| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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MAN IN THE ATTIC
Rating: 
USA. 1953.
Director – Hugo Fregonese, Screenplay – Barre Lyndon & Robert Presnell Jr, Based on the Novel The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes, Producer – Robert L. Jacks, Photography (b&w) – Leo Tover, Music Director – Lionel Newman, Makeup – Lou Hippe, Art Direction – Leland Fuller & Lyle Wheeler. Production Company – Panoramic Pictures.
Cast:
Jack Palance (Mr Slade), Constance Smith (Lilly Bonner), Byron Palmer (Inspector Paul Warwick), Rhys Williams (William Harley), Frances Bavier (Helen Harley), Tita Phillips (Daisy)
Plot: London in the midst of the Jack the Ripper murders. Mr Slade comes to rent rooms from William and Helen Harley. Slade is a pathologist and is engaged in mysterious experiments in the middle of the night. Increasing evidence makes the Harleys’ suspect that Slade might be the Ripper. The Ripper targets young dancehall girls and they become concerned when Slade becomes friendly with their niece Lilly, a dancer.
Man in the Attic was the third film adaptation of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ novel The Lodger (1912). The first film adaptation was Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1926). It was remade as The Lodger (1944), featuring Laird Cregar as the sinister title figure, which is the most well-known of the three versions. Man in the Attic is a direct remake of the 1944 Lodger – it retains the identifying of the killer as Jack the Ripper, whereas both Lowndes and Hitchcock simply named the character The Avenger. This version is also co-written by Barre Lyndon, who wrote the 1944 Lodger.
Lyndon certainly takes the opportunity to refine and polish his script. The Slade character is given somewhat more believable psychological motivation – he now hates showgirls because he sees his mother who was a showgirl as having dragged his father down, rather than the improbable motivation of hating them because one ruined his brother as was the case in the 1944 version. And the relationship with Lilly/Kitty has been refined – now she is romantically interested in Slade and not in the inspector, which sets up more sympathetic resonances. Although, as in The Lodger, Lyndon has failed to do his research regarding the Jack the Ripper case and still maintains the fiction that the victims were dancers, not prostitutes.
The part of Mr Slade is played by a young (34 year-old), almost unrecognizable Jack Palance in one of his first screen roles. Palance is free of the breathy, asthmatic overacting of the performances he gave in later life and with gaunt, bony face he has quite effectively harsh and sinister presence in the film. This version is better-budgeted than the 1944 version and directed with a basic, although not standout, competence. But it also lacks the entertainingly overwrought melodramaticism of the 1944 version though and as such is only a fairly ordinary psycho-thriller.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2001
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