General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog is a 1926 British silent thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock, released in February 1927, in which a mysterious boarding-house tenant falls under suspicion as a serial killer known as "The Avenger" stalks blonde women in fog-shrouded London. It was Hitchcock's third feature film, and he later called it "the first true Hitchcock movie" and "my first picture", because it was the moment he "presented for the first time ideas in purely visual form".¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Alfred Hitchcock; filmed 1926, released in London from January 1927 and across Britain in February³
Position in career	Hitchcock's third feature, after The Pleasure Garden (1925) and the lost The Mountain Eagle (1926); his first thriller and first critical and commercial success⁴
Source	Novel The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1913), loosely based on the Jack the Ripper murders⁴
Star	Ivor Novello, one of the most popular British film stars of the day, as the lodger⁵
Signature image	A clear glass floor through which the lodger is seen pacing in his room, making the chandelier sway on the ceiling below⁶
US release	June 1928, retitled The Case of Jonathan Drew, to a poor reception⁶
Restoration	Restored by the BFI National Archive from surviving nitrate prints; the original negative no longer exists⁴

Spoilers

Story and source

The film adapts Marie Belloc Lowndes's best-selling 1913 novel The Lodger, typically considered the first novelization of the Jack the Ripper murders. The novel tells of a failing London lodging house run by the Buntings, who believe their business is saved by the arrival of a mysterious lodger whom they come to suspect is the Ripper-style killer the press has dubbed "The Avenger".⁷^•⁴ Lowndes had been inspired by the artist Walter Sickert, who was convinced his Camden Town lodgings had previously housed the Ripper; she also co-wrote a 1915 stage adaptation that the young Hitchcock is known to have enjoyed.¹

Hitchcock's film, with a scenario by Eliot Stannard, broadens the story and sharpens the killer's methods. It opens with a close-up of a blonde woman screaming, her murder, and the news spreading through papers and radio: "Murder – wet off the press… hot over the aerial." The film's Avenger targets blondes and always kills them on Tuesday evenings, a predictability that draws the audience into anticipating the next murder. The murder scene is intercut with an advert for a show, "To-night – 'Golden curls'", whose dancers tuck brunette hairpieces into their cloches; Hitchcock draws a direct comparison between what audiences find attractive and what rouses the Avenger to kill.¹

The cast. Ivor Novello plays the lodger, a pale, hypersensitive stranger who ventures out on foggy nights and keeps a photograph of a blonde woman in his room. June Tripp plays Daisy Bunting, the landlady's blonde daughter, a fashion model engaged to the police detective Joe Chandler (Malcolm Keen); Marie Ault and Arthur Chesney play Mr. and Mrs. Bunting. Alma Reville, Hitchcock's wife, served as assistant director.⁶^•⁸

The changed ending and the "wrong man"

Lowndes's novel ends with the suggestion that the lodger probably is the killer. Studio executives demanded a script change making Novello innocent, fearing that his predominantly female fan base would object to seeing him as a murderer. As a result, The Lodger became the first film in which Hitchcock explored his classic theme of the wrongly accused man, albeit in rudimentary form.⁶ In the finished film the lodger is guilty only of sharing the public's preoccupation with the murders; the ending was sanitized because Novello had a reputation to protect, making the film one about suspicion and mania rather than murder itself.¹

Hitchcock compensated for the compromise by making the climax a thrilling public chase, in which the lodger dangles from an iron fence by handcuffs, more memorable than the awkward final scene.¹^•⁶ The motif of innocent, and sometimes guilty, men under suspicion recurred in Stage Fright (1949), The Wrong Man (1956), Frenzy (1972), and others, and Hitchcock repeated the casting gambit of a matinee idol asked to be doubted, as with Cary Grant in Suspicion (1941).⁹

Style and production

Made shortly after Hitchcock's return from working in Germany, the film shows the influence of the German Expressionist tradition of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Nosferatu (1922), in its angular compositions, high-contrast lighting, and atmospheric treatment of London at night. Hitchcock acknowledged that the dominant influence on The Lodger was the German Expressionist school.⁴^•¹⁰

The most famous effect is the glass floor through which the lodger is seen pacing back and forth, causing the chandelier to sway on the ceiling below, a way of visualizing the sound of footsteps in a silent film.⁶ The film was tinted and toned on its original release, with nighttime fog sequences toned blue and tinted amber.⁴

Recut and release. When studio executives received the film poorly, Ivor Montagu, the Observer's film critic and a promoter of Soviet montage theory, helped recut it, reducing the number of title cards by three-quarters and adding designs by the artist E. McKnight Kauffer; a few rough sequences were reshot. The recut version was shown to the press in September 1926, and the trade journal Bioscope wrote on 16 September 1926 that "it is possible this film is the finest British production ever made".⁴^•⁵ The film was produced by Michael Balcon and Carlyle Blackwell for Gainsborough Pictures, photographed by Gaetano di Ventimiglia, with art direction by C. Wilfred Arnold and Bertram Evans.⁶

Reception and afterlife

British critics hailed the film as a landmark on release, and it was Hitchcock's first commercial success.⁶^•⁷ The American reception in June 1928 was harsh: the Variety reviewer complained of Novello's "unbelievably stilted acting" and used the film to bemoan British film production generally, while The New York Times wrote that the picture had "a very, very, excellent beginning, a mediocre middle and a most deplorable ending". Most critics today rate the film considerably higher, though its achievement was later eclipsed by Hitchcock's other silents, particularly The Ring (1927) and the silent version of Blackmail (1929).⁶

The film's reputation has risen steadily. When Vertigo (1958) topped the Sight & Sound critics' poll, the BFI noted that The Lodger's reissue reviews showed a film of more consistent standing than its disastrous original press suggested, and Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian called the restoration "a gripping prehistory not just of [Hitchcock's] own work, but the Hollywood thriller itself".⁵^•¹¹

Restorations. Because the negative no longer exists, the BFI National Archive restored the film from nitrate prints held since the 1940s, spending several hundred hours on dirt and damage repair and digitally reproducing the original tinting and toning. The restoration premiered with The Hitchcock 9 event in 2013 and was rereleased in 2012 with a new score by Nitin Sawhney. The Criterion Collection issued a 2K restoration with a new score by composer Neil Brand, performed by the Orchestra of Saint Paul's, paired with Hitchcock's 1927 silent Downhill, which also stars Novello and explores the same "wrong man" trope.⁴^•⁵^•¹²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026