Man in the Attic (1953)

Man in the Attic was the fourth film adaptation of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ 1912 Jack the Ripper novel The Lodger. It was the first film from a company called Panoramic Productions and was distributed by 20th Century-Fox.

A rather young Jack Palance (he was 34 at the time) plays a pathologist named Slade who rents rooms in the home of William and Helen Harley (played respectively by Rhys Williams and Frances Bavier). Also living in the house is Harley’s niece Lily Bonner (Constance Smith), a rising musical comedy star.

This is London in late Victorian times and the city is in the grip of the Jack the Ripper panic. Helen Harley has her suspicions about the new lodger. He seems harmless enough but a bit withdrawn and he does seem to spend quite a bit of time wandering the streets at night, carrying a small black bag. And the Ripper has been seen carrying a similar small black bag.

Slade also seems to be less than fond of actresses. Actresses are the favourite victim of the fiendish Whitechapel murderer (in reality he killed prostitutes but the movie prefers to avoid too much sleaziness). The suspicions against him steadily grow although Lily refuses to believe them and seems rather attracted to Slade’s shyness and apparent vulnerability (he tells her he’s been forced to move constantly because he’s different and he makes people uneasy).

Although viewers are going to be inclined to share Helen Harley’s suspicions of Slade and to be a bit concerned about Lily’s wisdom in getting emotionally entangled with such an  unsettling character the evidence pointing in his direction is purely circumstantial. In fact we’re invited to share the view of both William Harley and Lily that Slade is being victimised for being socially awkward and unconventional. He might really be a harmless oddball. Meanwhile the tally of the Ripper’s victims mounts and Scotland Yard seems to be getting no closer to finding the killer.

While the movie is coy about the profession of the Ripper’s victims the sexual aspects of the crimes are made obvious enough. 

The screenplay tries to provide the necessary motivation for Slade’s antipathy towards actresses by linking it to his childhood and to his troubled relationship with his beautiful  actress mother who drove his father to self-destruction and ended her own life as a prostitute (which perhaps surprisingly is made quite explicit).

The numerous scenes of Lily performing onstage, apart from adding glamour and visual interest, do contribute to the story by helping to elucidate Slade’s ambivalent attitudes. He is attracted by the beauty and glamour but repulsed by what he believes to be the deception and corruption under the surface.

Jack Palance’s performance is the big surprise. Palance was a notorious (and often embarrassing) scenery-chewer but this is a very low-key performance. And it’s all the more effective for Palance’s willingness to go for a subtle approach.

Palance is the only big name here. The supporting cast can best be described as perfectly adequate. Constance Smith brings the necessary glamour to her role, Rhys Williams and Frances Bavier add some mild comic relief which thankfully is not overdone. Byron Palmer, who was never able to get further in Hollywood than second leads despite having leading man looks, is quite good as the determined Scotland Yard detective who falls for Lily Bonner.

The movie was shot at least partly at the old Ince studio in Culver City. It certainly has the look of a film shot shot entirely in the studio and on the backlot, which can be an advantage in this type of film since it adds to the paranoid mood. Use was made of some impressive sets originally constructed for Orson Welles’ ill-fated The Magnificent Ambersons. On the whole it’s a pretty good-looking movie. As you’d expect there’s lots of fog and lots of suitably sinister night scenes.

Argentine-born director Hugo Fregonese spent his entire career making low-budget movies in various countries. His work here is solid if not exactly inspired.

The script apparently borrowed generously from the 1944 version of The Lodger. Very generously indeed.

This movie has fallen into the public domain so some of the various DVD releases are of pretty dubious quality. Fox’s Midnite Movies release is definitely the one to go for since it pairs Man in the Attic with an excellent noirish crime thriller, A Blueprint for Murder. The transfer for Man in the Attic is very good. You might be disappointed that the only extras are a trailer and a photo gallery but it’s a bonus to get any extras at all on a Midnite Movies release. And the photo gallery is huge and includes publicity materials that do offer a few snippets of background information. Overall this Midnite Movies two-DVD pack is a very good buy indeed. 

While it might have been questionable whether a remake that borrowed so heavily from the very good 1944 version was really necessary Man in the Attic is a decent enough suspense chiller with some gothic horror atmosphere and a surprisingly good performance by Palance. It doesn’t add any significant new insights but it’s worth a look, especially given the ridiculously low price of the excellent Midnite Movies double-movie pack. 

Shadow of the Cat (1961)

Shadow of the Cat is a 1961 British gothic horror movie that is almost a Hammer film. It was shot at Bray Studios, it was directed by John Gilling who went on to make some of Hammer’s best 60s horror films, it stars Barbara Shelley, it was photographed by Arthur Grant and the production design was by Bernard Robinson. Officially, and for complex legal and financial reasons, it was credited to BHP Productions but it was in fact a Hammer film in all but name.

On the other hand it’s also very different to the usual run of Hammer gothic horror movies. More on that later.

Ella Venable has mysteriously disappeared. Actually there’s nothing mysterious about it - the audience knows right from the word go that Ella has been the victim of foul play. There was only one witness to the crime - Ella’s cat Tabitha. Now you might think that a killer has nothing to worry about when the only witness is a cat. You might think that, but you’d be wrong. 

Tabitha is not exactly a helpless little kitty. Ordinarily she’s the friendliest of felines but she doesn’t take kindly to having her mistress murdered. She wants revenge. And for a small tabby cat she’s rather determined.

Ella’s husband Walter (André Morell) has called Ella’s niece to the house, partly to give her the bad news that Ella wrote her out of her will shortly before her disappearance. Walter has also assembled other family members - the three most disreputable members of the family. He needs help in order to deal with a formidable menace - one small tabby cat. Walter has his faithful butler Andrew but although Andrew is a strong healthy young man he’s no match for an enraged and vengeful feline.

One interesting, and clever, feature of this film is that the cat’s actions are somewhat ambiguous. The murderers certainly believe the cat is actively plotting to get them. But does the cat actually have supernatural (or at least preternatural) powers? Or has Tabitha simply seen something horrific and is she is now merely behaving the way any animal might behave, striking out instinctively at people who have frightened her? We do get some intriguing cat point-of-view shots that imply that the cat has a more-than-animal understanding of the situation but even here she could be just fixating on something that has disturbed her animal mind. There’s a memorable scene where Walter is stalking the cat in the basement but we have the distinct impression that it’s really the cat who is stalking him. This ambiguity works quite effectively - is it the cat seeking revenge or the killers’ own consciences haunting them?

Hammer made movies in black-and-white but their gothic horror movies were invariably in colour. This was what gave them their distinctive flavour - gothic atmosphere achieved with bold lush colour rather than moody black-and-white. Shadow of the Cat is however in black-and-white. This, among other things, makes it seem old-fashioned compared to the typical Hammer gothics. One thing is immediately apparent - director Gilling and cinematographer Arthur Grant can make a black-and-white horror movie look every bit as good as a colour film. They can use shadows just as effectively as they used bold colour in other Hammer productions. If you’re a fan of the classic Universal style of black-and-white gothic horror you will be well satisfied with the job they’ve done here.

The movie opens with a shot of the decaying gothic mansion of the Venables. It is your typical gothic dark and stormy night, and an old lady is reading Poe aloud. This again emphasises the movie’s affinity with the classic American horror cinema of the 1930s. 

Another point of departure from the regular Hammer style is the setting. It’s Edwardian England rather than 19th century central Europe, with cars as well as carriages.

Barbara Shelley was one of the great scream queens and she gives her usual fine performance. André Morell, a splendid actor, is wonderful as the irascible but very frightened Walter. The other cast members are excellent but it’s Shelley and Morell who dominate the movie.

This movie is at times reminiscent of the Old Dark House movies that were so popular in the 1930s. The atmosphere and the setup are both similar and it has a lot of the same ingredients - a group of people who don’t trust one another thrown together in a crumbling gothic pile, a plot driven by scheming relatives after an inheritance, suggestions of the supernatural that may turn out to be no more than suspicions.

Apart from its gothic trappings Shadow of the Cat has a lot more in common with Hammer’s black-and-white contemporary psychological thrillers of the early 60s than with their gothic horror movies.

One criticism that has been leveled at this movie is that a small domestic cat is not a very scary monster. That criticism misses the point. In fact the key to the movie is that it’s a psychological horror movie not a monster movie. The cat is not the monster. The monsters are human. The cat is merely the catalyst (if you’ll excuse my awful pun) that triggers the killers’ own feelings of guilt and anxiety.

On the subject of the cat special mention must be made of the cat’s trainer, John Holmes. This is not the kind of movie in which the cat just has to sit on a cushion looking cute. She’s not a bit player, she’s one of the leads and she has to do some serious acting! Getting the cat to do what was needed on cue must have been quite a challenge but however they did it it worked.

Network have done their customary very creditable job with the DVD. Picture quality is superb. Unusually for Network there are some worthwhile extras including an excellent documentary on the film.

Shadow of the Cat is not at all a typical Hammer production but it’s a well-crafted and generally very nifty little horror flick. It is a throwback to an earlier era of horror, which may be one of the reasons it’s been so often overlooked. The old-fashioned feel is however quite deliberate and today it makes this film seem quite refreshing. Highly recommended.