Abstract

Alfred Hitchcock’s first cinematic success, The Lodger (1926, silent), provides a case study of contagious violence in the modern metropolis. The film is ostensibly a crime thriller centered on the search for the Avenger, a serial killer modeled on Jack the Ripper. But Hitchcock raises the stakes by introducing a love plot in which the detective and the suspected killer compete for the same woman, who may or may not be the slayer’s next target. In the course of this triangular struggle, the hostility between rivals for the same object of desire escalates to the point of eroding any secure distinction between the cop and the killer, innocence and guilt, legal authority and criminal transgression. As if in homage to ..