MAN IN THE ATTIC (1953)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

MAN IN THE ATTIC was the fourth film to be based on Belloc-Lowndes’ novel THE LODGER, and the first remake of the Barre Lyndon script used in 20^th-Century Fox’s 1944 adaptation, also called THE LODGER. Lyndon’s version discarded any concern about the possible innocence of the titular character, and ATTIC follows the same path, signaling early on that the mysterious lodger is none other than Jack the Ripper, hiding out from his serial murders in 1888 London.

Though ATTIC also appeared under the aegis of Fox, director Hugo Fregonese doesn’t seem to have nearly as stellar a budget to work with as John Brahm did with the 1944 version. Still, if Fregonese is not quite as stylish a director as Brahm, Fregonese makes his entry just as tense as the earlier film. There’s less use of the sort of close-ups one gets in “A-level” pictures like the ’44 film, but I only felt their lack at the film’s end. In the Brahm film, I never questioned that the killer died by drowning, largely because the film shows him drowning, but the ending of ATTIC is not quite as explicit.

The script this time out is credited to both Lyndon and another writer, and the latter may be responsible fo ATTIC’s only major divergence from the earlier film. Putting the twist aside for last, the same template applies. A mysterious fellow named Slade (Jack Palance) seeks lodgings in the home of an ordinary British family. Slade specifically requests to take up residence in the house’s small attic, ostensibly so that he won’t disturb the family with his medical experiments. The mother and father find him slightly odd, particularly when he expatiates on “scarlet women,” but they rent him the room nonetheless. Shortly afterward, he meets the couple’s only child, their daughter Lily (Constance Smith), who works as an actress in a London music hall. Despite Slade’s negative feelings toward actresses, he’s enthralled by Lily, even though his night-time activities consist of stalking streetwalkers and slaying them with medical precision.

Palance’s depiction of the psycho-killer is markedly different from Laird Cregar’s. From start to finish, “’1944 Slade” seems unceasingly twitchy and troubled, and though this lends Cregar’s characterization great intensity, it does make one wonder why the renters seem so blithely accepting of his overall creepiness. In contrast, “1953 Slade” just seems eccentric, and even his rants about women seem more misogynist than psychotic. Palance also gives his version of Slade a more overtly masculine nature, so that his love-scenes with Smith are somewhat more credible than Cregar’s with Merle Oberon. And though neither version of Lily is really in love with the peculiar fellow, it’s a little easier to see why the ’53 version of the character might find ’53 Slade attractive.

In both films, Slade associates women, particularly actresses and prostitutes, with a world of unregenerate sinfulness, and the murderer seeks to cut that sin out of himself by cutting up women. In addition, as I noted earlier, there are indications that Slade’s first act of murder may have subconsciously titillated him so much that he felt compelled to repeat the act. In 1944, Slade, witnessing the suicide of his beloved brother, kills the latter’s fiancée, since her faithlessness caused the brother’s demise. ’44 Slade speaks so fervently of his lost sibling that some critics have speculated that he had some suppressed homosexual impulses—though any feelings of pleasure at the murders would have necessarily fallen into the hetero division. In ATTIC, ’53 Slade still hates actresses, but the offending woman is not Slade’s prospective sister-in-law, but his natural mother, and the cuckolded male is Slade’s father. Slade’s monologue doesn’t really say much about his father, for the Lodger is too focused upon the sinful figure of his actress-mother, of whom Slade says that she “never met a man she couldn't entice” (which logically might include the speaker). The actress’s culminating offense is to go off with a “young rich Frenchman”—implicitly, a young man who’s not Slade—which results in the father’s death. Slade finishes his monologue by saying that he knows that his mother ended her life as a prostitute—thus forging the link in his mind between actresses and prostitutes—though Slade doesn’t happen to say how his mother’s life terminated. The logical extrapolation from the ’44 film is that the mother of ’53 Slade was his first murder, and that the pleasure of killing her led to the rampage of the Ripper—which may be for some viewers an even creepier moment than anything in Lyndon’s original script.