Marie Belloc Lowndes’ 1913 novel The Lodger never once identifies its serial killing villain as Jack the Ripper, though she was supposedly inspired to write the book after reading a short story about the Whitechapel murderer. When Eliot Stannard adapted it for the screen in 1927 for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, he too avoided naming Jack, dubbing the killer The Avenger instead. By the time Miles Mander, Paul Rotha and H. Fowler Mear reworked it again (with uncredited help from its star Ivor Novello) for Maurice Elvey’s take in 1932, he’d become The Bosnian Killer.

Barré Lyndon had no such qualms when he tackled the first American adaptation, explicitly linking his flatsharing killer with the Ripper in John Brahms’s stylish and evocative 1944 version. It doesn’t steer particularly close to the stablished rules of the Ripper case – few films ever do – but it’s the best looking and mostly visually inventive of the three adaptations this far, though the Hitchcock just has the edge. Here, the strictures of the Hays Code probably ensured that the Ripper’s victims are now dancing girls rather than prostitutes (though recent work has thrown into doubt that all of the real victims were actually prostitutes anyway – Hallie Rubenhold’s 2019 book The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper is particularly good in this regard).

In Brahm’s film, the eponymous lodger is the hulking but softly spoken Mr Slade (Laird Cregar) who turns up at the London home of Robert (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) and Ellen Bonting (Sara Allgood) who have taken to letting rooms in their large house. The mysterious Slade arrives during the Ripper murders that have all London in a panic and the script makes few bones about his real identity. He’s soon setting his murderous sights on a fellow boarder, the singer and dancer Kitty Langley (Merle Oberon). Scotland Yard’s Inspector John Warwick (George Sanders) is on the case and is soon interested in Slade’s suspicious behaviour. Given the milieu, there’s room for some high-kicking can-can dancing (scenes that led to battles between Fox and the Hays Office over the amount and type of lingerie that could be shown) and of course for the kind of non-sensical cod psychology that tends to haunt films like this – Slade is driven into a misogynistic rage following the death of his brother after a disastrous affair with a dancer: “You corrupt and destroy men as my brother was destroyed.”

Those Hays Code restrictions mean that the film is never allowed to go full bore and the murders all take place off screen. But the film is so atmospherically lit by Lucien Ballard and inventively directed by Brahm that it scarcely seems to matter. The opening murder of Jennie (Doris Lloyd), with its long takes and dramatic swoop down across James Basevi and John Ewing’s marvellous, fog-shrouded set (repurposed from Fox’s standing set from 1937’s In Old Chicago), so impressed producer Robert Bassler that he had it moved from later in the story to give the film more immediate impact. Brahm was a director who knew the value of a restless, fluid camera and there are some lovely tracking and crane shots scattered throughout The Lodger.

Brahm no doubt benefitted from the decent budget that Twentieth Century-Fox afforded the film. It certainly paid for some impressive costumes, those outstanding sets and secured the services of the excellent Ballard, who had already worked with Brahm on another horror film for Fox, The Undying Monster in 1942. He ensures that the film positively drips with atmosphere and he was able to help out leading lady Merle Oberon (they later married) when it came to hiding the facial scars she was still bearing after a recent car crash. He invented a small light that attached to the side of the camera, nicknamed the “Obie” after Oberon, that not only helped to wash out the scarring but later became widely used within the industry.

Oberon is great as the object of the Ripper’s sordid attentions, though she was reportedly unhappy that her role was overshadowed by the third billed Cregar. And it is quite the performance, firmly establishing Cregar as a “new” (he’d been acting on the screen for four years already by this point) horror star, a standing he’d cement with his even better turn in Brahms’ Hangover Square the following year. Tragically, Cregar longed for more of the romantic leading man roles so went on a crash diet to shed some of his considerable weight and the strain it placed on his system was so great that he suffered a heart attack shortly after filming Hangover Square and died at the ludicrously young age of just 31. The promise he showed here in a performance that oozes menace – and which daringly for the time hints at incest, homosexuality and even necrophilia – was never realised and The Lodger and Hangover Square stand as testament to one of the great “what-ifs” in horror history.

Elsewhere, Sanders seems disengaged and not entirely happy in his role (he famously said of Tinsel Town “The only thing that keeps me from killing half the people in Hollywood is the thought of being jailed…”) but Cedric Hardwicke and Sara Allgood are a lot more fun as the suspicious landlords. But it’s Cregar’s film and he’s fantastic, never more so than in the climax amid the lighting scaffold of the theatre where he lets his mask of quiet civility slip altogether to reveal the monster beneath.

Hangover Square – which would reunite Brahm, Bassler, Cregar and Sanders – would do something very similar again casting Cregar as a killer, and Lyndon’s screenplay for The Lodger would be pressed into service again, lightly resurfaced by Robert Presnell Jr, for Man in the Attic (1953), a virtually beat-for-beat remake directed by Hugo Fregonese and with Jack Palance in the title role. Along with the Hitchcock, Brahm’s version remains the definitive take on the novel and with its director’s extraordinary eye for the unusual camera angle or the perfectly composed tableaux, it’s certainly one of the most atmospheric and visually arresting.