Not many movies are in contention for being among the Ripper cinema’s “crown jewels.” Perhaps Pandora’s Box. Probably Murder by Decree. And definitely the John Brahm/Laird Cregar Lodger.
My film geek friends have always been split over whether the 1944 Lodger or Murder by Decree is the best Ripper film of all time. There is no doubt in their minds that it’s one film or the other. But they are universally convinced that Laird Cregar gives the greatest Ripper performance ever. For many years, though, fans of Ripper cinema had a serious impediment to seeing this film and this performance. The 1944 Lodger was not out on video.
I, at least, had a decent reproduction in a non-commercial VHS print. But I could never tell visitors to Hollywood Ripper how to obtain a copy of their own. It was not available commercially (had never even been released commercially!), and it was difficult to find an unauthorized version short of visiting the dealer’s tables at a horror film convention. And even then, the movie was a rare find.
For about a decade, actually, the rumor had kicked around among classic horror fans that Fox was finally planning to release The Lodger. The wait, though, went on for so long that some thought the rumor to be a kind of urban legend for classic film buffs.
As it turned out, it was true. Not only did Fox finally release The Lodger, the studio released it in a lavish boxed set alongside two other 1940s films by director John Brahm—Hangover Square and The Undying Monster. So how is this long-awaited DVD? Well, it really delivers.
The Lodger uses a restored grayscale print with what is either a remastered or a re-recorded soundtrack. Both video and audio quality are superb. The restoration has removed all noticeable flaws from the print and given it a gorgeous range of tone, while the soundtrack has all the clarity, frequency separation, and stereo depth of a recording made on modern equipment.
In addition to high video and audio quality, this DVD collection comes with a small booklet, duplicates of original lobby cards, a “making of” feature, as well as a 1946 Vincent Price radio show production of the 1944 film. In short, this is a classy production. (We particularly enjoyed seeing our acquaintance, film historian Greg Mank, comment in the feature about The Lodger’s place in the classic horror canon).
So what makes the 1944 Lodger the “crown jewels” of Ripper cinema? If you ask my husband, the first thing he’ll say is “the atmosphere.” The movie has excellent production values and a wonderful Gothic feel, complete with foggy London streets, unusual camera angles, and creative use of light and shadow. The film stock here, with its lush but subtle gradations of gray, is a long way from the stark high-contrast stock of lower budget films from the era.
But beyond the film’s look and feel, The Lodger (1944) has a great script and an A-list cast. Laird Cregar and Merle Oberon were up-and-coming stars at Fox, while acting greats Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Sara Allgood (one of Hitchcock’s early favorites) filled out the parts of the landlord and landlady. Future Oscar winner George Sanders takes a delicious turn as the ever-so-sophisticated police detective. Even bit player Helena Pickard brings so much humanity to the poor has-been Annie Rowley that it’s hard to maintain dry eyes so long as she is on the screen.
Even a drab script could turn to magic in the capable hands of a cast like this! But this is no drab script. For starters, it’s based on Marie Belloc-Lowndes’ novel—which means that its makers would have had to try really hard to screw it up all up! This film doesn’t come even close. It makes some changes, of course (they all do). But the essentials of the novel are there.
In the Belloc-Lowndes novel, the killer is self-titled “The Avenger,” and he preys explicitly on alcoholic women. (I suppose Belloc-Lowndes probably could not get “prostitutes” past the censors). In the 1944 Lodger, the killer is called Jack the Ripper—for the first time in English-language cinema - and he preys on actresses, or women who once appeared on the London stage. (In this case, the change was made explicitly to get the script past censors).
Though this film’s Ripper carries a grudge against exquisitely beautiful actresses—women of the type who seduced and destroyed his brother—the women he actually targets are middle-aged derelicts, much like the Ripper’s actual victims.
This is the first film I know of, in any language, to treat the killings in a way that resembles the Ripper murders. The Lulu films, such as Pandora’s Box, tell the story of a beautiful young seductress who turns into a beautiful young prostitute who ultimately becomes a beautiful young Ripper victim. Hitchcock’s Lodger has the killer target beautiful young blonde models, while the 1932 version has him target random young beautiful women who happen to be out alone at night. The operative terms in all of these instances are: beautiful and young. The 1944 Lodger departs from this characterization. Here, the killer preys on down-and-out middle-aged barflies.
In addition to its more realistic treatment of the victims, this film addresses the fact of serious mutilation beyond the throat slitting. As the landlord puts it: “He slits their throats… and then he uses his knife.” The full details are too shocking to reveal to the public.
These departures from the earlier, more sanitized, film adaptations are indicative of the filmmakers’ general willingness to take this film right to the edge of social acceptability. The beautiful and respectable ingénue (played by Merle Oberon) becomes a music hall sensation by bringing a rather naughty (and very leggy) Parisian dance to the English scene. The Lodger uses its period setting (the cusp of the wild 1890s) to push back hard on the production code and bring the skirts all the way up.
And then, there’s Laird Cregar, whose general soft-spokenness makes his lodger’s sudden shifts into impassioned monomania all the more threatening. One moment, he quietly negotiates terms with his landlady. The next, he frantically turns pictures of old actresses to the wall… because their eyes followed him around the room. By understating his lodger’s more ordinary interactions, Cregar carefully modulate his performance so that even his character’s most extreme moments never drive him into overacting.
Yet Cregar lives dangerously in this role. In the lodger’s monologue on his brother’s destruction at the hands of a seductive actress (a “woman subtle of heart”), Cregar takes the lodger’s monomania beyond the edge of production code acceptability… all the way into hints of incestuous homoerotic desire. The script’s raw lines offer standard backplot—the sort of stuff most actors would walk through. But Cregar uses these lines to make the audience squirm ever so slightly (did we really just see what we thought we saw?) and reveal more of his character’s motivation than perhaps we are even willing to acknowledge. His relatively manic reading reveals that the lodger possesses a too excessive admiration for his brother’s physical beauty, a too excessive admiration for his brother’s artistic genius, a love for his sibling that goes beyond familial affection and possibly into the forbidden realms explored by Byron and Faulkner.
The two previous film versions of The Lodger, both starring Welsh heartthrob Ivor Novello, had turned the matinee idol into a “wrong man”—peculiar, suspected, but ultimately innocent. The 1944 filmmakers use this background to their advantage. Cregar’s soft-spoken lodger hearkens back to Novello’s. He seems overly-sensitive and perhaps too excitable (as Novello’s lodger was), but he likewise seems generally harmless.
Movie-goers familiar with this history could easily be lulled into thinking that all will turn out as well in the end for Cregar’s lodger as it did for Novello’s. But despite The Lodger’s conventional façade, this film has little interest in letting its audience off that easily. Its “twist” is that it returns the story to Belloc-Lowndes… and thus challenges its audience to confront a harsher world than previously displayed in English Ripper cinema.
