Downhill

Alfred Hitchcock followed his success with the The Lodger with Downhill, an aptly titled retrograde effort. Much of the credit—or blame, perhaps—belongs to Ivor Novello, who wrote the script and stars as a somewhat bewildered, prudish playboy. An all-star rugby player at a boarding school, the jaunty young Novello proves irresistibly attractive to women, including the sinister sexpot who lures him to “Ye Olde Bunne Shoppe” in the hopes of seducing him (ye olde bunne in the ovenne). She fails and settles for his chum, but puts the blame on Novello anyway in the hopes of tapping his family wealth. From there, his life—apparently as sturdy as the hideous cardboard sets where most of the action takes place—collapses in mild chaos, light depravity, and slight madness.

Hitchcock has never really been what you might call a feminist director, but he could still muster some strong, intelligent female characters throughout his career. Unfortunately, the sex-panicked script lays the blame for Novello’s fall at the feet of a series of shrill, callous gold-diggers and floozies, with rock bottom being a hairy-lipped lady in a dingy Parisian dance hall. If there is any reason to watch this film—and really, there probably isn’t—it would be for Hitchcock’s technique, which betrays an intelligence far livelier than the surroundings. Some elegant lighting, a few judicious tracking shots, and even some point-of-view perspective shooting add to the visual interest of the film, but do little to enrich the material. Mostly, these touches serve as an occasionally pleasant distraction from the finger-wagging, tongue-clucking moralizing of the dreary script.

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.