10 Things I Learned: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
1.
Before ever setting foot in front of a camera, Ivor Novello found fame as a music composer in 1914 with his beloved wartime anthem “Keep the Home Fires Burning (’Till the Boys Come Home).” Over a million copies of the sheet music were sold when it was published during World War I, and the song was translated into six languages, paving Novello’s way to popularity in British musical theater and film.

2.
Marie Belloc Lowndes’s novel The Lodger ends with the villain fleeing the Bunting home before the detectives can arrest him. But studio executives forced Hitchcock to change the ending, convinced that Novello’s appeal among his female fans would be tarnished if he played a murderer of beautiful blonde women.

3.
Belloc Lowndes’s novel has served as the basis for five screen adaptations. After Alfred Hitchcock’s version, among the most notable is a 1932 “talkie” remake by the prolific British director Maurice Elvey, who cast Ivor Novello once again as the mysterious lodger. In addition to being based on Belloc Lowndes’s book, Hitchcock’s film also drew inspiration from Who Is He?, a comedic adaptation of the novel by Horace Annesley Vachell that the director saw on the London stage.

4.
Hitchcock appears in his first cameo, as an editor in the Evening Standard newspaper bureau. What began on the set as a solution to a problem caused by a shortage of extras later became a signature motif for Hitchcock, making him one of the world’s most recognizable movie directors.

5.
Hitchcock’s closest collaborator—his wife, Alma Reville—makes her own cameo appearance in the film as a terrified Londoner, depicted in a close-up listening to the radio as news of the Avenger’s latest attack is broadcast over the wire.
