The Lodger (1944)

London, 1888. Jack the Ripper is stalking the streets of Whitechapel, in a Production Code friendly change of pace murdering actresses and former actresses who for some reason haunt the Whitechapel streets like prostitutes (cough). Though, when the film says actress, it really seems to mean 1940’s risqué singer/dancer, so temporal confusion is bound to happen for any viewer.

The slightly come-down Bonting family takes on a lodger, one Mr Slade (Laird Cregar), who says he’s needing the rooms they rent him for living and pathological experiments. Slade is clearly a gentleman, even though he seems a bit lost and lonely. Yet he also has strange habits, coming and going at all hours of the night through the back entrance, burning various things one might think to be connected to the Ripper murders and generally acts creepy and more than just a bit crazy. Let’s not even start with his rants about the evil powers of female beauty.

Despite all of this, it takes quite some time until his hosts start to suspect him, which is particularly dangerous because their live-in niece Kitty Langley (Merle Oberon) is one of those actresses who don’t act but sing and dance, and most certainly fits the mould of female beauty Slade, who is most certainly not Jack the Ripper, no sir, gets so excited about.

This third adaptation of Marie Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger was directed by John Brahm, whose best – at least in my opinion – movies do tend to be thrillers in historical settings like this is. Brahm certainly knew how to attractively put much completely made up period detail into a film, the production putting Merle Oberon et al in fashion and environments that never try to actually realistically emulate the past but are very much a mid-1940s fantasy of the past. Particularly Kitty’s musical numbers have to be seen to be believed in this regard.

That’s not a criticism, mind you, for often, turning the past consciously into a fantasy of itself leads to more interesting results than any pretence of authenticity, which is often only a less honest kind of fantasy.

Among Brahm’s other virtues is a fine ability to use the Hollywood-approved elements of expressionist films, so there are rather a lot of wonderful, moody shots of a foggy backlot London that is in turn filled with the shadows of policemen and the Ripper and those singing, dancing poor you hear so much about (see also, fantasy). This is actually a surprisingly effective contrast, because not portraying Whitechapel as the slum it was at once satisfied the needs of the production code but also turned the Ripper into even more of a threat, a predator in a place completely unprepared for such a thing.

Much less satisfying than Brahm’s work is the script by Barré Lyndon. Answering the age-old question if the audience of the past was really that slow, the film apparently already annoyed some critics of its own time by making everyone involved with Slade quite so slow on the uptake that it sometimes borders on the ridiculous. And even once the family, and a boring policeman played by George Sanders in a particularly bland month, are pretty sure their guest is indeed the killer, they still don’t act on it in any reasonable or useful fashion, deciding on nonsense like keeping Kitty, who is clearly in danger from him, out of the loop for no reason I could make out. Kitty herself seems to have no sense of self-preservation whatsoever, treating Slade even in full-on crazy rant mode (and Cregar’s a great, effective, eye-bulger and ranter) as if he were a nice, socially adapted guy. This would be even more frustrating if Oberon didn’t somehow manage to still project a degree of strength and intelligence into a character who has nothing like that whatsoever as she is written.


Still, despite these pretty hefty flaws, the game cast, the fantasy 1880s, and Brahm’s direction turn The Lodger into a surprisingly captivating movie, even if it is a somewhat frustrating one at times.

The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)

The people of the village of Frankenstein finally have their fill of what they identify as The Frankenstein Curse™. Consequently, they build a mob armed with torches and explosives to raze Castle Frankenstein - you know, the building last movie’s Frankenstein gifted to them at the end of Son of Frankenstein. During the course of their demolition project, they free the Creature (now played by Lon Chaney Jr.) from the sulphur pit that wasn’t located below the castle in the last movie but now seems to have teleported there. Ygor (still Bela Lugosi) – despite having been shot dead in the last film, a fact the film adorably shrugs away with a “well, he already survived a hanging” – is rather chipper too, blowing his horn merrily and cackling with evil. So off he goes with his best bud the Creature to find the brother of last film’s Frankenstein, one Ludwig Frankenstein (Cedric Hardwicke), whom he plans to blackmail into improving the Creature. The poor thing, you see, is rather poorly and in dire need of some electric stimulation after the whole sulphur pit affair.

Soon enough, things get a little out of control. How out of control? We very quickly progress from “Make the poor Creature healthy again!” to brain transplants and the dire question whose new brain the creature is supposed to get: Frankenstein opts for the brain of an assistant the Creature has killed, the Creature wants the brain of a little girl (seriously) and Ygor wants his brain in the Creature’s body to rule the country with the power of a hundred men, immortality and his wonderful, wonderful brain! And Ygor might just get what he wants, for Frankenstein’s mentor, partner and secret hater Dr. Bohmer (Lionel Atwill) is rather interested in a job as YgorCreature’s new sidekick.

Given the stage of affairs at Universal at this point in time, it is easy to be positively surprised by Erle C. Kenton’s The Ghost of Frankenstein, a film which seems to take its relegation to the minor leagues of minor budgets in stride. At the very least, unlike a lot of horror films Universal had already started to crap out at around this time, this film does clearly try to entertain its audience, so it lacks the offensive tendency of many a Universal horror film from this era to drag a non-plot from one moment of nothing of interest happening to another, and instead hits a mix of Frankenstein’s Greatest Hits while adding a few weird ideas all of its own, without getting bogged down in decidedly boring romance, comic relief, or simple feet-dragging.

After the mix of craziness and artfulness of Son of Frankenstein, Ghost is of course still quite a let-down, but at least it is an entertaining one. Kenton’s direction certainly isn’t on par with old style Universal at all, but he keeps the pacing vigorous, the film nice to look at and never does anything to embarrass himself. Why, from time to time, he even has a good idea or two. Junior obviously isn’t Karloff, and he certainly does overplay the stiff arms bit terribly, but he really does good work with the minimum of facial expression the – still excellent – make-up allows him; he particularly seems to enjoy his short time as the YgorCreature. In fact I would certainly have preferred the further adventures of this power couple to the business with the Wolfman coming up in the next film. Bela is still pretty damn great as Ygor, hitting a nice mix of cackling evil and a more sensitive side. I don’t believe I’ll ever understand people who say Lugosi couldn’t act – how else would you play a guy who wants his brain in the Creature’s body than as a complete yet somehow charming and pathetic weirdo?

Speaking of weird – and goofy – I’m very happy with the film’s brain fixation that after all finds various people having very peculiar ideas concerning what sort of brain belongs in a monster body. Frankly, I’m rather dubious about the idea Frankenstein’s assistant would thank the good doctor for getting this particular body – “oh hey, I’m not only a hideous creature every torch-wielding mob in Backlot Europe (that’s at least one mob per square kilometre) wants to burn, I’m also in the body who murdered me. Happy days!”. The Creature’s own candidate being a little girl is interesting to say the least, and Ygor’s preference is an awesome mixture of the megalomaniacal and the pathetic, so very much Ygor.

Ghost of Frankenstein is so entertaining, I didn’t even need to mention the – absolutely shoehorned in – titular ghost of Frankenstein (senior), a scene utterly useless yet still one that would probably still have been the highpoint in most of the Universal horrors in their express-decaying era. And if that’s not high praise, I don’t know what is.

In short: Invisible Agent (1942)

1941. German agent Conrad Stauffer (Cedric Hardwicke), “Japanese” “Baron” Ikito (Peter Lorre, as we all know the most Asian guy in Hollywood at the time, Austria being so very close to China or Japan) and their henchmen have a nice little talk – with assorted introductory torture – about a certain family invention with one Frank Raymond (Jon Hall). Raymond changed his name to Raymond from Griffin, and the film usually calls him the grandson of Frank Griffin, the Invisible Man, even though Frank was the brother of the original Invisible Man. Far be it from me to suggest a Universal movie doesn’t give a crap about even the simplest facts surrounding what came before in a franchise, so let’s just pretend “Grandson of the guy who helped Vincent Price become the second Invisible Man” would be too difficult for the tiny brains of an audience to comprehend.

Anyway, Frank manages to escape the bad guys’ clutches, delivers news of the affair to some kind of military gentleman, declines to deliver the invisibility serum to the US military (because bah, gas chambers, who cares, one can’t help but mentally add), but quickly changes his tune after Pearl Harbour, for once Americans are getting killed moral compunctions aren’t important anymore. However, Frank still has one condition: only a single man shall be treated with the serum, and that man must be him! Because this is a movie, various Allied higher-ups agree with the plan, and quickly, the Invisible Amateur, I mean Agent, is on a mission to Berlin to find out all available information about a coming Japanese/German attack on US soil.

Will he bumble around even worse than you expect the amateur he is to, and risk his invisibility cover on the tiniest of provocations? Will the film awkwardly shuffle between portraying the Nazis as fools even more bumbling than our nominal hero and actually evil? Will Stauffer and Ikito just happen to become involved? Will there be an attractive woman (Ilonay Massey) in the spy business for our hero to romance? Will character actors like Albert Bassermann and J. Edward Bromberg try their best working from a particularly sloppy Curt Siodmak script? You betcha!

Turning a version of the invisible man into a propagandistic war time hero obviously made a lot of sense in 1942, and of course suggests to the excitable mind further movies only made in an alternative reality like “The Wolfman Howls at Himmler” and “Dracula bites Hitler: Perhaps not the best idea”. Alas, what Universal and director Edwin L. Marin deliver here is quite a mess, featuring a hero so incompetent he is threatened even by the most Keystone Koppish of the Nazis, and Nazis the film never can decide are bumbling fools or terrifyingly effective evil. It’s a tonal problem that isn’t helped by the Universal love for bad slapstick, nor by the film’s episodic structure, where single scenes can be quite impressive but no care seems to have been taken with actually turning these scenes into a narrative with a coherent mood. Which of course, war time propaganda or not, does fit perfectly into the way Universal treated its fantastic films after The Wolfman, disposable trash good enough for the peasants to spend their money on but not important enough for the studio to put any effort in.

In short: King Solomon’s Mines (1937)

It’s rather startling to watch Robert Stevenson’s British – and decidedly free - adaptation of Henry Rider Haggard’s novel and compare it to American adventure movies taking place in Africa at the same time, and to realize how much more comfortable an entertainment product of the ailing Empire seems with the idea that black people are actually human like everyone else. Sure, the people of colour we get to see in the film are mostly barbarians of of kind or the other, but then, the film never makes any attempt to suggest culture and skin colour have much to do with one another, nor does it seem interested at all in ideas of white superiority, despite various plot developments that would actually make an easy starting point for this sort of (idiotic) argument. The film also feels pleasantly matter-of-fact about one of its main characters being black, treats him like everyone else on screen, and casts him with Paul Robeson, who of course doesn’t do undignified comic relief, or undignified at all. He’s also by far the most sympathetic character in the film, for Cedric Hardwicke’s Allan Quartermain (I never understood the desperate need of filmmakers to add that R to the name, by the way) is a bit of a prick additionally addled with horrifying facial hair, John Loder’s Sir Henry Curtis is your typical romantic lead (which is to say very boring), Roland Young’s Commander John Good a caricature, and Anna Lee’s fake Irishness just horribly annoying.

With Robeson some of what might make the film look quaint to contemporary eyes comes in too, because – not a surprise, given Robeson’s career as a singer – this is a film that never lets an opportunity pass by to have Robeson sing one song or another, never explaining why this African king-in-exile sings the pop version of spirituals, nor a film that ever realizes that, while there’s certainly nothing wrong with the musical numbers, they do mess up the film’s potential for excitement more than once. On the positive side, if you have to have filler in your film, there’s really worse to be found.

However, it’s not as if the film lacks in actual adventure movie excitements. There are sandstorms, a huge battle staged by a second unit in South Africa, and, finally, the rather spectacular end of the titular mine. Note to self: don’t throw rocks into a volcano.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,adventure,robert stevenson,paul robeson,cedric hardwicke,anna lee