This restoration of Hitchcock’s 1926 silent melodrama offers a gripping prehistory not just of his own work, but the Hollywood thriller itself. Ivor Novello plays the lodger, living in a boarding house in pre-first world war London where people are terrified of a serial killer called the Avenger who murders young blondes. The lodger is a strange, tortured figure whose neurotic sensitivity and vulnerability begins to entrance the landlady’s pretty daughter Daisy (June Tripp), who is being courted by Joe (Malcolm Keen), a police detective on the killer’s trail. But might not this lodger, with his mysterious nighttime excursions, be the killer himself? Novello’s haunted appearance is a ghostly premonition of Robert Donat in The 39 Steps and Anthony Perkins in Psycho. The initial sequence, showing how news of the murders is disseminated in the press, is brilliant, and there is a flash of pure Hitchcock genius in the lodger’s ambiguous disgust and excitement at seeing Joe playfully put Daisy in handcuffs. The ending is arguably a little anti-climactic, but with its sheer brio and control, this is a vital rerelease.
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Über Frank
Seit 1996 bin ich freier Mitarbeiter der Salzgitter-Zeitung, als Experte für das Geschehen im hiesigen Kreisfußball. Daneben sind meine Kolumnen seit 2005 fester Bestandteil im Lokalteil der Salzgitter-Zeitung. Zusammen mit Frau und Tochter sowie zwei gefräßigen wie faulen Stubentigern versuche ich das zu meistern, was das Leben, das Universum und der ganze Rest an Absurditäten für uns bereithalten.
