Sunday Afternoon Cinema: ‘The Lodger' (1944)

As I have been writing about the famous serial killer ‘Jack the Ripper’ a lot this week; I thought I’d watch a ‘Jack the Ripper’ film this Sunday. The film I chose was John Brahm’s 1944 classic ‘The Lodger’ based upon the 1913 novel of the same name by Marie Belloc Lowndes (the elder sister of famed writer and Catholic apologist Hilaire Belloc).

It was an enjoyable watch not least because all the actors could actually… well… act.

There were no special effects, but rather just lots of good old-fashioned method acting which really does show. 

Samuel Laird Cregar’s Mr Slade (aka Jack the Ripper) is suitably odd and faithful – as far as I can recall – to Belloc Lowndes’ original character and the other characters bounce off of Cregar’s wonderful performance well.

This performance ultimately resulted in Cregar’s early death in late 1944 at the age of thirty-eight. (1)

The only aggravating thing about ‘The Lodger’ is the fact that it completely ignores the jewish angle to the Ripper killings, which I have documented in a separate article and the majority of these facts were well-known by 1944.

The reason for this striking omission is simple: John Brahm was a jew. (2)

It was also 1944 and the United States and Britain were in a war with the Third Reich and as it is not at all surprising that Brahm removed the anti-jewish realities associated with the Ripper and simply went along with a classic ‘it was a gentile doctor’ hypothesis.

As much as I’d like to blame Brahm for doing what he did: I cannot really as it was war time and he was only doing what he thought was best for his people.

References

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laird_Cregar#Death

(2) Cf. his uncle Otto Brahm’s biography: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/3620-brahm-otto-abrahamsohn