The Lodger (1944)

Every attempt to make a cinematic portrayal of the Jack the Ripper murders has one unavoidable problem: the inconvenient fact that the murders stopped on their own and the killer’s identity was never uncovered. Of course, this adds to the legend’s appeal and mystique, as well as provides it with a nightmarish, cynical touch that helps make Jack as much an emblem of Victorian Britain as Queen Victoria herself. Still, moviegoers tend to like their murder mysteries to have resolutions, especially when it comes to the rather discomforting idea of killers who take lives not out of greed or desperation or ideology or anger, but simply to satisfy their own compulsions.

Jack the Ripper is too good a story to pass up, though, and filmmakers have usually gotten around the lack of a killer’s identity or a definite ending by tacking on their own theory. Apparently the most popular fictional solution to the mystery is naturally the most outlandish: the murders occurred as a result of a conspiracy that involved the Freemasons and the British royal family (Murder By Decree, From Hell). Another well-worn idea is to literally take Jack the Ripper out of his original context and, at last, have someone else catch the elusive killer (Time After Time and the somewhat infamous David Hasselhoff vehicle Bridge Across Time).

For my money, the most promising approach is that taken by the early twentieth century novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes in “The Lodger” and by the subsequent film adaptations, which jettison the entire baggage of the Jack the Ripper mythos and set up a fictional spree of murders with an almost identical backdrop and set of circumstances. So that brings us to 1944’s The Lodger, the first adaptation of the novel that didn’t have the handicap of being seen as Alfred Hitchcock’s movie (the first film, in fact, that Hitchcock claimed was truly his own, despite the ending forced on him by decree) or as a cheap, scene-by-scene remake of Hitchcock’s adaptation (an unfair reputation, by the by). Even then, this is not a faithful adaptation of the book, which was a textbook example of what teachers and critics mean when they say things such as “It was a work of its time.” The novel and this adaptation both share the irresistible premise of what happens when a married couple takes in a lodger who may or may not be Jack the Ripper (called “the Avenger” in the novel and earlier adaptations but referred to as only “the Ripper” here), but both do not have much else in common aside from the broadest outlines.

Keeping the Victorian setting and the blatant Jack the Ripper parallels of the novel, the titular lodger is Mr. Slade, a man who rents out the attic room of the Bontings and claims to be a medical scientist working at a local university. Shy to an almost pathological degree and promising that he will work odd hours, Slade seems like the ideal tenant to the Burtons an invisible one. Slade’s presence becomes a bit more nerve-wracking as the Burtons read more and more about a series of actresses being murdered around their neighborhood in London’s East End, crimes carried out by a man the papers call “the Ripper.” As Slade begins to act more eccentric, even having outbursts where he fires religious indignation against actresses and confides in Mrs. Bonting that an actress destroyed the life of his brother, a talented artist, and drove him to his death, Mrs. Burton suspects Slade is the killer and fears that her niece Kitty, an aspiring actress, will be the next victim.

What splits The Lodger from Lowndes’ novel and its cinematic ancestors is that the film is not so much concerned with whether or not the lodger, Mr. Slade, is the killer. There is still a mystery, complete with several attempts to throw the audience off the scent, but it’s not much of a spoiler to tell you that Mr. Slade does indeed turn out to be the Ripper. Showing itself to be, at least in several ways, a prototype for today’s psychological thrillers, The Lodger has an interest in the killer’s motives unseen in the novel or the previous adaptations. The concept that the killer suffered from some sort of “religious mania” started in the novel, but the film goes to great lengths to establish the, if I can use superhero comic book jargon for a story about a serial killer, “origin story” of the Avenger and to set up a “logic” for his crimes (he is trying to save men like his dead brother from the snares of, ah, “actresses”). In this way, The Lodger has less to do with the original contexts of Jack the Ripper and Lowndes’ novel and more of a connection with today’s serial killer films.

Part of this emphasis on the killer, of course, might simply derive from the casting of Laird Cregar. A twenty-seven year old actor who could appear almost twice that, Cregar brings an authentic sense of isolation and self-loathing to the role (which is not all that surprising, since he was a gay man living in the 1940s). If Cregar does dance on the edge of the totally melodramatic, he makes up for it with painstakingly subtle moments, whether it’s exhibiting the face of a trapped animal or trying to restrain his own hands from his killing impulse. If any actor was qualified to bring the concept of the killer who is as much a victim as the people he kills, it was Cregar, who brings a low-key intensity to scenes such as the one where he admits to Kitty that he spends hours watching the Thames River at night, finding peace by staring into the dark waters. Tragically, Cregar died from a heart attack a year later, after making another film, Hangover Square, , caused by a crash diet, depriving the horror genre of another Boris Karloff or Vincent Price.

However, Cregar is not the only “star” of The Lodger. Although the film seems occasionally embarrassed by the actual circumstances of the Ripper murders – the script studiously avoids any but the vaguest references to prostitution, making this Ripper’s victims “actresses”, and depicting Kitty as a respectable actress, even though the only performances we ever see that she performs are dance-and-song routines in a burlesque show (that Kitty’s aunt and uncle are perfectly okay with this will surely make historians of the Victorian era clench their fists) – the production tries to recreate Victorian London in all its depressing glory, from eerie foglights to shadow-infested cobblestone streets. No wonder, despite this being a Jack the Ripper film only in the loosest sense, this movie is sometimes remembered as one of the best fictional depictions of the Ripper murders.

By downplaying the mystery, the film does squander the premise of the novel, but arguably by pushing the film’s center away from the landlady and more toward the killer it becomes a more daring film, one that depicts the intrusion of true evil and unpredictable violence on everyday life in a deeper and more disturbing way than what Lowndes originally envisioned. After all, this is a film where, in its “lighter” moments, has Kitity’s police detective boyfriend give her a tour of a museum filled with artifacts from famous murders. Although only two of the murders take place on film, one of them is shown through the killer’s perspective, as he chases down the victim in her own apartment. The film is still subtle in its exploration of violence, at least by modern standards (there is a difference, after all, between making the killer or the killings the centerpiece of your film), but the use of first-person perspective in such a way – not to mention the ugly chaos of the murder itself – is still sobering today.

The Lodger probably deserves to be remembered as a moment in the history of film and its relationship with the phenomenon of the serial killer, more than as an adaptation of “The Lodger” or as a film that is (sort of) about Jack the Ripper. There are flaws that threaten to derail the entire train: the musical interludes with Kitty are jarring (especially to those of us not used to such interludes in our movies except in musicals) and, more to the point, the film never really follows up on the lingering question of what really happened to Slade’s brother or the broader question of the implications of Slade’s misogynistic obsessions (as it is, we are still left with the possibility that we are supposed to “understand” that Slade would be driven to such monstrous extremes by female promiscuity, a sore spot with the original novel). Nonetheless, Cregar at least begins to fill in the holes left by the script, creating a film that at times does feel like a glimpse – perhaps an unwanted one – into the mindset behind modern monsters such as Jack the Ripper.

Now go read:

The Lodger (1927) and

The Lodger (1934) (a.k.a. The Phantom Fiend) at And You Call Yourself A Scientist!

And then join us for our discussion at: