A stranger comes to stay
Hitchcock always called this his first true film -- the first to show "the Hitchcock touch." He was 27, working from a novel loosely inspired by Jack the Ripper, and already reaching for the visual tricks that would define his career: a glass floor built into the set so the camera could look straight up through the ceiling at the lodger's pacing feet, and a wrongly-suspected man at the center of the plot, a theme Hitchcock would return to again and again over the next five decades. Star Ivor Novello was already a matinee idol, which forced the studio to soften the ending so its heartthrob couldn't turn out to be the killer.