Scotland Yard greift ein

A tight, terse little black and white film about.....well, about Jack the Ripper. Prostitute victims are transformed into actresses for the film (and obviously for the Code) but it follows somewhat the modus operandi of Jack. You never see the violence, it is only implied and that works for this film.

Laird Cregar is absolutely marvelous as the strange, sweating lodger who may or may not be the murderer. He was perfect for the part, with those great, brooding eyes. Sadly, he died at a very early age.....he could have gone on to greater things. Merle Oberon is lovely, of course, but in the real world she certainly would have not made it on the musical stage....can't sing (obviously dubbed), can't dance,...but that's irrelevant in the scheme of things. George Sanders, that most wonderful gentleman, doesn't get to be too suave in his part as the Scotland Yard inspector, but he is, as he always was, very good. And who could ever fault Sara Allgood, as Oberon's aunt......she never gave a bad performance in her long career.....just marvelous. This film is worth watching and you will agree that Laird Cregar is as good as it gets playing a very edgy man with some big problems!!

It's London's autumn of terror – 1888 – when Jack the Ripper stalked the slums of Whitechapel to eviscerate gin-soaked prostitutes and shake the capital of the British Empire to its foundations. John Brahm's movie opens on the gas-lit and fog-wreathed cobblestones, evocatively shot by Lucien Ballard, in this umpteenth recension of Marie Belloc Lowndes' evergreen chiller The Lodger (Alfred Hitchcock did a silent treatment in 1927, and Jack Palance would star in Man in the Attic in 1954 , to name but two of its closest cousins).

The crafty Mrs. Lowndes may have been the first to use that surefire scare tactic `the call is coming from inside the house!' The gimmick of her story is that the fiend has a respectable face and may have taken lodgings under a respectable roof while its respectable occupants remain oblivious but imperiled.

Brahm's choice of lodger is Laird Cregar, whose enormous bulk – he was six-three and 300 pounds – made him look perpetually 45, though he was only 28 when he died, shortly after making this movie. (His last, released posthumously the following year, was the somewhat similar Hangover Square, which Brahm also directed). The rooms he takes (including an attic `laboratory' complete with gas fire for his experiments) belong to Cedric Hardwicke and Sara Allgood, whose niece Merle Oberon, a music-hall star, lives there as well.

When Laird is invited to attend one of Oberon's can-can numbers, he rants and raves about painted and powdered woman and finally erupts: `I can show you something more beautiful than a beautiful woman,' whereupon he produces a photograph of his dead brother, who came to ruin through consorting with wicked women (there's the merest insinuation of syphilitic insanity). Clearly, the lodger has unresolved issues.

The Ripper legend and Lowndes' telling of it are so familiar it needs no retracing, save to note that George Sanders plays the smitten Scotland Yard Detective and that Brahm delivers all the expected chills. But then this German emigrant always fared better with the spooky and the Victorian than with the hard-boiled and American. The Lodger counts among his finer hours-and-a-half.

From the first few frames, as the title credits wash in and out like the tide, this is a superb film, full of fog, shadows, suspense, and great performances from Cregar (brilliant in this), Oberon, Hardwicke and others. It manages to be chilling and moving at the same time, and the ending seems incredibly sad and poetic after what has gone before. This makes it all the more memorable. Sadly not on video at the moment unless you dig around, but deserves to be better known than perhaps it is. In comparison with the silent version by Hitchcock, this is more deranged and evil than Novello's cuckoo clocks and wild eyes, and also has a more logical conclusion that the viewer was sure of from early on. The strongest scene is the one in Oberon's dressing room quite near the end, which gives the viewer as much of a fright as it gives her. After that it is somehow reminiscent of Phantom of the Opera, not without advantage. Well worth a look.

Though heavy hints suggest the "Jack the Ripper" murders, this name is deemphasised in the film. Here the killer is known mainly as "The Ripper" and possibly for censorship reasons his victims are identified in dialogue as "actresses" and "showgirls" but never "prostitutes".

Many of the victims are downtrodden cockney women who may once have danced or acted on stage but are now reduced to street busking and begging to support their rowdy drinking sessions in cosy East End pubs. Save for their career designation as given in the dialogue, the film is clearly suggesting prostitutes as victims, and the killer is shown to find showgirls immoral. (It is also important to note the great pains made by the script to show the victims as kind and generous and in no way deserving of their fate.)

In any event this is a well-made film with excellent black and white photography, good camera work and some interesting images. The film is foremost entertainment, it is not a detailed documentary of the "Jack the Ripper" crimes, nor is it a mystery. Only a rudimentary exploration of the killer's psyche is made, and much screen-time is lavished on showcasing song and dance numbers performed by Merle Oberon in her leading role as a gaily dressed showgirl. Indeed the police investigation takes second-place to the fluffy romance between Oberon's character and a police detective, and the final twist involving the killer's possible left-handedness a rudimentary boy's-own-adventure style plot twist.

This is a great Victorian melodrama. Everything about this film is superb. The late Laird Cregar is just outstanding in the title role and Merle Oberon has never looked lovelier It's funny how you can see a film when you are about twelve years old and it sticks in your brain because it is so good and this one is one of the best. I highly recommend this film.