Lodger with a documentary film, but so that we will be drawn into the film as subjects and as spectators. Hitchcock’s crowds pour over the newspapers feverishly, and they scan the outdoor news marquee in rapt attention. So too, our gaze at the screen is directed by the director - recalling, for the moment, that Hitchcock has made his first cameo in the film as an editor at the newspaper office, directing his underlings to their various duties. We may take exception as filmgoers to the images of those who treat the killer’s atrocities as though they were merely entertaining diversions from the humdrum of their everyday lives, yet as theatergoers we are equally guilty of this attitude.

After her introduction as a fashion model, the film’s heroine, Daisy Bunting, arrives home to find her parents discussing the newspaper report of the Avenger’s latest murder. Her boyfriend Joe, a police detective, is already present. As Daisy reads the newspaper account, Joe suggests an immediate affinity between himself and the Avenger, telling Daisy that, like the Avenger, he is himself fond of blonde hair - a direct reference to Daisy. This is the first of three tasteless jokes that Joe tells, a practise he will only abandon when he returns from the scene of the Avenger’s eighth killing, horrified by what he will see. From that point forward, Joe neither jokes nor smiles for the remainder of the film.

Early in the film, however, Joe is a happy-go-lucky character, whose cavalier attitude toward the Avenger suggests that he treats his police duties with less than serious attention. In drawing a parallel between his own attraction to Daisy (symbolized by her blonde hair) and the Avenger’s fetish for golden-haired women, Joe articulates a triangular structure that will lie back of most of the film’s subsequent action (the three-way relation between Joe and Mr. and Mrs. Bunting precedes the expression of the triangular relations between Daisy, Joe, and the Avenger, but this trilateral configuration is less important). Daisy is represented clearly as a potential victim of the Avenger, given that the three qualifications of being a woman, of being young, and of being blonde have already been forcibly conveyed in the film’s opening sequences. And Joe’s status as police detective (though as yet not assigned to the Avenger case) places him directly in the position of Daisy’s guardian. Joe, we might reasonably conclude in these opening moments, will stand between Daisy and the Avenger. In this respect Joe emerges in the narrative’s opening moments as the film’s male lead.

And yet, Joe is quickly reduced in stature. His inappropriate joke comparing himself to the Avenger is not endorsed by Daisy who rolls her eyes in disgust, and his subsequent effort to make amends by surreptitiously presenting her with two hearts he cuts out with a cookie cutter receives a mock rebuff from Daisy who tosses his heart back at him. Disconsolate, Joe tears his cookie heart in half and gazes forlornly into the camera. Daisy’s reaction is only mild amusement.

The scene is curious for several reasons. In the first instance, it is unclear what we are to make of their relationship. Mrs. Bunting shows obvious pleasure in Joe’s efforts at affection, delighted in seeing her daughter matched with a police detective. Mr. Bunting, expressing the stereotypically dull-witted oblivion of a father, remains noncommittal regarding matters of the heart. Hence our sense of Daisy’s reaction to Joe’s protestations of love are equally ambivalent. He appears to be genuinely attached to Daisy, but she often seems to be distant from him, and disinterested in his actions. Moreover, his tasteless attempts at humor leave her more annoyed than amused, suggesting that although she tolerates his attentions - and accepts that Joe is the best she is likely to do - she has loftier ambitions in respect of a lover. Joe is a pedestrian sort: low, vulgar, obsequious, and cloying. His suit is cheap and rumpled and his manner generally brusque. Furthermore, as Brill points out, the fact that Joe consorts as easily with her parents as he does with Daisy suggests that he may also be too old for her (1986). In short, Daisy’s rejection of Joe’s cookie-heart is itself a heart-felt rejection even as it is apparently meant in jest. Indeed, although the scene is played for laughs the serious undertow is inescapable: Daisy reads about a murderer of blonde women and her boyfriend suggests that he and the killer are alike. It is hard to ignore the fact that Joe is far too insensitive to accept him readily as the film’s male hero.

The climax of this domestic interlude is the lodger’s arrival. Two symbols suggest his imminent appearance, including the dimming of the lights (the electric meter requires money) and the sounding of the cuckoo clock. The first event may seem inconsequential, but the symbolic intimations of darkness as a prelude to a character’s appearance hardly need explaining. Moreover, that the darkness is a consequence of a meter calling out for payment is a subtle indicator of the Bunting’s lower-middle-class status. That the man at the door will turn out to be someone bringing them further income in the form of rent suggests that while he may usher in darkness of one sort (the suspicion of his being a murderer), he will bring light of another kind. The lodger’s wealth is only revealed at the close of the film, but is hinted at when he pays for a month in advance with neither hesitation nor negotiation. Later we are shown that he is inclined to leave money lying about his room, a practice that distresses Mrs. Bunting.

In the second instance one cannot help but reflect on Hitchcock’s use of birds as symbols of chaos. Perhaps the cuckoo, a bird that displaces others from their nest, is especially significant in this film. As events will show, the lodger will initiate a series of displacements and disruptions. He will disrupt the apparently smooth operations of the Bunting home and displace Joe from his station in Daisy’s affections. In addition, as many of Hitchcock’s interpreters have pointed out, birds are outwardly soft animals, yet they have pointed beaks and sharp claws; many are predators. The lodger too, conceals something dark and potentially sinister behind his affected exterior. The lodger’s arrival is thus signaled by everyday events which, though hardly significant to the characters within the narrative, are intended to be more than accidental occurrences to us watching the film.

The structure of the lodger’s entry has already been mentioned. Mrs. Bunting opens the door and as the London fog swirls about, a tall, dark, and menacing figure is revealed to us. Seen from Mrs. Bunting’s perspective, the stranger at the door immediately conjures up recollections of the witness’s description of the Avenger including the detail of a scarf covering the lower half of his face. When he steps into the light and slowly removes his scarf, his actions are stilted, artificial, and deliberate. His face is a study in intensity, and he gazes about the room furtively. Mrs. Bunting has difficulty collecting herself, but when the man points to the sign advertising a room for rent she offers to show him upstairs to inspect the quarters.

Novello’s campiness is at its zenith in the following scenes. The lodger inspects his room, finds it adequate, and dismisses Mrs. Bunting to bring him a sparse meal. While she is out of the room he seeks for a place to hide a small black valise, eventually locking it in a cupboard and pocketing the key. When Mrs. Bunting returns she opens the door to discover that he is turning all of the pictures around so that they face the wall. These pictures are of young, blonde women in various poses, including - curiously - one scene of bondage. The lodger explains to Mrs. Bunting that he finds the pictures disturbing, and would like to have them removed. She calls downstairs for Daisy to come and assist her.

Daisy enters the room, sees what the lodger has done, and bursts out laughing. This is the second time he has heard her laughter, for when he first entered the house she was laughing at her father who had fallen from a chair while putting a coin in the meter. Here, standing in the doorway, framed in soft focus, Daisy is unaware of the lodger standing only several feet away, but the sound of her voice on him is hypnotic, and he is plainly startled out of his stupor. Then, in a remarkable take, the lodger, shot from Daisy’s perspective, turns about to see her. He is facing the mirror and Daisy is to his left. Yet rather than make a simple 90° movement, the lodger turns to his right, sweeping around the room a full 270° . The gaze that comes to rest gaze on Daisy is a curious intermingling of surprise, attraction, and, I would argue, recognition. In Daisy, I believe, the lodger first sees the image of his murdered sister. This may explain why he was entranced by the sound of her laughter, for the last thing he heard from his sister’s lips at her coming-out ball was her laughter. The lodger’s filial affection will, of course, be transformed into romantic love. But in his initial gaze, Daisy carries him back into the dance hall, and memories of his sister fill his mind.

This may also account for the fact that we have no subjective shot of Daisy immediately following the lodger’s view of her. Instead we cut to a view of the room, where Hitchcock shows the lodger and Daisy eyeing one another hesitantly. The absence of the opposing subjective shot seems at first an editing oversight: what does he see in Daisy’s face, and how is she returning his stare? Hitchcock withholds the answers, increasing our curiosity just as the lodger’s extended turn increases our anticipation of his first view of Daisy. Not knowing what the lodger saw in Daisy’s eyes at the moment of their first meeting increases the mystery of his intentions.

Mrs. Bunting arrives and symbolically pushes Daisy across the threshold into the lodger’s room. They gather up the offending pictures and Daisy carries them downstairs. Daisy again encounters Joe who follows her into the parlor. Inside, Joe sweeps Daisy into his arms and kisses her, the abruptness of his actions standing in stark contrast to the deliberate and extended movements of the lodger upstairs only moments before. This contrast is especially significant in light of the way in which Hitchcock provides no touches of cinematic intimacy to the scene, and Joe’s actions seem clownish and even juvenile. All of Joe’s and Daisy’s embraces and kisses are shot from a medium distance. This structure seems to establish them as mere objects of our gaze, and the absence of close-ups lends a voyeuristic character to their intimacies. When Daisy and the lodger commence to kindling their romance, the camera itself turns more intimate, providing a sequence of powerful subjective shots to heighten the audience’s emotional engagement with them.

Joe’s physical impulsiveness stands in for a deeper examination of his immaturity, adding further evidence to our growing suspicions that he is unsuitable for Daisy. The lodger, by contrast, exudes a haughtiness which, though off-putting in the initial stages, is both a captivating and even seductive quality. Joe is literally a superficial character, whose visceral responses betray an impetuosity he struggles to control. The lodger, on the other hand, is a man of far greater depth and complexity, whose tortured and anguished appearance hints at darker mysteries. With Joe, there is little to explore other than the surfaces; with the lodger, a world of possibilities is opened up to Daisy.

Mrs. Bunting enters the room and Joe and Daisy cease their embrace and inspect the pictures. Joe is puzzled that the lodger would not want these pictures of attractive blonde women hanging on his wall (we know that Joe would want them), and suggests that the lodger is not "keen on the girls." The reference is double-edged, for the actor, Ivor Novello, was a known homosexual to Hitchcock and others working on the set of the film. In the context of the narrative, though, it suggests that Joe’s investigative instincts are utterly untrustworthy. The lodger is indeed "keen on the girls" - and especially keen on Daisy - though in a way the story has yet to make evident. The viewer cannot but be struck, however, by Joe’s capacity to jump to precisely the wrong conclusion.

The scene with the pictures concludes with Hitchcock’s first cinematic special effect. As Joe, Daisy, and Mrs. Bunting huddle in the parlor discussing the lodger, an overhead shot brings the chandelier into view. It begins to sway, drawing their attention to the ceiling which then fades into transparency (Hitchcock used a glass floor). Through the ceiling we now see the lodger, as if shot from the parlor below, as he paces across his room, his movements causing the chandelier to sway. The effect is startling, though perhaps somewhat clumsy (Hitchcock later regretted it). But it serves to establish an important symbol for the rest of the film: the chandelier - with its three lamps - is now a symbol of the lodger, and when the Buntings gaze at the chandelier it is as if we are peering into their minds as they imagine the lodger and his murderous impulses.

With the lodger now firmly entrenched in the Bunting household, the storyline unfolds quickly and with a calculated predictability. Daisy and the Lodger become friends, and we see her spending more time visiting in his room. They play chess together, and display all the cinematic signs of an emergent romance. But there are still indications that we are not yet to trust the lodger fully. When Daisy brings him breakfast, for instance, a curious sequence of edits makes it appear as though he is about to threaten her with a knife (shades of Blackmail and Psycho), and during their chess match, he reaches for a poker as they sit near the fireplace with a menacing look as Daisy retrieves a chess piece from the floor. Both events are ruses, of course, but the possibility that the lodger is the Avenger is reinforced nonetheless.

On the night of their chess game Joe comes to the Bunting kitchen to announce proudly that he has been assigned to the Avenger case. Upstairs, the chess game has proceeded to the stage of incipient courtship, and the lodger and Daisy exchange a sequence of glances suggesting a combination of seduction and uncertainty. The intimate close-ups suddenly end with a long shot as the lodger and Daisy draw back from one another in response to a knock at the door. When Mrs. Bunting enters to announce Joe’s arrival, Daisy’s expression is an unqualified look of disappointment, and she leaves the lodger’s room reluctantly. Downstairs, Joe dangles a pair of handcuffs in front of Mr. Bunting, explaining just as Daisy enters the kitchen that "When I’ve put a rope around the Avenger’s neck" - and here he impersonates a hanged man - "I’ll put a ring around Daisy’s finger." This is Joe’s second tasteless joke, one that is even more grotesque than the first. Like his first jest it also relies on his forging a puzzling alliance between himself and the Avenger, making the nature of his relation with Daisy dependent on his association with the murderer. It is also the first instance in a Hitchcock film of a connection being drawn between murder and marriage.

Daisy leaves the kitchen and Joe follows her, continuing his joke about handcuffs and marriage, finally pinning her playfully near the bottom of the stairs and locking the handcuffs on her. This will be his third and final attempt at humor, for when Daisy realizes what he has done she screams frantically. Mrs. Bunting and the lodger rush out from his room at the sound of Daisy’s cry. The camera then cuts to a low angle shot in which Daisy’s struggle to free herself from the manacles is shown only in the shadows along the stairwell wall. This image darkens the implications of Daisy’s struggle considerably, accentuating the terror she feels and negating the humorous intent lying back of Joe’s actions. Shot only in the shadows, Daisy’s efforts to free herself clearly suggest that she is fighting to release herself from something far more sinister than a boyfriend’s prank. Perhaps, as both Brill (1986) and Rothman (1982) suggest, she is fearful of the idea of her impending matrimonial bondage to Joe. From the top of the stairs the lodger looks down at the spectacle in disgust before retreating back to his room. Finally freed from the handcuffs, Daisy is comforted by her mother who escorts her into the parlor.

This is the first time in the film that the lodger and Joe have been in the same scene, though Joe remained oblivious to the lodger’s presence. From this point in the film, one might almost think of The Lodger as a series of studies in the movement of Daisy across the emotional spectrum, and across the screen. In this scene, she is drawn from the lodger’s room by Joe’s arrival (and moved from a state of sexual arousal to one of disappointment), and then taken into the parlor by her mother following Joe’s sadistic prank with the handcuffs (where her reluctance to meet with Joe has given way to virtual terror). Once inside, Joe follows and offers apologies which Daisy apparently accepts, albeit with some reluctance, again moving from anger to a kind of resignation. But once she and Joe have hugged and exchanged a kiss, Daisy darts from the room and literally skips back up the stairs (presumably to rejoin the lodger). Joe and Mrs. Bunting are puzzled by her behavior, and Joe reflects in what must be the most ominous intertitle card in the film, "Does this lodger of yours mean any harm to Daisy?" Mrs. Bunting’s laughter and her assurance that the lodger is not "that sort" do nothing to assuage Joe’s concern - nor do they do much to deflect our attention from the possibility that the lodger and the Avenger are one. The fact that Daisy’s symbolic emancipation from Joe is followed by her immediate return to the lodger quickens the viewer’s concern over the meaning of the lodger’s dalliances.

Daisy has now begun a sequence of movements between the lodger and Joe that is sustained until the final stages of the film. Her retreat from Joe following his apology in the parlor has also solidified the link between Joe and the lodger, and Joe’s suspicions about the Avenger, and his suspicions about the lodger, begin to coalesce into a mutually reinforcing apprehension about his own place in Daisy’s life. Indeed, Joe’s investigation into the Avenger case, and his concerns about Daisy and the lodger, become an inseparable, overriding worry for him. Thus Hitchcock continues to present the major relations of the film in the triangular motif described earlier, and with each subsequent scene in which the lodger, Joe, and Daisy are shown, the meaning of the action can be read from Daisy’s movements across the frame, from Joe to the lodger and back again. This becomes especially pointed in their next encounter.

It is now the Tuesday night following the lodger’s arrival, and Hitchcock provides a victim for the Avenger in the person of one of the chorus girls who was shown in the opening montage. She has argued with her boyfriend and commenced to walk home alone through the London fog. At the same time, the lodger has begun preparations to leave the Bunting home, sneaking his way out of his room and down the staircase. This sequence contains several atmospheric touches, including low angle shots of the lodger emerging from his room which suggest that we are peering up at him from some secret hiding place, and thereby reinforce our suspicions concerning his movements. There is also a remarkable overhead shot of the stairway in the Bunting home, showing only the lodger’s white hand against the dark wood of the banister spiraling downward as though running in concentric circles down a drain. This shot carries us back to the brief opening shot in the montage where a man’s hand appeared a split moment before the film’s first murder. There are also intimations in this sequence of Vertigo. Staircases often play a significant part in Hitchcock’s attempt to draw out the length of a scene for dramatic and mysterious effects.

Mrs. Bunting is alone in the house, as Daisy is out (with Joe, perhaps?), and Mr. Bunting has taken a job as a waiter at a swank party and is not expected in until very late. Mrs. Bunting hears the lodger leaving his room and cranes her neck to detect his movement down the stairs. From her window she spies him walking away from the house and then, draping her robe about her, she creeps to his room. There follows a series of shots tracing her movement from her room to the lodger’s where she snoops about trying to discover any secrets that might confirm or refute her growing suspicions about the man who only that evening she herself defended from Joe’s suggestions. The close-up shots of her face make it unmistakable that suspicions have begun to grow in her mind, but it remains unclear whether these suspicions are connected to her fear that Daisy’s love life is about to be disturbed, or her fear that Daisy’s life is at risk. When she detects the lodger returning to his room after midnight, however, it seems clear from her expression that it is the latter worry that has consumed her. The lodger, she has determined, is the Avenger.

The murder of the chorus girl echoes faithfully the film’s opening sequences, but the significance of the killing is curiously blunted by the comedic imagery that follows when the scene opens the following morning in the Bunting kitchen. Mrs. Bunting yawns incessantly as she prepares breakfast, apparently tired after a night sleepless from worry. Mr. Bunting yawns as a consequence of his late night work. And as they try in their turns to stifle their yawns, the sight of one another, mouths agape, makes it impossible for them to stem the contagion of their fatigue. Daisy watches all of this and laughs heartily before taking the lodger’s breakfast tray upstairs.

Joe’s arrival is typical. He blusters into the kitchen without knocking and seats himself in his usual chair. He literally orders Mrs. Bunting to bring him tea. But aside from his swaggering attitude, he is a changed man in some respect, and when he utters "The way that fiend did her in--" we realize that his attendance at the murder scene of the previous night has transformed the Avenger from myth to reality. The brutality of the killing has had an impact on Joe that has changed his view of matters utterly. As I mentioned earlier, from this juncture forward, Joe neither jokes nor smiles in the film. His attitude, we can assume, is a result of what he has witnessed at the sight of the killing, though his uneasiness over the lodger - whom even he could hardly mistake as a rival for Daisy - may also account for his changed demeanor.

Joe’s account to Mr. and Mrs. Bunting of the murder is interrupted by a cut to a tray of food falling to the floor, a close-up of Daisy screaming - a close-up identical to those of the two murdered women - and a cut away to one of the pictures that were removed from the lodger’s room falling to the floor.

Joe and the Buntings rush up to the lodger’s room. As Joe opens the door he sees Daisy and the lodger laughing and embracing by the window. Seeing them in one another’s arms, Joe stalks across the floor, the camera providing his viewpoint as the distance between him and the couple diminishes. It is here that Daisy’s proximity becomes telling. Joe pulls Daisy from the lodger’s arms and interposes himself between her and the lodger, forming a linear arrangement from left to right across the screen. Daisy’s mother then pulls Daisy further away yet, so that both Joe and Mrs. Bunting now stand between her and the lodger (somehow Mr. Bunting has disappeared entirely from the scene). Joe and the lodger square off as though about to come to blows. During this time Daisy has taken upon herself the task of cleaning up the mess while explaining to Joe that she dropped the breakfast tray after being frightened by a mouse. Hitchcock then moves Daisy toward the camera, so a triangle is formed between her, the lodger, and Joe, Daisy forming the centerpoint of the line between Joe and the lodger from our vantage point. Mrs. Bunting is now framed outside of the triangle. The argument continues, Daisy placed symbolically between them as both the source of their connection, and the cause of their anger. Just as Joe joked about his relation to Daisy being predicated on a connection with the Avenger, so now Daisy has become the medial object both drawing together and driving apart the two men.

The lodger crosses the room, opens his door, and demands that they leave. Another shot of the room establishes the triangularity again, Daisy closest to the camera at equal distance from both men. Joe moves to the door, collapsing the geometry. Catching himself up he returns into the triangle, steps around a chair, and pulls Daisy from her position and pushes her to the door. Mrs. Bunting, of course, first introduced Daisy to the lodger by pushing her across the threshold into the room; now Joe revokes that introduction by forcing her retreat. With the three-way configuration undone, Daisy and the lodger speak to one another at the door. She offers an apology for Joe’s behavior which is accepted. Then, having walked out into the hall, she pauses for a suggestive glance across her shoulder at the lodger who watches her leave. Joe follows her, but not without an angry glance at the lodger who then informs Mrs. Bunting that he will tolerate no such further interruptions.

Downstairs in the parlor Joe and Daisy argue. He apologizes by way of explaining that there is something about the lodger he cannot stand. His violent and potentially abusive treatment of Daisy is thus justified by his conception that masculine jealousy, and the privilege of intimidating and controlling women, are beyond the need of further justification. Hence the manifest differences between Joe and the lodger are drawn ever more starkly. Joe’s bellicosity, and his desire to dominate Daisy, are countered completely by the lodger’s sensitivity, and his far gentler treatment of Daisy.

Joe pushes his apology, and eventually, Daisy relents and they embrace and exchange a kiss. Mrs. Bunting who is eavesdropping outside the parlor door decides not to enter - the first time she has knowingly left Joe and Daisy unchaperoned. But her look is a quizzical combination of happiness at their reconciliation, and continuing worry about the lodger and what his presence in their house might mean - and, no doubt, about Daisy’s obviously changed attitude to both Joe and the lodger. Inside the parlor, Joe and Daisy continue their embrace while the camera cuts to an overhead shot recalling the earlier scene of Joe, Daisy, and Mrs. Bunting gazing up at the swinging chandelier. This time only Daisy peers up from her position in Joe’s arms, and stares (longingly?) at the gently swaying lamps. The sequence concludes with Mrs. Bunting finally revealing her fears to Mr. Bunting, explaining how on the night of the murder the lodger had disappeared for several hours before sneaking back into the house. They resolve that Daisy and the lodger must not be left alone together again. They too stare up at the chandelier as the scene fades out.

The stage would now be set for the final confrontation and resolution of the mystery, but Hitchcock includes an interlude that heightens the suspense even as it pushes the more artistic aspects of the film into the domain of fetishism. The events also anticipate two later films, Vertigo and Psycho. The scenes advance the intimacy between Daisy and the lodger even as they cause us to question the appropriateness of his courtship.

The lodger goes out during the day to attend the fashion show where Daisy works as a model. Immediately before Daisy steps on to the runway, a model in a wedding gown is finishing her walk, and she and Daisy exchange smiles as they pass, the marriage motif appearing once again in the film but in a far subtler and far more romantic context. Clearly the proximity of a wedding gown, Daisy, and the lodger is meant to act as a foreshadowing. As she parades past the potential buyers Daisy smiles at the lodger and they exchange nods of recognition as she crosses in front of him, modeling an evening gown. He then calls to a sales clerk to make a purchase.

We now find ourselves in the police station where Joe is explaining to his superiors and a group of other detectives that it is possible to construct a map of the Avenger’s murders, and to show that they are slowly converging on a central location - the Bunting’s neighborhood. Joe suggests that it will be possible to anticipate the killer’s movements and apprehend him before he kills again. As we stare at Joe’s map there is a lap dissolve to a second map, similar in sufficient respects to Joe’s map to suggest that it represents the same series of events, but different enough from the police map to enable us to understand that another person - the Avenger, no doubt - is plotting the site of his next murder. A hand reaches out to sketch a triangle on the map, indicating the scene of the next killing. The camera then pulls back, and we peer over the shoulder of the dark-haired man examining the map. The image dissolves, however, before we can catch more than a glimpse of him from behind.

The scene cuts to the Bunting kitchen at the moment of Daisy’s return home and her discovery that a package delivered for her earlier in the day contains the dress she was modeling at work. To their horror Mr. and Mrs. Bunting learn that the gift comes not from Joe but from the lodger, and in spite of Daisy’s protests, Mr. Bunting collects the parcel and carries it upstairs to the lodger’s room where he coldly informs him that their daughter will accept no gifts from strangers. The lodger, of course, can hardly conceive of himself as a stranger at this stage of his relationship with Daisy, yet he seems almost paralyzed by Mr. Bunting’s admonitions and remains silent, deeply offended.

The choice of gift is itself suggestive on a number of additional fronts, and can easily be seen as a way Hitchcock devised to once again set us to wondering about the lodger’s intentions. In the first and most obvious instance, the giving of clothing is ordinarily reserved for relationships that are far more developed than is the lodger’s and Daisy’s. Yet Daisy’s delight in receiving the present indicates that she may view their relationship as more intimate than outward appearances suggest. Though Daisy and the lodger have been unable to acknowledge openly their mutual feelings of attraction, it is apparent from Daisy’s reaction to the gift that she is already in love with the lodger and willing to overlook the presumptuous and sexualized nature of the present. It is not clear, however, whether Hitchcock wants us to perceive the dress as a mark of presumption on the part of the lodger, or as a token of the advanced state of their relationship. There may also be a certain naivete associated with Daisy at this point, and her willing reception of the present could indicate that she misunderstood its deeper implications.

There is also the fact that this gift is something neither Daisy nor her parents can afford, and the dress therefore underscores the Buntings’ lower middle class circumstances rather forcibly. The lodger tries to elevate Daisy from her social and economic position to his own, to transform her from the daughter of a backstreet lodging house owner, to a woman of sophistication and elegance, one who will be worthy of the comforts he enjoys in his world. This attempt to transform a woman so as to make her a suitable partner - and to effect control over her in that act of transformation - also plays a significant part in Vertigo and Marnie. Here the theme of control suggests an additional if somewhat uncomfortable affinity between the lodger and Joe; both have romantic intentions in respect of Daisy, and both are prone to express those aims in ways that reflect their mutual desire to dominate her. In Joe’s case, this penchant for domination is depicted in a most literal fashion as he physically bullies her to suit his wishes. But the lodger’s efforts at domination have a more sensual if fetishistic quality about them, especially if we recall Hitchcock’s view that for the male character to dress a woman in a film (and here he was speaking principally of Vertigo) is really to undress her.

But the refutation of the gift provides an opportunity for the lodger to approach Daisy, and to inquire whether she is as upset about the dress as was her father. Later that evening, while she bathes, the lodger comes to the door and tries the handle (somehow we are given to understand that he knows that it is Daisy in the bath). He hesitates, withdraws his hand from the handle, and then appears to decide to walk away. But he changes his mind, re-approaches the door and calls to her. Daisy steps from the tub, wraps a robe about herself, and carries on a conversation with the lodger through the door. The image is quaintly romantic, yet the lodger’s initial intention to open the door charges the scene with sexual tension. He explains that he is concerned that Daisy might be as angry with him about the gift as was her father, but she assures him that she was not at all concerned. Daisy then laughs - the third time she has done so - when the lodger complains that her father believes she should not go out with him. The lodger is elated, a reaction that can be seen as the culmination of his own transformed reactions to the three occasions of her laughter. Her laughter has become a potent nonverbal sign of the truth and the depth of her affections, and we are given to understand in his satisfied look that he has at last reached a point of confirmation in his own feelings about Daisy.

But what that conclusion might be is made complicated by a curious intertitle card that is interposed at this point reading "But Daisy didn’t worry." The viewpoint assumed by the card is confusing: does it refer directly to the narrative, suggesting that, unlike her father (and mother) Daisy didn’t worry about going out with the lodger, or does it suggest instead that we are being given privileged, directorial information? Is it Hitchcock who tells us that Daisy was not worried? The conflation of these two perspectives - the narrative perspective and the authorial/directorial perspective - is a deliberate means by which the suspense of the film is extended, and questions we might still entertain about the lodger are forced back upon us. But why should Daisy worry? The answer to this question, is obvious: Daisy should worry because the lodger is really a serial killer. But there are secondary answers as well: Perhaps Daisy should worry only because her parents and her boyfriend will be angry with her; perhaps virtuous young women do not accept invitations for an evening out from men they have known only for two weeks. By the film’s end it becomes clear that the card is merely a description, and contains no darker auguries. At this juncture, however, it achieves nicely the double effect of confusing and worrying the audience.

That same evening, a Tuesday night, Daisy and the lodger go out together. Mrs. Bunting laments to her husband that she has "let Daisy go out with the lodger," though in what manner she is responsible for their going out is unclear. Daisy and the lodger sit beneath a street lamp which looks ominously like the lamp under which the second murder in the film occurred, but their behavior is far from sinister as the lodger attempts to make plain his passion. His displays of affection are cut short by the arrival of Joe who, presumably, has been assigned to work given that it is Tuesday night. He roughly pulls the lodger’s hand from Daisy’s shoulder and demands that he leave her alone. But Daisy will have none of Joe’s jealousies, and jumping to her feet, she now places herself between Joe and the lodger. This sequence is a re-enactment of the earlier scene in the lodger’s room, but now Daisy stands between Joe and the lodger, just as Joe stood between her and the lodger earlier. Daisy angrily tells Joe she never wants to see him again and departs with the lodger to return home.

Joe sits beneath the lamp dejected, staring at the ground. Then, as he gazes directly at the camera, a moment of illumination dawns, and he again casts his eyes downwards and stares directly at the footprint the lodger’s shoe has left in the soft soil. In a flash, images of the lodger and Daisy, images of the chandelier, images of the lodger’s black valise, and images of the pictures of blonde women removed from the lodger’s quarters pass through the footprint, superimposed on the ground. Joe thinks carefully about these things, and continues to stare. At last he has it: the lodger is the Avenger, and he sets off immediately to procure a search warrant.

Aside from the fact that this is the second time in the film in which Hitchcock has employed a clever visual stunt, the choice of the footprint as a screening device deserves at least brief comment. The footprint is, of course, an indexical sign of the lodger, bearing both causal and existential relation to him. The footprint serves also as a staple symbol of police work, and Joe’s deliberations are thus presented as a sustained piece of analysis in which disparate pieces of a puzzle are brought together even as they are linked in the traces of the lodger. Cinematically, the footprint also enables Hitchcock to retain our knowledge of the lodger throughout the scene; he has become an absent referent - much as the film is structured around the absent referent that is the Avenger. In other words, the lodger must disappear physically in order that the footprint might represent him, he must become absent from the scene in order that Joe’s cogitations can achieve the potent symbolic and visual intonations Hitchcock wanted.

Back at the Bunting home Joe and Daisy have withdrawn to his room where their romantic desires begin to find realization in passionate kisses. Daisy draws back at one point, emphasizing for the audience that although a sexual encounter is certainly implied by the action, she retains the properly Victorian attitude of virginal uncertainty concerning the step she is about to take. She shortly overcomes her hesitancy, but in her attempt to resume their intimacy, the lodger draws away from her, adding further complications and depth to his character. As Rothman has suggested:

Though Daisy’s hesitation is easily explained, the lodger’s behavior is more mysterious. His resistance to her passion may reflect either innocence or inhumanity. Many different explanations are possible. He could be enraged, taking her to be a cruel exploiter of men’s desires. He could be remembering his gentleman’s duty to respect her honour. He could be revolted by her sexuality and unable to go through with the act of making love to her. He could be afraid that he is monstrous, fated to destroy what he loves, and be struggling with himself to spare Daisy from falling victim to his curse. (Rothman, 1982: 38)

The enigma of the lodger’s momentary rebuff remains a mystery, however, for even as they resume their ardent kissing, Joe arrives downstairs with two other detectives. "We have come to have a word with your lodger," he explains to the frightened Buntings.

Upstairs Joe finds Daisy and the lodger together, and, once again, a series of highly choreographed movements involving Joe, the lodger, and Daisy ensue. The detectives commence searching the lodger’s room while Daisy alternates between clutching the lodger’s arm, and arguing with Joe that he has accused the wrong man. Once the black bag has been discovered the tension in the film reaches its climax. Joe places the bag on the lodger’s table and, ignoring the lodger’s impassioned protests, he goes through the valise, discovering a gun. When he triumphantly announces the discovery of a map of the Avenger’s murders in the bag, the lodger answers plaintively "Exactly," a response calculated to heighten our confusion as to the identity of the real killer. Joe next discovers press clippings of the murders and, finally, a picture of a young blonde woman. Brandishing this in the lodger’s face he challenge him with the accusation "Your first victim, eh?" But the lodger replies that it is a picture of his murdered sister.

This is the first element in the story that points directly away from the lodger’s guilt, although his romantic attachment to Daisy has already given us ample reason to want to see him innocent. Hence Hitchcock has mobilized our own desires in service to the narrative, pulling us first in one direction, and then persuading us through a romantic entanglement that physical clues were not to be trusted. Now the lodger’s guilt or innocence is cast before us again, this time in the deliberations Joe is forced to undertake. He weighs carefully the lodger’s explanation as to the identity of the woman in the picture, but is forced to consider this explanation in relation to the gun, the map, the press clippings, and his own alienation from Daisy. In the meanwhile, Daisy remains faithful to the lodger, her eyes providing firm evidence to the camera that she has now severed her connection to Joe entirely, and given herself over completely to the lodger. At last, convinced that the evidence he has uncovered is sufficient, Joe has the lodger arrested, handcuffed, and taken from the room.

The descent down the Bunting’s staircase is slow, funereal, and melodramatic. The lodger’s measured pace down the stairs is intercut with subjective shots of the Buntings who wait at the bottom, staring up in obvious shock. When the entourage reaches the landing, Daisy whispers to the lodger that she will meet him under the lamp where Joe first espied them. Then, in a puzzling though convenient reaction, Mrs. Bunting faints, drawing the detectives’ attention momentarily away from the lodger who bolts into the night. The detectives chase after him with Daisy in pursuit. Daisy and the lodger meet up at the bench under the lamp precisely where Joe came to the "truth" about the lodger earlier in the evening. Now a second truth will be revealed to Daisy.

The lodger explains in flashback that the picture found in his bag was indeed of his murdered sister, the Avenger’s first victim. He recounts how his mother, who never recovered from the shock of her daughter’s death, extracted a promise from him on her deathbed that he would not rest until the Avenger had been brought to justice. The map and press clippings are merely the tools he has assembled in his hunt for his killer’s sister; the gun, apparently, the tool by which he intended to satisfy his mother’s wish. He may not be a killer, but the lodger’s heart has been blackened by his planning for murder. Now suspected of being the Avenger himself, the lodger laments that his promise must go unfulfilled, and he virtually collapses in Daisy’s arms.

Much has been made of the flashback sequence, including Rothman’s (1982) observation that in the flashback, the lodger does not appear after the opening moments in which he is shown dancing with his sister at her coming-out ball. The lodger’s absence throughout the flashback may be explained as a consequence of Hitchcock’s desire to continue the possibility that the lodger is really the murderer. In this respect, the lodger’s absence may be a further instance of the director working his manipulations upon an unsuspecting audience. It is also noteworthy that the flashback, which is told from the lodger’s perspective, includes subtle details that only the killer would know. For instance, there is a shot of a gloved hand turning off the lights moments before the murder occurs, an image only the killer would see in the way it is presented in the flashback. Given that the flashback is told from the lodger’s subjective position, and given that that perspective coincides with what we imagine the killer’s view would have been, it then seems that the lodger and the Avenger are the same person. In spite of the story’s conclusion, therefore, Rothman argues that the lodger might still be the killer after all.

More pedestrian explanations, however, are also possible. The gloved hand turning off the light, from a technical standpoint, is impossible. Ivor Montagu, who helped Hitchcock with editing the film, admits that the shot was disconcerting because it showed the hand turn off the lights a second before the lights actually went out. Impossible in reality, but necessary in cinematic terms. Hence it does not seem profitable to attempt as literalist a reading of the film’s flashback as Rothman suggests, for otherwise we would be forced to deal with the more surreal qualities demanded by Hitchcock’s cinematic methods as though they could be accounted for in strictly objective terms. Moreover, because several scenes were reshot after Hitchcock completed the film, continuity may have suffered as a result. Mr. Bunting’s absence from the lodger’s room at the scene of Joe and the lodger’s first confrontation is another example of a major character’s absence being unaccountable by the narrative logic of the film. In any event, and despite Hitchcock’s subsequent tampering with the flashback convention in Stage Fright, it seems most likely that we are to take the lodger’s account of his sister’s murder at face value. Flashbacks in film - again, excepting for the moment the aberration of Stage Fright - have the truth status of objectively grounded realism. I do not believe that the flashback sequence in The Lodger bespeaks more or less than this.

His recounting of events completed, the lodger is spent, and Daisy takes him to a bar for a recuperative drink of brandy, his manacled hands concealed beneath his overcoat. Just as Daisy was escorted by her comforting mother following Joe’s attempt to handcuff her, so now Daisy assumes a properly maternal attitude to the lodger. Daisy is forced to hold his drink for him so that the patrons will not detect the handcuffs, but these efforts at nonchalance are unsuccessful, and several customers strain to see exactly what is preventing the lodger from handling his own glass. Moments after they leave, Joe and several detectives rush into the bar to use the telephone, and the barmaid, overhearing their conversation about a handcuffed man, tells them that their suspect left the premises only minutes earlier. An enraged crowd, now convinced that the Avenger is literally within their grasp, charge out into the foggy night.

Still at the bar, Joe’s telephone conversation with his commander continues, but his expression suddenly changes as he struggles to comprehend what he is being told - not because he is unable to hear the captain’s voice clearly, but because he cannot believe what he is hearing. But at last it becomes clear: the real Avenger has been caught "red-handed" elsewhere in the city only a short time earlier. Joe mutters to himself that he must save the innocent man before the throng tears him apart, and he too disappears into the night.

Daisy and the lodger first hear and then see the pursuing crowd; Daisy takes the overcoat from his arms and exhorts him to flee. The chase scene is remarkably tense, the eerie lighting and darkened sets providing appropriately haunting touches to the action, anticipating the horror films of the following decade, and recalling scenes from Nosferatu which Hitchcock had found compelling while working in Germany. Stopping in the center of a small bridge, the lodger first gazes frantically at the onrushing throng, and then attempts to climb over the bridge’s spiked metal railing. But in trying to scale the railing he slips, catching his handcuffs on the metalwork. In an agonizing close-up we see the lodger dangling from one of the dagger-like points of the railing, his handcuffs holding him suspended above the crowd. The angry mob converges on and below the bridge and begins to beat him as he hangs suspended and helpless.

It is difficult to overlook the crucifixion theme implied here, just as it is difficult to suppress our disgust with the behavior of the mob. Incited by rumor, they have descended to the Avenger’s level, their murderous intentions horrifying us with the immediacy and the violence with which they are carried out. When at last Joe and the other detectives arrive, they must force their way through the crowd, exchanging blows with many of the attackers. At last, the handcuffs are undone, and they lower the lodger to the ground, just as a vendor for the Evening Standard arrives, declaring that the Avenger has been apprehended at a different location. The crowd collects around the paper, contrite and ashamed, while Joe assumes credit for the rescue, exclaiming "Thank God I was in time!" But with the lodger cradled in Daisy’s arms Joe’s pomposity is now seen as a self-delusional defense against his growing sense of inadequacies.

In any event, Joe is simply wrong: it is the arrival of the newsboy, and the report from the mass media, that have rescued the lodger from the clutches of the throng, not Joe’s actions. Joe’s role in this episode has been only to agitate the crowd to its frenzy, and his arrival might have been entirely in vain had not the newspaper headlines reached the crowd when they did. Once again, the mass media’s relation to the Avenger, and the effect of the media on the public’s emotions, have been decisive in the Avenger case. Furthermore, the conclusion to the serial killings is accompanied not by shouts of exaltation, but by feelings of shame and guilt; the same feelings conceivably experienced by the Avenger at his moment of capture. The crowd and the (invisible) Avenger have been fused, his murderous impulses revealed in the everyman and everywoman of British society. Anger has become a symptom of impotence, a substitute for security. Once the lodger has been revealed at last as innocent of the crimes - though he remains guilty in other ways - the crowd is deflated, humiliated, and remorseful. But their anger is directed as much at the failure of the lodger to be guilty, as it is at the Avenger himself, who eludes their grasp utterly.

Rothman (1982) says that Hitchcock makes his second cameo appearance of the film during the climactic battle between the detectives and the crowd, and indeed, a portly man generally answering to Hitchcock’s description can be detected in the scene. Audiences in 1927 would be unlikely to realize that the man in the scene is actually the film’s director, and Hitchcock’s appearance would thereby be something of a shared secret among colleagues and those who worked on the production. But if Rothman is correct, there is something about Hitchcock’s appearance in this scene that I have not found commented upon by other writers, something that is overlooked either because the man in the scene only resembles Hitchcock, or because others have simply ignored the profundity of his actions.

As the lodger hangs helpless from the railing, Hitchcock (I will presume for the moment that this is the director) appears at the lodger’s right, one face among many in a group of enraged citizens. But as the scene develops, and as Joe and his fellow detectives fight their way through the crowd to get near the lodger, Hitchcock too battles his way through the crowd toward the point where the lodger hangs, pushing back the crowd in a rather ineffectual and comic manner. He is, however, the only person other than the detectives who is actively battling the mob. A quick cut, and we now see that Hitchcock has reached a position immediately above the lodger. By this stage, Joe and his colleagues have tried unsuccessfully to release the lodger from his manacles, the constant jostling and swinging fists making their task impossible. But following the cut in the film that positions Hitchcock directly above the lodger we see that he is now in possession of the key to the handcuffs, and it is Hitchcock who actually unlocks the shackles! How he has come into possession of the key is not shown, for the cut in the film effaces that detail. Whether he was handed the key or magically produced one of his own is not revealed. It is possible that he is playing the part of a detective who has arrived late to the scene, but his clothing makes him look far more like a fishmonger than a policeman. It is equally conceivable that he portrays a good Samaritan. At the most literal level, however, it is Hitchcock who releases the lodger from the handcuffs, and Hitchcock who therefore controls the destiny of the characters. It is Hitchcock who releases the lodger so that he and Daisy can wed, and Hitchcock who ultimately resolves the narrative’s most suspenseful episode - the lodger’s suspense being embodied in literal fashion. It is Hitchcock who has the key to the film’s conclusion.

With Taylor (1978), however, I am inclined to believe that the man shown in the final sequence is not Hitchcock, although the resemblance from certain angles is striking. But whether or not the character in the scene is or is not Hitchcock, it remains somewhat of a mystery that he, rather than the detectives, releases the lodger’s from his handcuffs. It is possible that the director deliberately chose a performer who resembled him, but this is also rather peculiar given that an audience in 1927 would not likely recognize the person as a Hitchcockian surrogate. It is unclear how to resolve the puzzle.

The lodger’s release from the handcuffs sets in motion what Rothman (1982) has referred to as the first of three endings to the story - the number three continuing to play an important role in the film. The first ending features Daisy poised over the lodger’s apparently lifeless body, the police gathered about, and the contrite mob consoling themselves in the background. For all intents and purposes it appears that the lodger has died in the assault, and that the film is to have a tragic ending.

But a fade-in to a hospital ward shows us Daisy sitting by the lodger’s bed while a grandfatherly doctor explains that the lodger’s "youth and vigor" will see him through the trauma. The lodger and Daisy clasp hands, and the film now appears to have ended on a second, melodramatic note.

But yet a third fade-in opens in the lodger’s mansion. Daisy and her parents wait in a foyer, and then, from the top of the stairs, the lodger descends to greet them. He moves down the stairs in a curiously halting way, as if savoring the moment of conquer. The scene recalls several other staircase movements in the film: the lodger’s first ascent of the staircase in the Bunting home, his descent when sneaking out at night to look for the Avenger, and the descent he made while handcuffed in the custody of the police. Now he appears to relish his position of superiority, and he descends with an air of deliberate superiority.

At the bottom of the stairs he hastens over to Daisy and, extending his hand to her parents at her urging, he symbolically welcomes them into his home - and, we may presume, into his life. Mr. Bunting, unaccustomed to the mansion’s plush carpeting, trips. Then Daisy and the lodger retreat to an inner room where a window overlooking the nightscape of the city shows us the same flashing marquee lights seen in the opening montage: "To-Night, Golden Curls". The words retain their seductive charm, of course, but are now infused with sexual connotations as the lodger and Daisy exchange a passionate kiss by the window. The camera moves in and we fade out on the film’s third, romantic conclusion.

Made in the waning years of Hitchcock’s silent film career, The Lodger is often the film to which historians and critics first turn when explaining the origins of Hitchcock’s style. Indeed, the film is a treasure trove for cinema sleuths in search of the Hitchcockian motifs and themes that would inflect his subsequent filmmaking. But while the film provides us with near text-book examples of Hitchcock’s penchant for privileging the individual shot over the logic of the narrative, there are other elements in the film equally important in the context of the stylistic touches and psychological complexities for which Hitchcock would become renowned. The major achievement of The Lodger, one might say, is its remarkable handling of such difficult themes as guilt, innocence, despair, and romance, and the technical virtuosity with which the young director confidently arranged the cinematic exposition of his narrative. Hitchcock transcended the limitations of the theatrical mannerisms of his principal players, and the abstractness of their motives and counter-motives, by using the eye of the camera to peer deeply into their thoughts and feelings. The Lodger explores moral and emotional ambiguity with a candor that impresses and disturbs audiences today.

For instance, the film’s exploration of romantic sentiment is developed in a manner which, though primitive in many respects, has a haunting and even lyrical quality to it. Love is never an easy experience in Hitchcock’s films, and here, so early in his career, romance must be threaded through the tightly woven obstacles fashioned in both the plot and the conflicting emotions of the characters. The Lodger rarely compromises in its telling of the double-edged nature of our passions: Daisy risks everything in turning from Joe to the lodger, who in turn agonizes over abandoning her in pursuit of justice. And the lodger’s courtship of Daisy is shown as a strangely traumatic affair for him, as he struggles with his longstanding commitment to his mother’s deathbed wish, and his sexual attraction to Daisy. Even Daisy and Joe’s relationship is shown in the opening moments of the film as quietly strained by competing tendencies, Daisy trying to deflect his amorous overtures one moment, but unwilling in the next to cool his ardor entirely. Joe’s petty jealousies, of course, turn out to be fully grounded, yet his mettlesome professions of love, which stand in sharp contrast to the mysterious qualities of the lodger, leave him a rather pitiable figure in the end. His self-importance assumes an entirely different quality by the story’s conclusion, the bravado and macho swagger of his earlier appearances having been held up to the audience for ridicule. Daisy’s ascent is mirrored by Joe’s decline, and he vanishes in the final moments a tortured character, declaring unconvincingly the important part he has played in the lodger’s rescue - and, one might suggest, in the narrative itself.

In concert with its calculated examination of the intricacies of human emotion, The Lodger equally deserves appreciation as a visual feast. As I have already pointed out The Lodger’s atmospheric spirit owes much to Hitchcock’s careful study of German filmmaking in the 1920s. Taylor writes that

the German cinema [at the time of The Lodger] 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. (1996: 71-72)

This architecture of suspense is fully exploited in The Lodger, where structural axes of movement between the upstairs and downstairs of the Bunting home signal a series of narrative divisions. Movement upwards, into the lodger’s quarters, is a movement into mystery, the unknown, and possibly danger. But it is also a movement into a realm of heightened sexuality and pleasure, and a movement away from the mundane amusements and activities of the Bunting household below. Daisy, it seems, is the only character in the film who is at home in both locations, enjoying the company of her parents and Joe in the kitchen and the parlour, but equally at ease in the lodger’s room. She forms a bridge between their worlds, metaphorically ascending to the heights of the lodger, but never entirely breaking with her family. Whereas the others in the film demonstrate a concentrated effort at retaining a life of horizontal movement across the screen, Daisy undertakes the vertical movement demanded of someone who seeks to become a different person, transformed by the challenges of the lodger’s status, and by her willingness to peer into the mysteries from which the others shy away.

The Avenger, the unseen villain of the piece, is a quintessential Hitchcock MacGuffin. He puts the events of the story into motion, and sustains them only by the malevolence that seeps from the shadows he casts across the story. (In this respect he will reappear as the hold-up man thirty years later in The Wrong Man.) Yet in the course of its unfolding, The Lodger transforms itself from a police manhunt into a quite different tale. The Avenger becomes incidental to the main action of the narrative, which is a story about a young woman who must decide between the sober comforts of her lower-middle class existence, and the chance at a life charged with both the promise of erotic fulfillment and the dangers concealed in the secret of the lodger’s identity. Indeed, although it is not developed in the film, the prospect remains that one part of Daisy’s attraction to the lodger issues from her awareness that he may indeed be the killer. This is an unsettling point to raise, but it is difficult to overlook. Hitchcock’s opening montage includes images of Londoners whose salacious appetites are gratified by accounts of the Avenger’s activities. Daisy shows nothing of this attitude, but it is hard to imagine that she is utterly naïve concerning the suspicions that Joe and her parents have entertained even before the execution of the search warrant. Much as Alice White is drawn to Crewe in Blackmail partly for the possibility of flirtation on the margins of forbidden sexuality, so too Daisy Bunting finds something awakened in her by the lodger that Joe’s affections have left dormant. That this something is erotic desire can hardly be doubted, but that it may include a thirst for the darker aspects of human nature is also possible. It is one thing to say that Daisy’s love for the lodger conquers her fears that he means to do her harm, yet to what extent is her love intensified by the seductions of an illicit (and possibly) dangerous liaison? We should not ignore Hitchcock’s intimations that the satiation of romantic desire will entail the risk of uncontrolled passion.

A novel’s plot, Trollope observed, is merely a vehicle for "created personages." It is the writer’s task to bring these created personages to life and infuse them with the psychological and social behavior of real people. The function of the plot is to provide the frame or vehicle in which their movements are contained, for "when you have the vehicle without the passengers," Trollope argued, "a story of mystery in which the agents never spring to life, you have but a wooden show" (1980: 125). Trollope often wrote as though he was determined to discover to what extent in the novel one could eliminate plot. Something of this doctrine is evident in Hitchcock’s films, and certainly emerges with visible effect in The Lodger. It is not as if Hitchcock dispensed with the vehicle entirely, but his attention to the complications of his characters, their puzzlements, ambitions, and occasionally contradictory desires, indicates his interest in using the cinema to evoke powerful, viseral reactions in his audience. And this could best be done by involving the audience in the emotional lives of the characters. One did not want the audience merely to watch actors play at experiencing emotions; one wanted them to live those emotions as though they were real. Hence Hitchcock’s tendency, one might suggest, was to privilege the emotional realism of the story over and above the empirical realism of plot and setting.

Hitchcock’s characters come to life in The Lodger because they are conflicted in their emotional lives, uncertain about how they should behave. From an artistic standpoint, the improbabilities of the plot, the airy tissues of a narrative that dissolve in the face of critical scrutiny, are neither technical flaws nor failures of the larger artistic vision of their creator. They are rather the cinematic techniques that the emotionally compelling narratives of his films demanded if the "created personages" inside the vehicles were to engage us at all. The Lodger has withstood the passing decades, I believe, because in it Hitchcock managed the difficult task of dispensing with the principles of empirical realism precisely so that the human story of emotional complexity would emerge.