Matcollis
This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.
Glucedee
It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.
InformationRap
This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.
Rainey Dawn
Another version of The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), an Alfred Hitchcock film. And this Man in the Attic is a good version of Hitchcock's classic film.Jack Palance plays Slade The Lodger that in a boarding house of a woman and her daughter. This happens when the Jack the Ripper's murders are going on and soon the woman thinks her new lodger Slade is Jack himself but the daughter is slowly falling in love with him. Is he actually The Ripper or is being wrongfully accused due to his secretive studies as a pathologist up in the attic? Very good story and film version! Jack Palance is great as usual and the rest of the cast is good too.8/10
dwpollar
1st watched 6/26/2014 -- 5 out of 10(Dir-Hugo Fregonese): Interesting but calculated mystery revolving around the British "Jack the Ripper" legend. This movie version of the story involves a mysterious pathologist played by a young Jack Palance who is setup early on as a possible suspect in the ripper's murders. This is not necessarily done thru the screenplay but rather by the way the movie is directed. From the first scene, the Ripper is the focus as two policeman escort home a drunk older lady only to see her murdered. Palance's character then arrives on the scene looking for a room with an attic to perform his experiments -- supposedly. Palance has the ability to be charming yet sometimes scary and menacing and shows his screen presence in this early film. Palance is not the problem with this movie -- the problem is that it sets his character up too early and rides him as a mysterious unknown with Frances Baviar(from Andy Griffith's TV show) as the landlord exclaiming her belief in his guilt early on. It's fun to see Aunt Bee before she became this TV show character, but other than this oddity the movie doesn't provide much mystery or allure. The cast is fine and there isn't any over-acting it's just not a good screenplay. I guess if you want to see these TV stars in earlier roles it's not a wasted viewing but other than that it doesn't offer much. It's kind of alarming that a man that actually did a lot of real killing to women in England has gotten so much attention and movie credo's but I guess that's just the way of our world....the movie doesn't help us understand anything different about this character and doesn't make for a worthwhile experience unfortunately.
Ben Larson
This is the fourth of five films based upon Marie Belloc Lowndes novel "The Lodger."Alfred Hitchcock did the first in 1927 as a silent, and it was remade into a talkie in 1933. It was done again in 1944. All of the films prior to this one were called The Lodger after the book. The name was used again in the fifth film in 2009.I cannot imagine a better person to be a mysterious killer than Jack Palance. He was very young here, but he would go on to garner two Oscar nominations for his evil villains.Frances Bavier is sneaking around trying to find some dirt on her lodger. You will remember her best as Aunt Bee from the Andy Griffith Show. She was also in the original The Day the Earth Stood Still. Her character is consistent across all films and TV I have seen her in. She is a treasure, or was as she died in 1989.
Brim_and_Brood
This is the only version of "The Lodger" films that I have seen, and having not read the original story, I found the premise rather interesting. Jack Palance is the star here as the brooding Mr Slade with his nearly sinister demeanour keeping us suspicious for most of the film. While his emotional outbursts initially feel out of character, by the end of the film it is clear he is unbalanced and emotionally immature, and tormented enough to submerge himself into a river and not resurface.Frances Bavier and Rhys Williams work well as the Harleys, and their husband/wife banter is nice to watch. Byron Palmer as the Inspector did a passable job. The poorest acting was by Tita Phillips as the maid.While Constance Smith's performance as Lily Bonner was good, the absurdly out-of-place, overly long, poorly performed, and amateurish cancan sequences really do harm her character and the film in general. They were nearly painful to watch.The chase sequence at the end, with horse and cart navigating bends at high speed and a broken cart wheel, was an unexpected and entertaining climax.While not perfect, some bits are excellent while others are the opposite, it is certainly worth watching. It is available for free in the public domain, and a reasonable quality version can be downloaded from the Internet Archive.
