Il pensionante

I haven't seen the Hitchcock original, although I have seen the 50's version Man in the Attic, starring Jack Palance, a film I liked. This 40's version of the novel is an equally fine movie, with an entertainingly creepy lead performance by Laird Cregar in the role as the lodger (Jack the bloomin' Ripper to you and me). The foggy London streets create nice atmosphere and the support cast all also contribute nicely. All-in-all, a quality production.

"The Lodger" is not a history lesson and is based very, very loosely on Jack the Ripper. I say this because as a retired history teacher, I've noticed that a lot of folks think many film characters are real...and Mr. Slade and his odd proclivities are based on some real events as well as a lot of fiction.

When the film begins, London is all in a panic due to the murders by Jack the Ripper. During all this hubbub, the ever-odd Mr. Slade (Laird Cregar) arrives at the home of two folks (Sara Allgood and Cederic Hardwicke). He wants to rent a room and seems like a pretty normal guy...initially. However, through the course of the film, you see more and more of the weird and peculiar aspects of Slade and folks start to add up all the weird details and think he might just be that serial killer.

This film works pretty well because it sets an excellent creepy mood and Laird Cregar really was terrific as the creepy lodger. Too bad he died so young, as he sure had a great screen presence! Worth seeing.

This is the first HOLLYWOOD lensing of the Jack The Ripper tale (Alfred Hitchcock choos ehtis material for his first film thriller in 1926, and there was a rather talky British remake in 1932) The film is a testimony to a great actor, Laird Cregar. He plays a tenant in a rooming house set in the middle of the Ripper murder sites. Cregar gives a wonderful performance, looking trapped when Scotland Yard detective George Sanders (always a treat) is around, or when his landlord's lovely niece (played by the beautiful Merle Oberon) is nearby. The best performance Cregar gives when all is closing in on him. Director John Brahm's camera catches him in close-up, savoring every bead of paniced sweat. Sadly, since Cregar was vastly over weight, only sinister roles came his way. Trying to crash diet, he died of a heart attack at the youthful age of 28. Had he lived, we would seen him become a more famous actors, taking roles probably well into the 1990's.

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.