Yet Cregar lives dangerously in this role. In the lodger’s monologue on his brother’s destruction at the hands of a seductive actress (a “woman subtle of heart”), Cregar takes the lodger’s monomania beyond the edge of production code acceptability… all the way into hints of incestuous homoerotic desire. The script’s raw lines offer standard backplot — the sort of stuff most actors would walk through. But Cregar uses these lines to make the audience squirm ever so slightly (did we really just see what we thought we saw?) and reveal more of his character’s motivation than perhaps we are even willing to acknowledge. His relatively manic reading reveals that the lodger possesses a too excessive admiration for his brother’s physical beauty, a too excessive admiration for his brother’s artistic genius, a love for his sibling that goes beyond familial affection and possibly into the forbidden realms explored by Byron and Faulkner.
The two previous film versions of The Lodger, both starring Welsh heartthrob Ivor Novello, had turned the matinee idol into a “wrong man” — peculiar, suspected, but ultimately innocent. The 1944 filmmakers use this background to their advantage. Cregar’s soft-spoken lodger hearkens back to Novello’s. He seems overly sensitive and perhaps too excitable (as Novello’s lodger was), but he likewise seems generally harmless.
Movie-goers familiar with this history could easily be lulled into thinking that all will turn out as well in the end for Cregar's lodger as it did for Novello's. But despite The Lodger’s conventional façade, this film has little interest in letting its audience off that easily. Its "twist" is that it returns the story to Belloc-Lowndes... and thus challenges its audience to confront a harsher world than previously displayed in English Ripper cinema.
Article comments
1 - Ragozy
Interestingly enough, this is one of those jewels in the rough. For years my father talked about this film - which he had seen as a young man.
On a visit a few years before he passed away, TCM showed this film. We were all told that this was a no misser and we all sat down and watched. Was it a good film because it was something my father remembered; or perhaps because we were altogether with him? It doesn't matter. Good film!
2 - Cindy Collins Smith
Thanks, Ragozy. Not sure what you mean by "jewel in the rough" (I would tend to say that about a high-quality film done on a small budget - like Detour). But I enjoyed reading about your family watching The Lodger together with your father.
3 - Christine
Unfortunately this is not available in region 2 DVD format. Sniff! I am a film geek and fan of Ripper cinema and this film seems to be best Lodger adaptation. The 1940´s Hollywood version of Victorian London, B&W photography and all, with clean-mouthed literate language and only implied violence - yummy! Sounds a jewel crown instead of sinking in to the Whitechapel sewers...