Room to Let

People are usually unaware that when Hammer Films were originally making films under their earlier name Exclusive they already produced a number of films that qualified as fantasy and horror.

One of these was 'Room to Let' - based on a radio play by Margery Allingham - which featured the further exploits of a killer explicitly identified as Jack the Ripper (identifiable according to witnesses by his distinctively laboured breathing, but which the audience never actually hears) updated fifteen years later to the Edwardian era in a subject to which Hammer would return twenty years later with a far more graphic version entitled 'Hands of the Ripper'.

Jimmy Hanley is the young reporter with suspicions about whether everyone was accounted for in that fire at the madhouse. Valentine Dyall is Dr. Fell, who takes a room in the house of decayed gentry. He proceeds to terrorize everyone with his secretive manner and his threatening, cultured voice.

It's a variation on Marie Belloc Lowndes' THE LODGER. Dyall is the making of it, with a lovely scene in which he chides Constance Smith for turning up the gas lamps, noting that the only reason her mother lets a room to a stranger is because she needs the money. He's smooth and very scary, with his insinuating manner.

The decayed family, by the way, is named 'Musgrave', which recalls the Sherlock Holmes story 'The Musgrave Ritual. It's a nice bit suggesting that there is a mystery here... but what that mystery is will be answered by the end. Perhaps.