← Previous - Next →

The Lodger

Screening: Monday 28 May, 6:30pm

The Lodger (John Brahm, USA 1944)

Laird Cregar is absolutely chilling in this Jack the Ripper tale, perhaps the best film made about Bloody Jack. The Lodger's re-creation of Victorian London is soaked with fog, with cobblestones sweating and gaslights flickering as blood-chilling screams pierce the night air and a dark figure goes running.

Kitty (Merle Oberon) is a beautiful singer whose parents (Sara Allgood and Cedric Hardwicke), rent a room to a mysterious lodger (Cregar). The lodger tells them he won't be joining them for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, because he works at night. During the night, the lodger slips out into the fog carrying a little black bag; in the early hours, he can be heard pacing back and forth in his rooms—which are always kept locked, and where he performs what he terms "experiments."

The lodger eyes Kitty and fences with her friend Garrick (George Sanders), a Scotland Yard inspector developing new criminology techniques, but, in the end, he cannot resist killing the lovely Kitty, as he has killed so many others. Before he can murder her, however, the police and Garrick interrupt the attack and chase the lodger wildly through a theater. Trapped like a bear, salivating and maniacal, the lodger hurls himself through a huge window and into the Thames to drown rather than surrender. This ending is not in keeping with that of the film's source material, the superlative novel written by Marie Belloc Lowndes.

In addition, The Lodger, unlike the novel, leaves no doubt that Cregar's character is Jack the Ripper. The huge actor is superb in this grand film noir; he and Sanders would almost repeat their parts in the similar Hangover Square, also directed by John Brahm. (Only 28 at the time, Cregar longed to be a matinee idol and, shortly after the release of this film, went on a crash water diet and literally starved himself to death.)

The Lodger remakes the Alfred Hitchcock silent film starring Ivor Novello, and is probably better. Brahm directs with a taut rein, the script is brilliant, the photography by Lucien Ballard (Oberon's husband-to-be) is a marvel of fluid action, and the whole is mightily enhanced by Hugo Friedhofer's strange and unnerving score. Written by Barré Lyndon, based on the novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes. Photographed by Lucien Ballard, With Laird Cregar, George Sanders, Merle Oberon, Cedric Hardwicke

(16mm, B&W, 84 mins, PG)

Our activities have been sponsored this year by:

← Previous - Next →