SFJAZZ.org | On the Screen_The Lodger

October 22, 2024

On the Screen: Alfred Hitchcock's "The Lodger"

By Rusty Aceves

Grace Cathedral will transform into a grand movie palace for a special Halloween screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent thriller The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog featuring an original live score performed on Grace’s famous pipe organ by renowned organist and composer Dorothy Papadakos. Here’s more about the movie. 

The Lodger

Scene from The Lodger

Hitchcock’s first thriller and the film that firmly established him as a director of note, The Lodger is a tense, atmospheric tale of murder and suspicion based on the 1913 Marie Belloc Lowndes novel and loosely inspired by Jack the Ripper. The film stars Marie Ault, Ivor Novello, and June Tripp, and concerns a mysterious stranger at a London boarding house who may or may not be a serial killer.

While a murderer nicknamed “The Avenger” is terrifying London with the killings of a string of blonde women, a shadowy man shows up on the doorstep of the Bunting family to rent a room and makes a connection with daughter Daisy, a young blonde model.

Daisy’s boyfriend Joe, a police officer, has been assigned to the Avenger case and is dismayed to learn that that the murder locations have been moving closer to the Bunting neighborhood since the secretive new lodger moved in. With all evidence pointing to the stranger as the murderous Avenger and with the body count growing ever larger, Joe is intent on exposing him and bringing him to justice.

While working in Germany in the early 1920s, Hitchcock observed the work of German expressionist director F.W. Murnau and was influenced by the oblique camera angles, short scenes, and claustrophobic interior lighting that marked the Nosferatu director’s style as well as that of Murnau’s contemporaries Fritz Lang and Robert Wiene. These inspirations informed the look of The Lodger, with its murky photography shrouded in mist and endless shadows, matching the spirit of mounting dread that hangs over the film as the death toll mounts and suspicions intensify.

Flashes of Hitchcock’s visual brilliance are in abundance throughout the 90-minute run time, including a ghostly shot of a disembodied hand descending the Bunting house staircase from above and a brief virtuoso sequence of the family, disconcerted by the lodger’s seemingly constant stomping in his upstairs bedroom and looking to the ceiling, now translucent and revealing the stranger’s agitated pacing from below.

The Lodger is credited with helping define the modern suspense film genre and elements of Hitchcock’s signature style were clearly in early evidence – themes of an accused man on the run, blonde women in peril, and the threats posed by authority – along with the masterful ramping of suspense that is synonymous with his later efforts. Described by the French New Wave legend François Truffaut as “the first true Hitchcock movie,” The Lodger also contains the first of the director’s many cameo appearances in his own work, appearing early in the film as a newspaper employee seated at a desk and using a telephone with his back to the camera.

A member of the GRAMMY-winning Paul Winter Consort and former Cathedral Organist of New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Dorothy Papadakos has accompanied the greatest silent films in venues around the world.

This performance will take full advantage of Grace’s 7,500 pipe Aeolian-Skinner organ, a historic instrument installed in 1934 that has been played by many of the world’s great organists and earned a place in jazz history as well, being employed for the premiere of Duke Ellington’s Concert of Sacred Music in 1963 and pianist Vince Guaraldi’s 1965 Jazz Mass.

Dorothy Papadakos at the Grace Cathedral organ, 10/26/18 (photo by Rebecca Nestle)

Dorothy Papadakos performs live to a screening of The Lodger at Grace Cathedral on 10/31. Tickets and more information are available here

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