The Lodger (1944)

I mentioned a few months back that one of the movies that's back in the FXM rotation is the 1944 version of The Lodger. I'd seen it before, but surprisingly, a search of the blog claims that I haven't done a post on it. With that in mind, I decided I'd wait for it to show up again on FXM so that I could re-watch it and do up a post to go with the FXM showing. That next showing is tomorrow, July 13, at 7:15 AM.

The Lodger is based on the same source material as the Alfred Hitchcock movie of the same title, a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes; that novel was also the basis for the Jack Palance movie Man in the Attic. As you may know, the material is based on the famous Jack the Ripper serial murders of 1888, although, as the identity of the real Jack the Ripper was never determined, what happens to the stand-in character here is obviously different from whatever happened to Jack the Ripper.

In a portion of the Fox backlot that stands in for London, a drunken music-hall player heads for home, only to get waylaid and murdered by an unseen person. This is presented as not being the first of the Jack the Ripper murders, so the whole press already has been been reporting breathlessly for some time on the murders and everybody has been waiting for the next one to happen.

At about the same time, even though it's late evening, a man walks up to a middle-class house not quite where the murders have been occurring but close enough to get there at night. The man, taking the name Slade from a nearby street sign (Laird Cregar), says that he got the address of this house from an estate agent who told him that the house was letting out rooms. In fact, that is true; man of the house Robert Bonting (Cedric Hardwicke) has suffered some financial reverses and he and his wife Ellen (Sara Allgood) need to rent out the upper rooms to make ends meet. Slade is presented as someone we're obviously supposed to suspect of being Jack the Ripper, and he takes the rooms.

Things get worse when the Bontings' niece, Kitty Langley (Merle Oberon) returns from France. She had been working there as a singer in a revue, but she's about to take on a new job as the lead in a London music-hall revue. However, she's also the same exact sort of actress whom Jack is believed to be attracted to. Slade seems to be OK keeping to himself, although Kitty takes an interest in him, trying to invite him to see her new show. This also serves to increase the suspense, as Kitty seems to have no clue that she might be in any sort of danger. Her aunt and uncle, however, begin to suspect that Slade and Jack the Ripper might be one and the same.

Meanwhile, an old acquaintance who used to work in the same theater where Kitty is now performing shows up briefly; after leaving she too gets murdered by Jack. This brings in Scotland Yard in the form of Detective Inspector Warwick (George Sanders). He too takes an interest in Kitty, although you might think this is a bit unprofessional. In any case, the police do have to be around to keep Kitty safe, since she is in their eyes an obvious target for Jack especially once her aunt and uncle bring their suspicions to the police.

This version of The Lodger effectively brings all of this to a successful climax. The one objection might be that, because of the Production Code we know the Jack the Ripper mystery can't be left unsolved. Be that as it may, the cast does a good job, especially Laird Cregar, who died much too young. There's a fair bit here that bears similarity to Cregar's final film, Hangover Square, another smallish picture that's very well done. Both of them deserve to be seen more often.

Mr. Imperium

Another of the movies that I reecorded when Lana Turner got a day in the 2025 edition of Summer Under the Stars was Mr. Imperium. It's a movie that I don't think gets all that much mention when it comes to Turner's filmography. Having seen it, I can understand why.

Turner plays Frederica Brown, an actress who is doing some sort of American-themed stage show at a club in Italy in 1939, which is of course just before World War II kicked off in Europe, and a fact that ought to set off all sorts of alarm bells in terms of anachronisms and the question of how the movie will handle the history of the intervening 12 years. Anyhow, one of the male patrons sees Frederica and falls for her, creating a ruse in which he calls himself Mr. Imperium to get the chance to meet her.

Imperium takes Frederica to the sort of lovely Mediterranean villa that, by the end of the decade, would have been filmed on location in lovely wide-screen in addition to the pretty good color we have here. (IMDb says the California coast around Monterey and Pebble Beach are standing in for Italy, which isn't a bad stand-in.) Imperium played by the much older Ezio Pinza, reveals that his true identity is Alexis, the crown prince of Italy. Alexis is a widower with an unseen 5-year-old son. Alexis knows his duty is to become king, and he's resigned himself to that, although he's not thrilled that this is going to be his son's fate too. And not that Alexis can really marry an actress like Frederica: it would cause a royal scandal.

In any case, Alexis suddenly hears from the prime minister Bernand (Cedric Hardwicke) that the King has taken a sudden turn for the worse and that Alexis is going to have to go to Rome to see the King. Alexis writes a note to Frederica to explain, but Bernand burns the note so that Frederica won't understand why Alexis just up and left her, at least not until she sees the news of the king's death. Frederica has to be smart enough to know what all that means.

Anyhow, a dozen years pass. Frederica, now using the stage name Fredda Barlo, is a successful Hollywood actress with a boyfriend in producer Paul Hunter (Barry Sullivan) who is trying to get her to sign a long-term contract. In Paris, Alexis sees a marquee and lobby card for Fredda's latest movie. He realizes he has to get to America incognito to have another chance to see her again. So he schemes to get in contact with Fredda, who is going to be going to Palm Springs to contemplate her next movie. Fredda is staying at a private resort run by Mrs. Cabot (Marjorie Main) and her shockingly indiscreet niece Gwen (Debbie Reynolds).

Alexis, again registered under the alias Mr. Imperium, tells Fredda about the history of what's been going on in his country since the war. He abdicated following a post-war revolution, and his kid is at a boarding school in England, soon to turn 18. However, the country has been going through revolution for quite some time, with one section of the population tired of the revolution and thinking that the monarchy would be a good way to return stability and a unifying force to the country. There's going to be a plebiscite next week on whether to restore the monarchy, and Alexis plans to lose it so he can stay with Fredda. And then Bernand shows up to reveal a twist....

Mr. Imperium is another of those movies that's decidedly of its time, and is supposed to be inoffensive. If you're not the biggest fan of MGM's musical romances of the era, especially considering that Pinza's music stylings are more operatic, you're probably going to have a problem with this one. For me, the bigger problem was with Debbie Reynolds' scenes. She's just so obnoxious in trying to snoop on her guests. If she hadn't been the proprietress' niece, she would have been fired for cause.

Mr. Imperium is a minor movie, but I can see why some people might like it.

The face that launched a thousand ships

A movie that for some reason I thought I may have watched ages ago, before I even started this blog, was the 1950s version of Helen of Troy. I had never blogged about it, and having watched it, am not 100% certain that I even had seen it before; perhaps I may have watched the 1950s version of Alexander the Great on TCM instead. In any case, Helen of Troy is getting an airing on TCM tomorrow, May, 3, at 7:45 AM, so now's the time for me to watch it and write up a review of it.

The movie is based on Homer's Iliad, although liberties are taken. We're introduced to Troy as the city that guarded the entrance to the Dardanelles between what is now the Turkish Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Troy grew wealthy by charging a toll for safe passage through the straits, although this ticked off other civilizations and mean that Troy didn't have ships of its own. Particularly the Greeks, led by Spartan King Menelaus (Niall MacGinnis), were unhappy.

Meanwhile, in Troy, there's debate over what to do, with King Priam's (Cedric Hardwicke) son Hector wanting to go on the offensive and attack the Spartans first, while younger son Paris (Jacques Sernas, credited as Jack) disagrees and thinks they should offer peace. You can always try war later, so Paris gets on a boat bound for one of the Greek harbors. Except that the ship is overcome by a storm, with Paris going up to fix the mast and going overboard when the mast snaps. He washes ashore and is rescued by a gorgeous woman who turns out to be Helen (Rossana Podestà) although she doesn't reveal her true identity who is AWOL from the palace with an old governess and her slave servant Andraste (Brigitte Bardot in one of her first international roles). Unsurprisingly, Paris falls for this lovely woman, although everybody realizes there's a problem if the Greeks were to find the guy.

Paris does make his way to the Spartan council, where Menelaus is meeting with Agamemnon (Robert Douglas), Achilles (Stanley Baker), Odysseus (Torin Thatcher), and others. Paris proves who he is by being good at combat, but then who should show up to the council but Helen? Menelaus is no dummy, and realizes that Paris and Helen have already met somewhere before. Menelaus is also insanely jealous because Helen doesn't really care for him on the grounds that she's been basically forced into a marriage and he tries to keep her captive in a gilded cage. So although Menelaus feigns talking peace, he actually plans to keep Paris hostage and ransom him to Troy.

Helen's servants inform Paris of this and effect an escape, leading to Menelaus getting even angrier, and sending soldiers to find Paris and kill him. They do find him, but there's a problem in that Helen has escaped the palace to make certain Paris gets to the Phoenician boat that's supposed to take him back to Troy. Whether the soldiers can kill Helen along with Paris is an open question, but one that Paris obviates by taking Helen in his arms and jumping off a cliff to the ocean below much like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Paris takes Helen back to Troy.

When Menelaus learns of this, he vows to go to war with Troy, using Helen as the reasonable excuse, but with as much of an intention to loot Troy and let a bunch of people bring the treasures of war back to Greece with them. Unfortunately Troy is in an easily-defensible place, and has a bunch of land behind it that's going to make it hard to surround. So instead, after the first attack is repulsed, the war becomes a largely frozen war of attrtition. Can the Greeks wait out the Trojan subjects' increasingly poor morale? Well, as anybody who knows their history will remember, the Greeks eventually came up with the Trojan horse that had a couple of commandos inside who could open up the city gates while the Trojans, drunk having thought they won a big battle, are hung over.

This version of Helen of Troy is pretty impressive to watch from the point of view of all the technical parts of the production; it was filmed largely in Italy with wide-screen color photography and what generally look like very high production values. The story and the acting, however, leave a bit less to be desired, in part because the two leads were not native English speakers. Still, I think the good parts of the spectacle ultimately outweigh the shortcomings of the story.