This is Pordenone’s first Hitchcock screening since 1999, the centenary of his birth, when the full range of his surviving silent work was shown. A later landmark was the London Olympics year of 2012, which generated a parallel “Cultural Olympics”: cinema’s contribution to this enterprise was a new restoration by the BFI of the silents, linked to a big campaign promoting “The Genius of Hitchcock”. The new prints were shown in many countries, though not at Pordenone, which always has so much else to catch up on. But 20 years on is a good time to revisit his third feature (and the second to survive), The Lodger, in a luminous print, and with a new orchestral score by Neil Brand.
The Genius of Hitchcock…. One potentially reductionist aspect of the triumphant promotional work of 2012 was that it tended, in the accompanying literature as well as in the programming, to perpetuate the idea of Hitchcock as a self-sufficient auteur, floating free of his surroundings from the start. But what about the people he worked with?
The first name on the credits of The Lodger is Michael Balcon, Britain’s most important producer from the 1920s through to the 1950s. Three years Hitchcock’s senior, he launched him as a director, saw him move elsewhere for higher pay, then welcomed him back in the 1930s after his career lost momentum. It was Balcon’s co-production deals that gave him early experience in Germany, and Balcon who teamed him with his two formative scriptwriters: Charles Bennett, for the series of sound thrillers that relaunched him, and before that, Eliot Stannard, who wrote, solo or in partnership, all of the nine silent films prior to Blackmail – one of the solo credits, for “scenario”, being for The Lodger.
Stannard died in 1944, a neglected figure who, unlike Bennett, left no account of how the collaboration with Hitchcock operated. But he had brought with him a wealth both of practical experience, and of lively ideas about – to use the title of his five-part series written for a trade paper in 1918 – “The Art of the Kinematograph”. Much of what he articulated in print, in and beyond that series, on topics like imagery and cross-cutting, is strikingly prophetic of Hitchcock’s own later discourse. Clearly it was an inspired match on both sides, teaming Stannard with a bright young man fully responsive to his ideas. Two other credits to note are Alma Reville (assistant director), who married Hitchcock in 1926, and a more intermittent collaborator in the cosmopolitan figure of Ivor Montagu (editing and titling), one of the prime movers of the Film Society in London, soon to liaise closely with Pudovkin and Eisenstein.
Whoever did exactly what among this talented team – Montagu would later make some exaggerated claims about his own input – the resulting thriller was an instant success. Not quite instant, in fact, since the distributor held it back, seeing it as too arty, but as soon as it was shown it was welcomed by audiences and critics alike, and the young Hitchcock’s reputation was established.
His first film, The Pleasure Garden, also with a solo writing credit for Stannard, had opened with a prophetic vignette, foregrounding the lascivious male gaze and the resentment of the woman subjected to it. The opening shot of The Lodger is the close-up of another young woman, screaming, the victim of a serial killer. Media and public are at once shown to be – like us in the audience – horrified but fascinated, and the film exploits this ambivalence with ruthless efficiency, teasing us with uncertainty as to whether the handsome lodger may be the killer, and the blonde daughter of the house, Daisy, a likely victim. Repeatedly we linger over tense close-ups of women. The first victim; an older woman, sadistically scared by a stranger; Daisy; other blondes; a new victim; and, most memorably, Daisy’s mother, as she listens with growing anxiety to the lodger’s night-time movements in a classic lengthy scene of silent-film narrative.
Hitchcock directed other kinds of film after this one, and it was several years before the distinctive category of “Hitchcock thriller” began to emerge. But so much of the mature Hitchcock is already here in The Lodger. To use his own formula: “putting the woman through it”. Male violence, twisted sexuality, astute manipulation of the audience; the “wrong man” narrative. For what turned out to be his penultimate film, Frenzy (1972), he would make a sentimental return to London for a loose kind of remake, taking advantage of colour and of laxer censorship – but without remotely eclipsing the hallucinatory power of this silent Story of the London Fog from 1927.

Charles Barr

The score  The Lodger has always fascinated me (I wrote a film script in 2012 about Hitchcock and Novello filming it), but only as a milestone on Hitch’s journey to greatness. To me, when playing it, it has always felt uneven, and Novello too florid a bird of paradise to be descending on this dowdy London boarding-house. But then in 2016 Criterion asked me to score it – and all that changed.
I knew that Ben Palmer and his Covent Garden Sinfonia would play it wonderfully and I scored it for 12 players, still trying to maintain the big “Hitchcock” sound. My friend and mentor Timothy Brock suggested two violas to give extra depth to the strings, and I brought in the piano and percussion to handle the chases and sudden shocks. Horn, flute, clarinet, and bassoon would give me the deep, contemplative music I needed – and the line-up was complete. I had the tools to try to match Hitch’s demands.
My main task, I felt, was to give a consistent, chilly through-line to the film which would make the mood swings less obtrusive – also to tread a similar line as Hitch with Novello – that his character remains gorgeously seductive as well as potentially lethal.
I wanted the audience on the back foot throughout, so made the score ask questions it didn’t set out to answer, to keep the audience guessing until Daisy and the Lodger did finally fall into each other’s arms – and even then to maintain a nagging doubt…
I owe Ben Palmer a huge debt of gratitude for taking a chance on both the score and me – I am delighted he is with us tonight to conduct it, as he has done so brilliantly on every previous occasion! Enjoy the ride!

Neil Brand