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The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog wasn’t Alfred Hitchcock’s first film, but the 1927 silent classic was the one that established his style. It was also the first in which he made a cameo appearance. In fact, he made two, and his wife, Alma, had one as well.

This was the first film version of Marie Belloc Lowndes’s 1913 novel The Lodger, that would be filmed again in the U.K. in 1932, by Hollywood in 1944, 1953 (as Man in the Attic), and 2009. Hitchcock even directed a radio version of it in 1940. Inspired by the 1888 killings of Jack the Ripper, the film is about a mysterious young man who rents a room from a nervous landlady and her husband. Is he the notorious strangler of young women or is he an innocent? In Hitchcock’s version, he is an innocent, the first of the director’s wrongly accused men that would eventually include the likes of Robert Donat in The 39 Steps, Robert Cummings in Saboteur, Gregory Peck in Spellbound, Henry Fonda in The Wrong Man, and Cary Grant in North by Northwest.

Hitchcock’s protagonist is played by Ivor Novello, the most popular actor in British films of the day. A former boy singer, Novello was also an accomplished composer and stage actor. His “Keep the Home Fires Burning” was one of the most popular songs of World War I. He’s played by Jeremy Northam in Robert Altman’s 2001 film Gosford Park.

Unlike most of Hitchcock’s innocents, the audience isn’t sure of Novello’s innocence until he’s set upon by an angry mob that almost kills him when he’s saved in the nick of time by the arrest of the actual killer. The rest of the cast is not well known. Heroine June Tripp had a brief career in films before becoming a London, and eventually a New York, socialite. Landlady Marie Ault and her husband, Arthur Chesney, had bit parts in talkies. Only Malcolm Keen as the detective who is also in love with the girl, had a long career in films. Even Novello didn’t last long in the medium. He made his last one in 1934, preferring to concentrate on his music.

Criterion’s 2K restoration of the film is impressive, but the film goes from black-and-white to sepia to blue screen for no apparent reason throughout, which tends to be distracting. Hitchcock’s first cameo is as a newspaperman, seen from the back. The second is as one of the angry mob who tries to kill the lodger. Mrs. Hitchcock’s cameo is as a woman listening to the radio.

Also included on the Blu-ray is Downhill, Hitchcock’s second full-length 1927 film starring Ivor Novello. Released in the U.S. as When Boys Leave Home it is more of a melodrama than a suspense film. Novello stars as a wealthy college student who takes the blame for his scholarship roommate’s indiscretion with a young woman and is expelled. His father throws him out of the house and he wanders through life, marrying a gold-digging two-timing actress (Isabel Jeans) who robs him of the inheritance he received from his late aunt. Eventually he returns home where his father, who has since learned the truth about his sacrifice for his friend, begs his forgiveness.

Restored with the same shift from black-and-white to sepia to blue, for some reason the shift in tone seems less distracting in this film.

Downhill was co-written by Novello and actress Constance Collier under the singular pseudonym of David L’Estrange. The cast is an interesting one starting with Robin Irvine as Novello’s roommate. The popular young actor later married to Ursula Jeans, the actress sister of co-star Isabel Jeans. They were married less than two years when they took a trip to Bermuda where he suddenly fell ill and died at the age of 31.

Ben Webster, who plays the dean of the college, was Dame May Whitty’s husband. Isabel Jeans was not initially as popular as her sister Ursula who later co-starred in Cavalcade, but had a much longer career. Her most famous role was as Leslie Caron’s aunt in Gigi, a role she inherited when Marlene Dietrich turned it down.

Available on Blu-ray from Sony’s Choice Collection, Gus Van Sant’s 2000 film Finding Forrester was Sean Connery’s last major film featuring one of his best performances.

Set in the then-contemporaneous Bronx in the waning days of the writer’s use of the typewriter, Connery is a reclusive writer whose one book, published in 1953, is still taught in academia. He befriends a local basketball-playing kid who is also an aspiring writer, played by Rob Brown in his film debut. This was Van Sant’s first film since his disastrous 1998 remake of Psycho, which was his first film after earning his first Oscar nomination for directing Good Will Hunting.

The film’s plot seems like an amalgam Good Will Hunting and Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman, with Brown substituting for Matt Damon and Connery substituting for Al Pacino. It’s not a great film by any means, but it’s a good one, better than any I’ve seen about the art of writing in the modern world. Connery has never been better.

Available on Blu-ray from Warner Archive, Sidney Lumet’s 1988 film Running on Empty is far and away the best of the numerous fugitive families in hiding films of the era. Chrstine Lahti and Judd Hirsch are excellent as the one-time anti-war protestors on the run from the FBI for having blown up a napalm lab and injuring a janitor in the 1960s. River Phoenix as their oldest son, a high school senior trying to figure out his life, is the film’s real star. His performance earned him the only Oscar nomination of his all too brief career.

Available on Blu-ray from Shout Select is The Pink Panther Film Collection featuring all six of Blake Edwards’ Inspector Clouseau comedy-mystery films starring Peter Sellers.

Filmed over a twenty-one-year period from 1963 to 1983, the first Clouseau film, called The Pink Panther, was so successful that Sellers’ bumbling detective was inserted into 1964’s A Shot in the Dark, the film version of a Broadway play that starred Walter Matthau as another detective. After an eleven year hiatus, the series resumed with 1975’s The Return of the Pink Panther, 1976’s The Pink Panther Strikes Again, and 1978’s Revenge of the Pink Panther. Not included is Edwards’ critically lambasted 1983 film Curse of the Pink Panther in which Sellers’ character does not appear, the actor having died three years earlier. Unfortunately included, however, is 1982’s Trail of the Pink Panther, a poorly put together hodgepodge featuring Sellers in outtakes from the previous films. If you like Sellers and Edwards’ brand of tomfoolery, you’ll like the other five films.

This week’s new releases include The Zookeeper’s Wife and the Blu-ray upgrade of The Lemon Drop Kid.

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