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.

In short: The Gay Falcon (1941)

Playboy criminologist, international adventurer, and charming rogue Gay (ah, different times) Laurence, also known as The Falcon (George Sanders), has supposedly retired from all the interesting things in life and is now in the serious business of sitting in an office drinking spinach juice. Apart from the spinach juice, that’s exactly how Gay’s fiancée Elinor (Nina Vale/Anne Hunter) wants it.

Of course, when one Helen Reed (Wendy Barrie) asks our hero for help catching the crook or crooks stealing valuable jewellery from various rich ladies during high society parties, he’s very quickly in the charming rogue and crime fighting business again. Elinor is not amused, and her mood will not improve when Gay’s comic relief associate “Goldie” Locke (Allen Jenkins) falls under suspicion of murder, nor when the same thing happens to Gay himself. Well, at least she has tasty international playboy Manuel Retana (Turhan Bey) to distract herself while Gay romances Helen and solves a few crimes.

George Sanders was quite popular as the hero of RKO’s The Saint adaptations (and a much better choice for the role than Val Kilmer decades later), so when RKO started their own series of Saint rip-offs (one suspects so they didn’t have to pay Saint author and creator Leslie Charteris), they let him take on the role of The Falcon, too. Seeing that the two characters are so close as to be basically the same, it’s not much of a surprise that Sanders is pretty fun as The Falcon too, providing the character with the right combination of smarm, actual charm, and dry humour that is allowed to crackle in a screwball style in many a scene where he and Wendy Barrie trade snappy, actually rather bizarre dialogue of a delightful nature.

Of course, and also very typical of this kind of comedic mystery, the film doesn’t care much at all about its mystery. It’s all about the verbal gymnastics, content as risqué as the production code state of affairs allowed, and many a scene that suggests the writers were really just throwing together whatever seemed fun and came to mind, leading to a mystery film full of scenes that don’t have any function at all for the mystery at its core but that are bound to charm those parts of the audience charmable by them, like me.

It is, of course, rather difficult to say all that much about a film that concentrates so much on being a light, fun, dialogue and laugh dispenser, unless on wants to go the sociological route and furrow one’s brow about the way Turhan Bey’s decidedly non-Caucasian character is handled, or things of that sort. This isn’t a film made for furrowed brows, though, so I’ll leave it at declaring The Gay Falcon a perfect example of the kind of fluffy, slick fun a studio like RKO could just throw out in 1941.

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In short: The Saint’s Double Trouble (1940)

Gentleman thief and adventurer Simon Templar (George Sanders), aka “The Saint”, comes to beautiful Philadelphia to visit his old teacher, Professor Bitts (Thomas W. Ross) and his old flame, Bitts’s daughter (Helene Whitney).

However, there’s another man walking around with the Saint’s face, leaving Templar’s typical calling card on dead bodies. Murder is not a thing Templar approves of, so he jumps right into a rather convoluted and even more silly plot of doubles, peculiar traps, and cops and robbers with a decided lack in gray matter. Frightening stupidity (is it a virus!?) rules everyone except The Saint himself and Templar’s old friend and theoretical nemesis Inspector Fernack (Jonathan Hale), who just happens to be on vacation in Philadelphia too. Fernack, however, does really rather like Templar and his tendency for needlessly complicated shenanigans.

I can’t pretend to know much of or about the various incarnations of Leslie Charteris’s The Saint beyond vague memories of the Moore show and one or two books I must have read ages ago. Consequently, placing The Saint’s Double Trouble into the context of its series would consist of me repeating stuff anyone can read up on on Wikipedia, so I might just as well not pretend.

What I do know a bit about by now is the kind of programmer Jack Hively’s film is, a light concoction of convoluted plotting, a charming rogue protagonist doing charming rogue things, some action, and some moments of the film just playing around to fill out the running time. So I am quite able to identify The Saint’s Double Trouble as an entertaining example of its kind, pleasantly paced, shot straightforwardly but not without care, and acted by an ensemble that knows what its doing, and, particularly in the cases of Sanders and Hale, seems to have fun with it.

The film does of course need an audience tolerant of the contrived plot, Templar’s even more contrived manoeuvring to thwart it, the general silly stupidity of everyone involved, and the crimes’ basic improbability but then, it is charming enough to deserve this tolerance, and at least from me, had no trouble acquiring it.

The only thing I found rather disappointing was the waste of a perfectly fine Bela Lugosi in a forgettable role as The Partner (caps mandatory) of Templar’s evil double, but at least he isn’t playing a sinister butler.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,mystery,jack hively,george sanders,helene whitney,jonathan hale,bela lugosi