{"id":20027,"date":"2025-05-02T18:27:39","date_gmt":"2025-05-02T16:27:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.stummfilm-live.de\/project\/der-mieter\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T20:15:20","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T18:15:20","slug":"the-lodger","status":"publish","type":"project","link":"https:\/\/www.stummfilm-live.de\/en\/project\/the-lodger\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lodger"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Short and Sweet<\/h2>\n

A serial killer is on the loose, a mysterious stranger moves in \u2014 and suddenly nothing is safe.<\/span>\u00a0Hitchcock as master of suspense: the wrongly accused man, the blonde in danger, the audience kept guessing until the very last scene\u2026<\/p>\n

The first truly personal Hitchcock film \u2014 and the beginning of a thriller legend.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Plot<\/h2>\n
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London is terrorised by the mysterious serial killer known as “The Avenger”, who murders only blonde women. Into the Bunting family’s boarding house moves a silent, pale young man (Ivor Novello) whose behaviour is deeply suspicious \u2014 he hides pictures of blonde women and disappears into the streets at night. Daisy’s fianc\u00e9 Joe, a jealous police officer, makes him his prime suspect. Yet Daisy falls for the enigmatic stranger. Was he the killer \u2014 or himself a victim of fate? The audience is kept in the dark until the very end.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Production<\/h2>\n
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Based on the novel\u00a0The Lodger<\/em> by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1913), itself inspired by the Jack the Ripper murders. Hitchcock originally wanted an ambiguous ending leaving the lodger’s guilt unresolved, but the studio refused to let their star Ivor Novello be seen as a potential murderer. The screenplay was adjusted accordingly. After an initial rejection by distributor C. M. Woolf, editor Ivor Montagu helped revise the film \u2014 reducing intertitles to a quarter of the original number. Hitchcock later admitted the film was better for it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Hitchcock deploys visual tension throughout: expressionist lighting, skewed camera angles, and subjective perspectives. The famous glass-floor shot \u2014 showing the lodger pacing from below through a transparent ceiling \u2014 remains a landmark of silent-era filmmaking. Hitchcock himself called it his first “real Hitchcock film”. All his signature elements are already present: the wrongly accused man, the blonde in peril, the morally flawed detective, and an audience complicit in its own suspense.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Hitchcock-Cameo<\/h2>\n
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Hitchcock appears briefly in a newsroom scene \u2014 one of his earliest cameo appearances, which would go on to become legendary. He didn’t include himself for artistic reasons, but simply because there weren’t enough extras on set.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Context<\/h2>\n
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Hitchcock himself considered\u00a0The Lodger<\/em>\u00a0his first true Hitchcock film. Every ingredient of his later work is already in place: the wrongly accused man, the blonde in danger, moral ambiguity, and the audience’s own complicity in suspicion. The press celebrated it as possibly the best British film ever made at the time of release. The novel has since been adapted multiple times, most notably in 1944 with Laird Cregar and in 2009. A key work in film history \u2014 and the birth of modern suspense cinema.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":17765,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":""},"pj-categs":[],"pj-tags":[446,87],"class_list":["post-20027","project","type-project","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","pj-tags-the-lodger","pj-tags-wilfried-kaets"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Lodger - Stummfilm-Live<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"London is terrorised by the mysterious serial killer known as "The Avenger", who murders only blonde women. 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