The Lodger

Made during the tail end of the silent era in 1927, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger lays out the director’s concerns with all the clarity of a street lamp piercing the London fog. The barebones plot is primal Hitchcock—a serial killer is prowling the London streets for fair-haired victims, while the titular lodger takes the rap, due to an outrageous series of coincidences (and, it must be acknowledged, his own general air of creepiness). Many of the familiar obsessions are already fully evident here: dim-witted cops, blondes in peril, and the prototype for dozens of unjustly accused and needlessly pursued Hitchcock protagonists, the original Wrong Man.

Yet the film’s greatest strength lies in its skewed love triangle, with the lodger and a policeman vying for affections of the landlord’s daughter Daisy. Sexual repression becomes interchangeable with police oppression, and the paranoid mistrust of the lodger is impossible to separate from everyone’s attempts to micromanage Daisy’s love life. Tellingly, the smarmy cop comes on to the girl by equating a wedding ring to a hangman’s noose, and then slaps a pair of handcuffs on her (smooth operator, he). Little wonder she prefers the lodger, who lustily kisses her golden locks and doesn’t make his love conditional upon a hanging. But in an icky twist that oddly recalls Vertigo, Daisy is revealed to be the spitting image of the lodger’s murdered sister, meaning she is essentially a recreation of his lost love (his, um, sister). Unlike Vertigo, there’s a happy ending, but only of the most sour and peculiar sort. Somehow, the murderer seems less perverse than our putative hero.

The Artist

Armed with the score from Vertigo and the dog from The Thin Man, The Artist prods its audience with a thousand different pilfered pleasures. It’s a charm offensive wielding a crowbar—not necessarily to pry a smile out of you, but rather to open coffins while out on its grave-robbing expedition. Example: Is the gag about the extra that plays Napoleon and thinks he’s actually Napoleon a muddled reference to Josef Von Sternberg’s The Last Command? And does it even matter when the bit is so weak anyway? Writer-director Michael Hazanavicius is on his strongest footing when he relies on the real chemistry between his stars, Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo (an impromptu dancing duel, a series of botched takes). But there isn’t enough vaseline in the world to make me buy into the film’s half-remembered nostalgia, which reduces film history into some sort of mawkish twaddle about how the medium moves forward by paying fealty to its forebears—an idea repudiated by The Artist’s very own unimaginative appropriations and distorted notions of silent film. Just compare this to the work of Guy Maddin, a movie obsessive who has internalized the grammar of the silents and learned to speak it fluently. Hazanavicius, on the other hand, memorizes a few phrases and tries to bluff his way through a conversation.