Alfred Hitchcock progressed through the ranks of the British film industry as an inter-title writer, production designer and assistant director. That apprenticeship served him well when Michael Balcon at Gainsborough Studios gave him the opportunity to direct. His technical competence and his desire to experiment is evident in his early films. His experience shooting on location in Europe, a common practice for British filmmakers, also gave him the chance to rub shoulders with the likes of F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang. The imprint of those German masters, as well as the knowledge of Soviet montage, is all over his early work. He was one the few directors in England at the time to use extensively abstract, metaphoric imagery in popular narrative cinema. His use of lighting, props and camera point of view was unparalleled. Yet, despite all this, Hitchcock's early pictures produced at Gainsborough and then British International Films at Elstree studios were largely turgid domestic dramas or stage plays indifferently adapted to film. Never less than professional, they have moments where Hitch is fully engaged with a scene, but often there's a lack of investment in the material as a whole. Only on Downhill and The Farmer's Wife is he able to transform less than stellar material into something personal, while The Ring is an ill-advised attempt at the popular modes from which he should have been seeking to escape. The Lodger is the grand exception. In that riff on Jack-The-Ripper he found his subjects: fear, suspense, sexual repression, perversity swimming just below the surface of the normal. It's a great film, one of the best English films of the Twenties. But Hitch didn't seem to realise he discovered his cinematic country. It wasn't until Blackmail that he found it again.