A killer called "The Avenger" is stalking fog-bound London, and every victim has golden hair. One night a pale, quiet stranger (Ivor Novello) knocks at the Buntings' door looking for a room. He keeps odd hours, paces the floor, and turns the pictures of blonde women to face the wall. His landlady grows uneasy. Her daughter Daisy, a fashion model, finds him fascinating. Her suitor Joe, a detective on the Avenger case, is starting to wonder whether the man upstairs is the one he's hunting.

Hitchcock later called this silent film the first true "Hitchcock picture." It has his first cameo and the wrongly accused man he'd return to for fifty years. It also has some startling visual inventions, including a glass floor that lets us watch the lodger pace from below. A hundred years on, it's still a tense, stylish thriller and a perfect introduction to silent cinema.

Matthew Sorrento, PhD joins us for a post screening discussion. Matt is an American film scholar, critic and editor whose work centers on genre cinema, especially crime film and noir. He is editor-in-chief of Film International and Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon, and teaches film and media studies at Rutgers University. Film International is a long-running academic journal with a companion site, FilmInt, covering film, television, and moving image studies through critical, historical and theoretical essays, along with interviews and reviews.

1927, 1h29m