The Lodger [The Phantom Fiend] *** (1932, Ivor Novello, Elizabeth Allan, A W Baskcomb, Barbara Everest, Jack Hawkins) – Classic Movie Review 2640

Re-creating his role from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent classic, Ivor Novello plays a mysterious stranger who may, or may not, be a Jack the Ripper-style serial killer, in the 1932 British film The Lodger.

Ivor Novello again appears to good effect in the 1932 British film The Lodger [The Phantom Fiend], director Maurice Elvey’s first sound remake of this classic serial killer thriller story by Mrs Marie Belloc Lowndes.

Re-creating the role he played so memorably in the 1927 Alfred Hitchcock silent The Lodger (A Story of The London Fog), Novello plays a mysterious stranger who may, or may not, be a Jack the Ripper-style serial killer. Novello’s character Michel Angeloff is lodging with London married couple Mr and Mrs Bunting (A W Baskcomb, Barbara Everest), who have a young and lovely actress daughter (Elizabeth Allan), ready in the script to be terrorisable.

This antique, dawn-of-sound thriller is watchable, though it lacks bite and style, a real sense of danger and a truly eerie atmosphere. And it’s a pity Hitchcock hadn’t had been given the chance to make this version too.

An uncredited Novello helps to adapt the novel, along with Miles Mander, Paul Rotha and H Fowler Mear, and again they set it in the 1920s, updating it from its proper late 19th-century period.

Mrs Belloc Lowndes in 1936.

The film is also known as The Phantom Fiend in the US, where it was released in truncated form at 67 minutes in 1935. It was remade in America by John Brahm in 1944 as The Lodger, by Hugo Fregonese as Man in the Attic in 1953 and by David Ondaatje in 2009 as The Lodger, starring Alfred Molina, Hope Davis and Simon Baker..

Four works of Marie Belloc Lowndes are adapted for the screen: The Chink in the Armour (published 1912; adapted for the screen 1922), The Lodger (1913; adapted several times), Letty Lynton (1931; adapted in 1932 as Letty Lynton starring Joan Crawford), and The Story of Ivy (1927; adapted into the 1947 film Ivy starring Joan Fontaine).

Her most famous novel, The Lodger (published 1913), is based on the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888.

Ivor Novello.

In Gosford Park (2001), Ivor Novello (played by Jeremy Northam) is taunted that the film ‘should just flop like that.’ Screenwriter Julian Fellowes says in the DVD audio commentary that Novello’s talkie remake failed while the Hitchcock silent original had been a hit.

The cast are Ivor Novello as Michel Angeloff/ The Bosnian Murderer, Elizabeth Allan as Daisy Bunting, A W Baskcomb as George Bunting, Barbara Everest as Mrs Bunting, Jack Hawkins as Joe Martin, Shayle Gardner as Detective Snell, Peter Gawthorne as Lord Southcliff, Kynaston Reeves as Bob Mitchell, Drusilla Wills as Mrs Coles, Anthony Holles as Silvano, George Merritt as Commissioner, and Andreas Malandrinos as Rabinovitch.

It is made by Julius Hagen Productions, and distributed in the UK by Woolf & Freedman Film Service, released in London on 8 September 1932.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2640

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com