The Lodger (1944)

Marie Belloc Lowndes’ 1913 novel The Lodger is about a man suspected of being Jack the Ripper and has been turned into film multiple times, most famously by Alfred Hitchcock in 1927. I haven’t yet seen Hitchcock’s silent film or read the book, though I know that in the book the identity of the lodger is left ambiguous and in Hitchcock’s film the lodger turns out to be innocent. However, in Brahm’s 1944 film – starring Laird Cregar, Merle Oberon and George Sanders – there is little question that the lodger is indeed the murderer.

Ellen (Sara Allgood) and Robert Bonting (Cedric Hardwicke) are a financially strapped middle-class family obliged to let rooms to a mysterious man (Laird Cregar) who claims to be a pathologist. He needs a room in the attic to conduct his experiments, keeps irregular hours, and is out most nights. His name, he says, is Mr. Slade, which ironically is the name of the street near the Bonting’s house.

Meanwhile, there is mass panic in London. There has been a series of murders by an unknown assailant, who the papers are calling Jack the Ripper. Police are practically blanketing London and still the murders continue. Scotland Yard, lead by Inspector John Warwick (George Sanders), have noticed that all the victims have so far been women who have been on the stage at one point or other. And troublingly, the Bontings have a niece living with them who is on the stage, Kitty Langley (Merle Oberon). Kitty is working her way up the ranks from cabaret to musical theater.

Mr. Slade is a soft spoken man, but he is definitely a bit odd. He expresses dislike of actresses – calling them women  who are “subtle of heart,” which is a reference in Proverbs to harlots – and is besotted by his deceased, sensitive artist brother. He is polite and Kitty thinks he must be a very lonely man, but he also radiates mystery and menace (and Laird Cregar is a huge man who towers over everybody, including George Sanders, who is over six feet tall). Mr. and Mrs. Bonting (especially Mrs. Bonting) begin to suspect that Mr. Slade is really Jack the Ripper. Mr. Bonting initially pooh-poohs his wife’s suspicions as irrationally founded without facts, but gradually begins to join her in her suspicions. In fact, Mr. Bonting is a bit of an armchair detective, absolutely fascinated by the mystery, reading the morning papers and the evening papers in an attempt to stay always current.

Laird Cregar

There is a lot of newspaper reading in The Lodger: early in the morning, in the evening, always catching the very latest news the moment it hits the streets in the kind of sensationalist immediacy found today.

It’s not exactly a mystery that Mr. Slade is really Jack the Ripper and the plot is not particularly well-developed. What it does have and one of the reasons I like it so much, is atmosphere. There is fog everywhere on the cobblestones of London. It’s not quite like the fog described by Charles Dickens in Bleak House, which is almost a living substance, thick, murky, and polluting. However, it is still all-pervasive and would give the film a cozy feeling if there wasn’t so much menace. There are the buskers singing their songs while people wait to enter the theater where Kitty Langley is performing, the warm pub where people sing and drink with the fog outside, making the inside look all the more inviting. Policemen are reassuringly positioned on every corner of every street, giving the appearance of safety and solidity. But it doesn’t do any good and somehow Jack the Ripper continues to find his victims, practically under the noses of the police.

What also makes the film stand out is Laird Cregar as Mr. Slade. He is the ultimate alienated anti-hero. He reeks of alienation, with his puppy-dog eyes that can also threaten with a fanatical light. As DVD Savant describes the film and Cregar’s performance: “Once again teamed with cinematographer Lucien Ballard, Brahm’s camera cranes over shiny cobble-stoned back lots and isolates characters in dingy rooms. Cregar’s alienation and weirdness is accentuated by dramatic accent lighting on his tortured eyes.”

There is also a Phantom of the Opera-like ending, with a confrontation in the theater dressing room and a chase backstage on the catwalks.

George Sanders seems a bit under-used as the solid Scotland Yard inspector, much taken with Kitty, and solidly groping his way towards solving the mystery and trying to protect Kitty. Still, one never objects to the presence of George Sanders in a film, even when he doesn’t have much to do.

Kitty is actually a rather unique character, though not a complex one. She has just returned from Paris, where she learned the new Parisian dances, and has brought a company of French girls back with her to London, making her way in a very calm, business-like manner, like she was running a business and not a “saucy” show. She practically makes the cancan respectable. Even her respectable aunt and uncle seem to have no qualms about her chosen profession. She’s such a sympathetic person that it doesn’t seem to click for her how odd Mr. Slade really is. Perhaps it’s because, as my sister suggested, she’s used to meeting odd people in the theater or simply because she’s so busy recognizing the loneliness in him that it doesn’t register how dangerous he is or that he is in fact threatening her.

The Lodger can currently be found on youtube.

 

Wuthering Heights (1939) – Obsessive, Destructive Love

I’ve wanted to see Wuthering Heights for a very long time. I’d heard about it and read about it and understood that it is one of those films that made 1939 the greatest year in film history. And because I like a good gothic tale (especially if it is a movie) I was predisposed to love the film.

So I was quite disappointed when I didn’t love it, though it had nothing to do with how the movie was made and everything to do with the story. It is a beautiful film, finely acted, but I could not view the film as a great romance, which seemed to be how the story was presented.

I have to admit here, however, that I have not yet read the book, so I cannot compare how well the movie follows Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel and don’t know if my difficulties with the story stem from her original book or from how it was adapted to film.

The movie is constructed as a flashback. A man named Lockwood (Miles Mander) has sought shelter at Wuthering Heights during a snowstorm and is told the story of the ghost who haunts the house and particularly haunts the master of the house, Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier). The story is told by Ellen (Flora Robson) who now serves Heathcliff, but used to serve the young lady who haunts the house, Cathy (Merle Oberon).

Heathcliff and Cathy

Before everything went to rack and ruin, she says, Wuthering Heights was a fine house that belonged to Mr. Earnshaw (Cecil Kellaway), who had two children, Hindley and Cathy. He goes to London and when he returns he has a small gypsy boy who was starving in London. Mr. Earnshaw calls him Heathcliff and he and Cathy treat him like one of the family, but Hindley resents him and when Mr. Earnshaw dies, Hindley becomes the master of the home and relegates Heathcliff to stable boy.

As they grow up, Heathcliff puts up with all sorts of ill treatment and refuses to leave so he can remain near Cathy. The two of them are like flower children of the moor, retreating to their place on the moor called Peniston Crag, which they call their castle. However, as Cathy grows into a woman she becomes more interested in fine clothes and their elegant neighbors, the Lintons, especially Edgar Linton (David Niven).

As Cathy finds herself attracted to the world of Edgar, Heathcliff grows angry, possessive, and even physical, evening hitting Cathy several times when she insults him as being hired help with dirty hands (this man is definitely the type that would kill his wife in a rage of jealousy). However, they both tell Ellen at separate times that they need each other, that they are essentially one person. But Cathy comes to this realization a little too late, when Heathcliff goes off to find his fortune (which is what Cathy had been urging him to do all along so that he could come back and take her away). Convinced that he’ll never return, Cathy marries Edgar.

Cathy with Edgar

Ellen tells Lockwood that Cathy managed to forge a happy life for herself, not exciting or grandly passionate, but a good one. However, Heathcliff comes back a very wealthy man and acquires Wuthering Heights from the alcoholic and disintegrating Hindley by buying up all his debts. He also still wants Cathy, but Edgar’s sister, Isabella (Geraldine Fitzgerald) falls in love with him and pursues Heathcliff. Cathy begs Heathcliff not to marry Isabella because she knows he does not love her, but Heathcliff imagines that in doing so it will be revenge on Cathy, because, I guess, she will be jealous that she is not married to him.

The marriage is a tragedy, Isabella is so desperate for Heathcliff’s love that she welcomes the news that Cathy is dying. Hindley continues to drink himself into an early grave and the doctor (Donald Crisp) can only look on while people he helped bring into the world self-destruct, with Heathcliff the self-destructor-in-chief.

If it had been presented as being about destructive love, than I might have enjoyed it more. I don’t mind having a character like Heathcliff; I just mind being told he’s our romantic lead. He’s a narcissistic, jealous, obsessive stalker. If the movie acknowledged that, I’d be fine. But he comes back, like the Count of Monte Cristo, fabulously wealthy to wreak revenge on all people who did him harm in the past. And he blames Cathy for having rejected him and she even agrees with him when she is on her deathbed.

Even his love is narcissistic. When Cathy dies at the end, he says that now she is his. He says that she broke his heart, she’s a part of him, he can’t live without her. And because no one else, apparently, has even a fraction of the feeling, love and passion that he has, those people don’t count. Heathcliff has no sense of personhood, that perhaps people exist apart from him with their own feelings, motivations and lives. He doesn’t even see Cathy as a real person who exists apart from him, but just someone who’s one with him, who rejected herself when she rejected him and instead chose Edgar and society over Heathcliff and the moor.

Cathy and Heathcliff with their heather

I watched the film with my sister, who has read the book, and she tells me that there are children in the book. Cathy and Edgar have a daughter, Hindley has a son and Heathcliff and Isabella have a son. Cathy apparently dies in the middle of the book and the rest is taken up quite prominently with Cathy’s daughter. My sister felt that with removing the children, it changed the story significantly. Now, the story is just about Heathcliff and Cathy and not about Heathcliff’s attempts to control and destroy the second-generation, and how, despite his attempts, the second generation does achieve a kind of redemption at the end.

According to the critic John Sutherland the 1939 movie is largely responsible for the romantic interpretation of the book and that people in Brontë’s time might not have been likely to see Cathy as haunting Heathcliff because she was waiting for him to join her, but because she was angry and didn’t want him to steal her daughter’s inheritance. Interestingly, the director William Wyler did not want to include the famous ending with the ghost of Heathcliff and Cathy walking off towards Peniston Crag (I guess so they can be perpetual flower children with their heather), which cements the film’s romantic status. It is a rather upbeat ending for a man who destroyed everyone else’s lives.

I’m ranting a bit. As I said, it’s really not a bad movie; I was simply frustrated. Perhaps I will be able to enjoy it more on a second viewing now that I have gotten my rant out of my system. I am really curious, though, to read the book and see how Brontë portrays Heathcliff. I have it coming now from the library!

Notes: The score by Alfred Newman is simply lovely and haunting, with his theme for Cathy being especially notable. Here is a link to the violinist Itzhak Perlam performing the theme with the Boston Pops Orchestra.

Olivier credited Wyler with showing him him how to adapt his acting style for the stage to that of the screen. He helped him tone down some of the expansiveness of his acting and also to get over his initial contempt for the movies, as opposed to the stage. Wyler thought that making movies was a wonderful art form and Olivier apparently came to agree with him.