4 The Silent Era

Chapter 3 The Silent Era Hitch's first completed movie as a director, The Pleasure Garden, was about two friends who have some unlikely adventures in love. Michael Balcon sent Hitchcock, along with Alma, to Germany in 1925. The cameraman warned Hitch not to tell the border patrol that he was carrying film or cameras. He would have to pay German customs officers a fee to bring them into the country.

Hitch trembled and sweated as customs officials searched his train compartment. They didn't find the camera, but they took all the film. The next day, just as the cameraman arrived with twenty pounds of new film, their original film was returned. They had paid for twice as much film as they needed, and they still had to pay the customs fee on top of that. Hitch's first

movie was already over budget, and he hadn't even begun filming! Despite the problems, Hitch enjoyed working in Germany because German directors were making some of his favorite movies at that time. He liked the way the German filmmakers used shadows and strange scenery to tell fantastic, thrilling, and sometimes scary tales.

In the spring of 1926, Balcon found a story well suited to Hitch's interests. The Lodger was inspired by the true crimes of Jack the Ripper. Hitch and Alma worked out the details of the

story together. Hitch was quickly learning that his wife-to-be was a valuable collaborator. When The Lodger was finished, it was shown to distributors who would consider booking it into their theaters. The head of the group, C. M. Woolf, said, "Your picture is so dreadful that we're just going to put it on a shelf and forget about it." Luckily for Hitch, a film critic convinced Mr. Woolf that the movie was good enough to release.

The Lodger showed British audiences a whole new kind of filmmaking, one that revealed information in very creative ways. In one famous scene, the family hears their lodger—the person to whom they've rented one of their spare bedrooms—pacing in his room above their heads. This was not easy to show in a silent movie. Without being able to hear the footsteps, how could the audience understand what was going on? Hitch used a glass floor in the lodger's bedroom so that the audience could see the character's feet moving back and forth, causing the chandelier to shake in the dining room below.