The see-through ceiling scene in The Lodger is justifiably famous.
The Lodger (1927), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Ivor Novello, June Tripp, and Marie Ault. The Lodger is, in many respects, a dull and trite movie. This is true even if the viewer allows for the fact that it’s a 92-year-old b&w silent film. The plot is ultimately quite hokey.
Despite these flaws, it’s worth watching for insights into why Hitchcock was one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. Technically, it’s a very well-made film with groundbreaking camera action.
Welsh actor Ivor Novello plays a tall, dark, and handsome stranger who rents a suite of rooms from a lower middle-class family in London. Their pretty daughter, Daisy, lives at home while working as a dress model at a fancy couturier.
Daisy has a boyfriend, Joe, in the police department, who is assigned to the case of The Avenger — a serial killer who targets young, blonde women. As the film opens, the seventh victim of The Avenger has just been found. Eventually, suspicion falls on Novello as The Lodger, because of his peculiar habits and apparent aversion to young blonde women—all except Daisy, to whom he is obviously attracted.
Abstracting the Action
As Hitchcock tells the story of Daisy, Joe and The Lodger, he goes where few filmmakers of the era ever thought of going. In one scene, Hitch delves into pure cinematic abstraction. This is the famous scene where he shows The Lodger pacing nervously back and forth in his room, while Daisy’s family is speculating about his identity in the room directly below. Hitch shoots The Lodger’s pacing feet with an upward-facing camera through a see-through floor, so that he can show both the gossipers and the gossiped-about at nearly the same time. (Years later, Hitch would stage a similar scene in Spellbound (1945), where he films the participants of a coffee meeting upward through a glass-topped coffee table.)
Of course, as viewers, we know perfectly well that The Lodger’s rented room doesn’t have a see-through floor. However, Hitchcock’s camera seduces us into accepting this shot as an abstract storytelling embellishment—one that’s very effective at building suspense and tension.
In another scene, Hitch repeatedly uses a theater marquee to flash the neon sign for a musical revue called “Golden Curls” on the faces of the actors as the night time action unfolds. Of course, using a flashing neon sign to light a night scene is pretty cliched today, but it wasn’t the case in 1927. The “Golden Curls” sign is also an ironic reinforcement of the theme of young blonde women in danger.
Finally, Hitch shoots a gorgeous cat-and-mouse chase scene in a spiralling stairwell with a downward-facing camera. Again, the downward shot of a chase in a stairwell is often used in thrillers and horror films today, but not in the 1920s. (Years later, Robert Siodmak’s creepy Gothic thriller The Spiral Staircase (1946) would employ virtually the same shot.) Viewers shouldn’t expect the terrors of a modern-day slasher film from The Lodger, but they may enjoy watching the virtuosity of the Great Master’s technique. On disc, streaming, and Youtube.
Sidenote: Nobody, except perhaps Orson Welles, knew how to design and shoot innovative scenes as well as Hitchcock.
The Master Shot-Designer
In Strangers on a Train (1951), he shoots an entire strangulation scene through the reflection on the dropped spectacles of the victim. In Spellbound (1945), there’s the coffee table shot, where we hear the actors’ dialogue, but all we see of them is cups, saucers and spoons being picked up and set back down again. In Sabotage (1936), he shoots a closeup of a woman screaming, but out of her mouth comes a screeching train whistle; the scene then cuts to a speeding train traveling furiously to its destination.
In the infamous “shower scene” from Psycho (1960), we never actually see Marion Crane die; we just see her dying hand grab the shower curtain and pop off the curtain’s rings, one by one, as we imagine her body sinking to the floor of the bathtub. In Rope (1948), Hitch shoots an entire 80-minute movie with just four, cleverly disguised cuts. And in Vertigo (1958), he had a revolving stage built so that he could shoot a 360-degree tracking scene.
In 1977, the comedy director Mel Brooks released High Anxiety, an affectionate parody of Hitch’s fancy camera angles and other techniques. For example, Brooks recreates the coffee table scene from Spellbound, but in his version, the actors keep spilling cream and coffee on the table and obscuring the camera's view. Unfortunately, viewers must have a strong familiarity with Hitchcock’s work to “get” most of these scenes. In 1977, before VHS, it wasn’t possible for the average movie-goer to easily view a large body of Hitchcock’s work. This is one reason why High Anxiety wasn’t a hit; much of the comedy went over the audience's head.
