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THE LODGER
Rating: 
USA. 1944.
Director – John Brahm, Screenplay – Barre Lyndon, Based on the Novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, Producer – Robert Bassler, Photography (b&w) – Lucien Ballard, Music – Hugo Friedhofer, Music Director – Emil Newman, Photographic Effects – Fred Sersen, Art Direction – James Basevi & John Ewing. Production Company – 20th Century Fox.
Cast:
Laird Cregar (Mr Slade), Merle Oberon (Kitty Langley), George Sanders (Inspector John Warwick), Cedric Hardwicke (Robert Burton), Sara Allgood (Ellen Burton), Queenie Leonard (Daisy)
Plot: London during the height of the Jack the Ripper murders. Robert and Ellen Burton rent out rooms to the mysterious Mr Slade. They soon find Slade suspicious – conducting mysterious medical experiments, going for walks at night with a black leather bag just like the Ripper is supposed to carry – and they begin to wonder if he could be The Ripper. Slade then develops an attachment to their niece Kitty Langley who is a showgirl just like all the Ripper’s victims.
The Lodger is a classic psycho-thriller from the 1940s. It was a remake of an earlier film The Lodger (1926), which was one of Alfred Hitchcock’s earliest films. Both had been adapted from a 1912 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, a well-known writer of thrillers in the early parts of the century. This version of the story is considered the definitive version. Unlike the novel this specifically identifies the killer as Jack the Ripper, a figure that Lowndes named only ‘The Avenger’. Hitchcock retained Lowndes’s description of the killer as The Avenger, although he also added an upbeat ending where the lodger turns out not to be the killer after all.
The Lodger briefly made the career of big man Laird Cregar, who after this seemed on the verge of becoming another Sydney Greenstreet, but at the very point of his success died of a heart-attack the following year. It was directed by John Brahm, a German immigrant who had made a few routine crime melodramas and war films and the not-so-well known werewolf film The Undying Monster (1942). Brahm went onto make Hangover Square (1945), also with Cregar, an attempt to repeat the success of The Lodger, and the dreary The Mad Magician (1954) with Vincent Price, but this was his greatest success. All three films are psycho-thrillers that contain a grandly pre-Psycho (1960) vision of melodramatic psychopathology. One hasn’t read the Lowndes novel but one suspects it is more an ambiguity drawn drama set around whether the Lodger is The Avenger/Jack the Ripper. But no such ambiguity exists in the film. While it’s there in the script to some extent, directorially the film is weighed toward painting Cregar as a sinister figure – his face is always underlit, reflected in mirrors, or seen looming in the foreground. Not to mention the ways he starts talking with an unnatural intensity about his brother and the river. By the end of the story Cregar has become such a melodramatically unbalanced figure that he is like a feral animal – wild-eyed, hunched over and shot as though he is backed into a corner.
It’s all quite entertaining, although as a Jack the Ripper story it is factually shaky to the point of being pure fiction. The Ripper victims here have different names to the actual ones. Most amusing is the bowdlerization of what types of people the victims were – they having gone from historically being prostitutes to now dancehall girls, a considerable dignification of their status that it seems the Hays Code has enforced. Moreover the psychology of the era, which was all informed by Gothic melodrama and little by real psychological motivation, is fairly cod. Cregar kills dancehall girls it appears because one of them morally dragged his brother down. The real Jack the Ripper wasn’t someone who operated on a screwy notion of revenge, but someone who pathologically hated hookers to the point of gutting them and tearing out their innards.
Other versions of the book are the obscure The Lodger/The Phantom Fiend (1932), a loose variation of the story, and Man in the Attic (1953), starring Jack Palance in the Cregar role, which was a direct remake of this film.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2001
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