The Lodger (1944)

The earliest movie by this title, from 1927, was the only Hitchcock silent I've seen. That had been a modernized (for the time) take on a Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes novel based on Jack the Ripper. The 1944 film must be more faithful to the source material, as it takes place in the Whitechapel district of London in the late 19th century.

The presumably titular lodger (Laird Cregar) goes by Mr. Slade. While the infamous murder spree is in full swing, he manages to find on short notice an available flat owned by the Bontings (Cedric Hardwicke and Sara Allgood). Another lodger, incidentally, is Kitty Langley (Merle Oberon), an up-and-coming musical actress. In the course of investigation, John Warwick (George Sanders) of Scotland Yard meets and develops mutual feelings for Kitty, hoping especially to protect her from the Ripper.


I checked, and sure enough, the real Jack the Ripper targeted prostitutes rather than actresses. Chalk it up to '40s censorship. In this movie, people seem utterly baffled as to why anyone would do such a thing. I could think of a few possible reasons, but the eventually stated one is more interesting: His brother lost both artistic drive and health due to preoccupation with a beautiful woman. The killer considers any woman who shows her beauty to many men (as on stage) a temptress who must have her evil surgically removed, as it were, for a purer beauty. That's about as sick as '40s characters get.

IMDb lists mystery among the genres, but there's not much mystery for the audience. Slade pretty much wins our conviction the moment we hear him speak. Part of it, I suppose, comes from Cregar's daunting performance, but nearly everything he says or does hints at a dark secret: his insistence on solitude, his odd hours, his philosophy.... As a result, Kitty and the Bontings appear awfully slow to catch on that he might be more than eccentric, considering the front-page news. Robert Bonting especially resists the idea.

From time to time, I wondered whether Robert could be the Ripper instead: He does stammer a bit when explaining what he just did. In retrospect, I must have been hoping for a twist. Few modern filmmakers would be satisfied to make the villain so obvious all along to the audience but not the characters. Maybe that's why the 2009 remake bombed.

What the movie lacks in surprises, it makes up for in cinematography. In this regard, it makes a worthy successor to the first "true" Hitchcock piece. If there's one other way it outdoes the original (which, admittedly, I recall only so well), it's in the sound. Kitty gets a few short songs in, and other characters sing a bit less. If nothing else, it gives us a further understanding of how they could attract the Ripper's attention.

If you watch only one adaptation of the novel in question, I'm not sure which of the two that I've seen makes a better recommendation. But evidently, they beat the rest. You may want to let one serve as a companion piece for the other.