Stories of the London fog and Paris underworld: Ivor Novello and the queer chronotopes of 'The Rat' (1925) and 'The Lodger' (1926)

Williams, Michael (2025) Stories of the London fog and Paris underworld: Ivor Novello and the queer chronotopes of 'The Rat' (1925) and 'The Lodger' (1926). BAFTSS Annual Conference 2025: Global Aesthetics, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom. 26 - 28 Mar 2025.

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Ivor Novello was arguably the leading British male film star of the silent era but was equally well known for his music compositions and stage work. His play, ‘The Rat’, co-written with Constance Collier, was a major success on stage in 1924 and then on screen. In The Rat (Cutts, 1925), playing the titular Apache of the Paris underworld, Novello introduced audiences to an expressionistic Montmartre club named ‘The White Coffin’ where heteronormativity was playfully subverted. A year later his most famous role in The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Hitchcock, 1926), would see the star play a suspicious figure ambiguously referred to as ‘queer’ in the intertitles who appears disinterested in women and who wanders (cruises?) the foggy streets at night and navigates between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural spaces.

When asked by François Truffaut about The Lodger and his interest in ‘the abnormal’, Hitchcock segued into a tale of visiting a Berlin gay night club in 1924. More affirmatively, this paper focuses on the queer experiences of other cities visited by Novello himself that we can glimpse through sometimes-coded reports in contemporary newspapers and fan-magazines. These include visits to Paris (a blindfolded trip to a basement club that inspired The White Coffin) and the speakeasies of New York (including an encounter with Rudolph Valentino and gay fan-magazine writer, Herbert Howe). Significantly, Novello established his own queer space, the ‘Fifty-Fifty Club’, in London’s Soho in 1924. A sanctuary for theatrical folk and queer people alike, the venue was regularly subjected to police raids on spurious charges. Linking real-world queer nightlife to Novello’s persona, and the milieu designed on screen, the Swedish caricaturist Nerman even painted Novello as The Rat into the décor of the Fifty-Fifty club. With Constance Collier as a partner, the Fifty-Fifty might be considered an extension of The White Coffin itself.

I argue that Novello’s queer authorship shaped the spaces we see in these films. Drawing from new archival research, I adopt a contextual approach using contemporary publications alongside the films to uncover traces of the international inspiration, queer cultural networks, oblique representations, and even hints of audience recognition that shape the spaces seen on screen in The Rat (in its centenary year) and The Lodger. I frame this discussion with Sobchack’s work on the chronotope of the film noir city and queer temporality more broadly.

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