The Lodger

The first of two period noirs set in London and pairing director John Brahm with lead actor Laird Cregor (the second is the following year’s Hangover Square), The Lodger is a visually stunning serial killer noir and a re-make of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 film of the same name. Brahm and his crew create a self-contained Victorian world with cobblestones, gaslights, and drunks with Cockney accents, the chiaroscuro lighting and angular architecture providing endless hiding places from which Mr. Slade (Cregor), aka Jack the Ripper, can observe his feminine victims, especially theater star Kitty Langley (Merle Oberon), the niece of his landlords, the Burtons (Sara Algood, Cedric Hardwicke). George Sanders plays Inspector John Warwick of Scotland Yard, who works secretly with the Burtons to investigate their suspicions. Mr. Slade’s psycho-sexual mania (“A man can destroy what he hates, and love what he destroys”), which boils in Cregor’s tormented eyes as he watches Kitty cancan on stage, may seem commonplace today but it must have shocked audiences in 1944. The script might have benefited from a little more polish, but Brahm delivers a symphony of visual beauty, which crescendos in the final chase in the theater shot with high and low angles, aerial views, rapid falls, flickering lights, inventive audio techniques (Slade’s deep breathing as the men close in), and geometric staging in the rafters.