The Lodger With Live Improvised Score By Hugo Max at Stockport Plaza
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
The master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock has no shortage of well known films, from Psycho to Vertigo to Rear Window to The Birds — the director has a back catalogue filled with classics. This month however, Stockport Plaza have decided to spotlight one of his lesser-seen works accompanied by an improvised live from violist, artist and filmmaker, Hugo Max.
Working for the first time in the genre that would define him, Hitchcock’s The Lodger is a 1927 silent thriller about suspicion, sex and murder in the London smog. Inspired by Jack the Ripper and drawn from Marie Belloc Lowndes’ popular novel by writer Eliot Stannard, the film stars Ivor Novello as a mysterious lodger who may or may not be carrying out the series of grisly murders occurring across the capital. Hitchcock had not long returned from a spell at Berlin’s Babelsberg studios where he had observed the great F.W. Murnau (Sunrise, Nosferatu) at work and The Lodger has been praised for capturing something of the German Expressionist cinema in its use of shadows and darkness.
Max will provide a live improvised score on viola and percussion, within the impressive Art Deco surrounds of Stockport Plaza. Following a succession of sold-out performances at the Prince Charles Cinema in London’s West End he will be accompanying a selection of the greatest silent films as part of a nationwide tour.
