THE LODGER (1944)

We open in Whitechapel, London in 1888. Low-hanging Hollywood fog pollutes the streets like smoke. Through them patrol genial, moustached Victorian bobbies, truncheons in hand. Spilling out of an East-End pub come a gaggle of gor-blimey Cockneys - flat-capped labourers, ‘painted ladies’ and Pearly Kings. They bid a boozy good-night to one of their number, a brassy dame (an uncredited Thora Hird) whose trip home down an alley-way ends with her being violently strangled off-camera. “Like a shadow ‘e was. Under your very nose” gasps an onlooker as the cops arrive. So far, so clichéd. But from these unprepossessing beginnings emerges a strange man in our midst  - and a surprisingly good horror remake…

The Lodger (1944) was the third film version of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ 1913 novel about the notorious Jack the Ripper killings, a brutal series of murders that earned him the title of the world’s first acknowledged serial killer. Alfred Hitchcock propelled himself to fame directing a hugely stylish and atmospheric silent film released in 1927 starring Ivor Novello in the title role (reviewed here). Director and star delighted in playing with audiences’ allegiance to the famously handsome musical idol, building heavy suspicion against this enigmatic young man who rents a room in the area and whose appearance and behaviour matches the murderer’s description. Both this and the subsequent 1932 sound version, also starring Novello, revealed that he was in fact pursuing the killer (fictionally dubbed ‘The Avenger’) ironically to avenge his sister’s murder.

For the 1944 remake by Twentieth-Century Fox the premise was changed to throw knowing horror fans’ expectations with an interesting double-bluff. The result is well-directed by John Brahm with excellent performances by an engaging top-drawer cast and while honouring the Victorian period with great sets and costumes, it manages to introduce an early modern approach to criminal psychology.

The aforementioned man from the mist is (Samuel) Laird Cregar, a fascinating and tragically short-lived actor who died aged 31. His death would have also stunned many as he appeared to be much older due to his imposing height of 6ft 3-inches weighing in at around 300 lbs. Cregar’s bulk typecast him as looming heavies in both senses of the word, a problem that tortured him incessantly in his desire to play romantic leads. He made a name for himself in the theatre in a self-financed theatrical run as Oscar Wilde. This led to movie offers and a seven-year contract with Fox starting with a larger-than-life fur trapper character in Hudson’s Bay (1941). Before long his film roles showcased his versatility, developing comic chops opposite Jack Benny in the farce Charley’s Aunt (1941) and in the same year channelling a frightening intensity in the film noir I Wake up Screaming as a cop who knowingly frames innocent Victor Mature for the murder of a girl whose case he obsesses over.

By the time Cregar did The Lodger it was to be his penultimate film in a movie career spanning just six brief years. He was a troubled soul who instead of enjoying his success and reputation battled with inner demons on more than one front. Cregar had submitted to playing various colourful and stereotyping assigned parts under his Fox contract while struggling to break away from the limitations of often villainous roles. An added career complication (for his bosses) was his homosexuality. He had no problem or qualms about picking up younger men, yet in the more disapproving Forties climate his gay relationship with married actor David Bacon forced the studio to distance any connection between them in 1943 following Bacon’s unsolved knife-wound murder. Cregar had described himself as ‘such a good friend’ of the young man. Fox head Darry F. Zanuck contrived a press story amorously linking him to Dorothy McGuire by way of damage limitation.

Cregar had begun using amphetamines as part of dieting for his latest film. He makes a compelling 

screen presence regardless of whatever he was attempting with his shape. Tall, sombre, sad-eyed and with a light-registered cultured voice reminiscent of Vincent Price. For the part of Mr Slade, Cregar showed off his facility for an English accent - although born in Philadelphia, USA, he had benefitted from an education at England’s Winchester College.

As the film unfolds, like the previous version evidence is loaded against Slade. His landlady Ellen Bonting (Sara Allgood)’s feminine intuition immediately begins to suspect him of being tied to the Ripper murders. Allgood was superb as the matriarch of the Morgan family in How Green Was my Valley (1941) and here her conviction is so strong that gradually she influences her husband, that venerable character player Sir Cedric Hardwicke whom we last saw in 1942’s The Invisible Agent and The Ghost of Frankenstein. His cosy domestic world of the smoking jacket and pince-nez glasses by the fireside is soon penetrated by the chill of foreboding. Their lodger is nocturnal – “I enjoy the streets at night – when they are empty” - rents their attic for strange smoky experiments under the guise of being a pathologist and has the most evasive, haunted manner about him.

Slade’s strangest behaviour is around their niece Kitty, a variety musical star who brings out an unsettling instability in his emotions. Gentlemen in the cinemas could be forgiven for a little of that effect upon themselves as it is the radiantly beautiful Merle Oberon inhabiting the role. At first, her cut-glass accent and Hollywood star voltage seems an unlikely match for the usually low-born performers of that era, yet of course she soon wins you over. Oberon also has a beguiling, unruffled confidence that isn’t fazed by Slade’s oddball loner even when he waxes almost suicidally lyrical about the hypnotic power of the Thames upon him. “Deep water is dark and restful and…full of peace”. She also takes no offence at his resistance to seeing her show, seeing him almost as a playful challenge.

Another major character who actually sees Kitty in the same way is the intrepid Inspector Warwick. The hits just keep on coming as the urbane dry wit of George Sanders is brought to bear in the part, subtly shifting between the deliciously waspish superiority of his signature roles in All About Eve (1950) and the Jungle Book (1967) and a charming vulnerability in chasing the coquettish Kitty. There’s a wonderfully black-humoured scene between the two as he shows her around the police’s infamous Black Museum of historic murder items – (“What’s this chopper for?”). At one point, after his offer of tea at his mother’s is met with silence, he picks up a poker, used by a man who beat his sweetheart to death. She, unflappably curious about these grisly mementoes, asks:

“Why did he do it?”

“Well, we’ve never known exactly, but my belief at this moment is that she failed to answer some perfectly simple question”. The flaring in Sanders’ eyes as he replies and the daringly kinky edge to this dialogue is macabrely funny, even more enjoyable for Oberon’s risqué playing along instead of outrage.

The Lodger is not just finely cast, it also boasts marvellous external sets for the London streets by James Basevi and John Ewing giving affording great depth of perspective. The cinematography by Lucien Ballard (who married Oberon the following year) is an atmospheric treat, such as when he stages a wide shot of cops stationed sentinel on horseback in the fog during a manhunt.

As the plot develops, our knowledge and understanding of Slade deepens. This is what gives the film its refreshing modernity of perspective (aided as well by Warwick’s hunch of the killer’s psychology and the new science of fingerprint analysis). The welcome twist that in fact he is guilty is equally a bonus. Far from being a pantomime villain who is evil for the sake of it or from a glib, clichéd motivation, his condition is a complex fusion of puritan aversion to women and vengeance fuelled by a pretty-boy brother who was ravaged into suicide by a fallen woman (seemingly) leading him astray. 

He is finally persuaded to see Kitty perform and as he watches from the audience, his intense stare of mounting, queasy possessiveness suggests he is building to a veritable climax of dangerous action. Trapping her in her dressing room, he succeeds in unnerving her with the homicidal impulses that quell his self-disgust “Yours is a beauty that could destroy men. There is evil in beauty…but if the evil is cut out-” he gibbers just as Warwick and his men burst in to save Kitty.

Coupled with his perverse passion, Slade has the frightening constitution of an ox, surviving two gun-shots by Warwick as he flees through the theatre up to a superbly mounted stand-off. Hugo Freidhofer’s engaging score is silenced, as indeed is all sound except for Cregar’s laboured breathing while he hunches over like a cornered animal before the police. Moments tick by in mounting tension held confidently by Brahm, until with nowhere left to go, Cregar turns and crashes spectacularly through an upper window into the river below that he foresaw as his terminal resting place.

This excellent ending is further capped with a hint that possibly Slade may not have been the pursued Ripper.  “If it was him, I’m glad…” remarks his Mrs Bonting – just to remind us that the notorious Jack the Ripper so far remains unidentified.

After The Lodger, Cregar was tipped to play two great classical parts: Shakespeare’s Henry VIII on Broadway and Javert in a film of Les Miserables. His final role though was the psychotically murderous pianist George Harvey Bone in Fox’s Hangover Square which reunited him with director Brahm and co-star Sanders. For the part, Cregar resorted to even more severe crash-dieting as a bid to change industry perceptions to suit his romantic self-image aspirations; however the shock severity of losing a third of his body weight down to 200 lbs ruinously taxed his heart and led to stomach complications. Sadly he did not long survive an operation for the latter and died on December 9^th 1944. Although he was determined to be a thinner man, Laird Cregar left us as a burgeoning young talent much too soon.