This electrifying early feature starring an ambiguously appealing Ivor Novello shows the young director marshalling a new medium's visual power
The Lodger, the silent film that Hitchcock directed in 1927, is generally acknowledged to be the one where he properly found his "voice": that distinctive combination of death and fetishism, trick shots and music-hall humour, intense menace and elegant camerawork that assured his place among cinema's giants. Hitchcock would go on to make more polished films, scarier films, more suspenseful films, better-acted films, funnier films and weirder films. But none, I think, as simply extraordinary.
The material, drawn from a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes (sister of Hilaire), is rather obviously inspired by the Jack the Ripper murders; they were still within living memory. Hitchcock himself claimed later that producing studio Gainsborough (including Michael Balcon) ordered him to remove any ambiguity that the central character, the mysterious room-renter of the title,...
The Lodger, the silent film that Hitchcock directed in 1927, is generally acknowledged to be the one where he properly found his "voice": that distinctive combination of death and fetishism, trick shots and music-hall humour, intense menace and elegant camerawork that assured his place among cinema's giants. Hitchcock would go on to make more polished films, scarier films, more suspenseful films, better-acted films, funnier films and weirder films. But none, I think, as simply extraordinary.
The material, drawn from a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes (sister of Hilaire), is rather obviously inspired by the Jack the Ripper murders; they were still within living memory. Hitchcock himself claimed later that producing studio Gainsborough (including Michael Balcon) ordered him to remove any ambiguity that the central character, the mysterious room-renter of the title,...
- 7/30/2012
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
Drowning, rabies, electrocution: 70s public information films suggested you could die at any moment. And they were so frightening, they still haunt people today
• Peter Bradshaw on the horror of public information films
• Jude Rogers on how public information films haunt today's directors
In the mid 90s, a company secured the rights to release a selection of classic public information films on video, under the title Charley Says. I bought it not, as I suppose most people did, in a haze of nostalgia, but in the spirit of confronting a terrible fear, like those people who try to overcome their aerophobia by booking on to a course that involves a trip in a plane.
I can't remember the first time I saw The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, the 1973 public information film in which a Bergman-esque Death literally stalks children playing on riverbanks. That was part of the problem:...
• Peter Bradshaw on the horror of public information films
• Jude Rogers on how public information films haunt today's directors
In the mid 90s, a company secured the rights to release a selection of classic public information films on video, under the title Charley Says. I bought it not, as I suppose most people did, in a haze of nostalgia, but in the spirit of confronting a terrible fear, like those people who try to overcome their aerophobia by booking on to a course that involves a trip in a plane.
I can't remember the first time I saw The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, the 1973 public information film in which a Bergman-esque Death literally stalks children playing on riverbanks. That was part of the problem:...
- 4/2/2012
- by Alexis Petridis
- The Guardian - Film News
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