The Lodger (1944) Victorian Gaslight Noir

Director John Brahm (Hangover Square, The Locket, The Brasher Doubloon, M Squad TV Series, The Naked City TV Series, The Outer Limits TV Series, The Twilight Zone TV Series). 

Written by Barré Lyndon and based on the novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes. Cinematography by Lucien Ballard (Don't Bother To Knock, Berlin Express, House On Telegraph Hill, Inferno, The Killing, Murder by Contract, City Of Fear, The Getaway), Music by Hugo Friedhofer. 

The film stars Merle Oberon (Dark Waters, Berlin Express) as Kitty Langley, Laird Cregar (I Wake Up Screaming, This Gun For Hire, Hangover Square) as Mr. Slade, the lodger, George Sanders (Hangover Square, Lured, While The City Sleeps, Death of A Scoundrel) as Inspector John Warwick, Sir Cedric Hardwicke (Lured , Rope)  as Robert Bonting, Sara Allgood as Ellen Bonting, Aubrey Mather as Superintendent Sutherland, Queenie Leonard as Daisy, the maid, Doris Lloyd as Jennie, David Clyde as Sergeant Bates Helena Pickard as Annie Rowley. 

Story

A Foggy London Night. Whitechapel.

A blind man and his buddy are standing by a wall with a reward notice. Its for information about the recent murders when the reader is done he and the blind man shuffle off. 

Two Metropolitan policemen walk into view. We soon see that the whole neighborhood is flooded with coppers some on horseback.

A pub called the Weavers Arms deposits a drunken theater company on its sidewalk. They sing a ditty and split off. We follow one of the women as she passes a mounted policeman who asks if she has far to go. The woman replies that she lives just around the corner.  She never makes it becoming the Rippers latest victim.

Her screams bring both the coppers and the rubberneckers. One of the street urchins that can see the victim announces that her throat has been slit

Obviously, the MPPC prevents the actual gruesome detail of the real Jack The Ripper from being mentioned so instead of eviscerating prostitutes, the Ripper in this film only slits the throats of female entertainers and actresses.

We cut to scenes of a news wagon dropping bundles of newspapers headlined with the details of the latest murder. which segues into newsboys shouting out the headlines as the peddle their papers through the residential streets. 

Out of the fog of a square walks a husky gentleman. He's carrying a satchel. He stops at a gaslit sign painted upon a wall announcing he's at Slade Walk. 

Laird Cregar as Mr. Slade

He turns a corner. Ignoring a news hawker passing in the opposite direction, he continues down the street with a note paper in his hand looking for the address of the Bonting's. 

When he finds it, just a few doors down, he coincidently meets Robert Bonting standing on his stoop, reading the paper he just bought. The man enquires about the rooms. Robert asks him inside and calls his wife Ellen. 

The man introduces himself as Mr. Slade. Ellen takes a wax taper lights it and tells Mr. Slade to follow her. 

By the light of the taper she ascends a stairway to the second story. There she lights a hall lamp with the taper, then opens the apartment door. 

Ellen explains to Slade that one of her relatives who was in the theater, last used the room. Slade asks if there are any more rooms and Ellen tells him her niece who is returning from abroad, occupies the others on this floor. However she mentions that she has a room in the attic.

Slade asks to see them so Ellen again lights the wax taper and they go upstairs. When Slade sees the attic setup he gets excited and tells Ellen he'll take both the room and the attic. 

He explains that he's a pathologist and conducts "experiments" and the small gas burner in the attic will be ideal. He'll take them, and offers her 5 schillings a week and givers her 20 in advance for the month. Ellen, you get the impression, was originally going to ask for less. 

Ellen confides to Slade that the reason they are having to rent to lodgers is because of some business difficulties suffered by Robert.

Slade pays her and tells her that he's moving in right now, the satchel is all he's got for luggage.

Later that evening when Ellen brings up a tray with some tea, she first gets an inkling that something is off when she sees that Slade has turned all the portraits in the room towards the walls.

Sara Allgood as Ellen Bonting

Slade also explains to Ellen, that his "work," sometimes keeps him out at nights, and that he enjoys the solitude that the night brings. He assures her not to worry he'll just use the back mews entrance so and not to disturb them during his comings and goings. 

Over the course of the next few weeks there's another murder and this time the ripper was spotted by a witness carrying a small satchel, and we also meet Ellen's niece, Kitty Langley.

Merle Oberon as Kitty Langley

Kitty is a headliner dancehall entertainer just arrived from Paris with her troupe of women doing a tamer version of the cancan for their London return.

We also meet Inspector John Warwick, of the Metropolitan Police investigating the Ripper murders, he becomes infatuated with Kitty.

George Sanders as Inspector John Warwick

We also encounter other denizens of the theater world. 

That's the set up and Slade has an attraction / repulsion dynamic going on within himself over Kitty, he blames a certain women's beauty (particularly female entertainers) as the root cause of the death of his brother. This is what set him off as "the Ripper" and of course it all goes Noirsville.

Noirsville

Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Robert Bonting

This is an entertaining Noir of a many time told story of actual events, but told in a Hollywood warped way. 

Laird Cregar plays "on the edge of sanity" exceedingly well. He probably, from the smatterings of his life story that I've read, had a well of inner turmoil to draw from. It's a very believable performance. 

The funny thing is the first role I really remembered Cregar in when I was a kid, was as the humorous sidekick Gooseberry (Médard des Groseilliers) to Paul Muni's Pierre Esprit Radisson in Hudson's Bay (1940). Think something along the lines of Blondie and Tuco in Leone's The Good The Bad In The Ugly, or say the caricatured trapper in those "Mad Pierre" cartoons we used to see as kids.

I haven't seen enough of Merle Oberon in films to form an opinion of her, and George Sanders is quite younger than I'm used to in this. It's got a more subtle style and the atmospherics are great. 7/10