Man in the Attic (1953)

Such a frustrating disappointment

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Yes, this movie takes huge historical liberties, as you'd expect from a 50's Hollywood treatment of Jack The Ripper. Actually, I felt the period setting pretty well done and the costumes were all very convincing. It was just the actual facts that were thrown to the four winds and replaced by a script written more like a Charles Dickens novel.Enter the shady and mysterious lodger, Jack Palance whose unpredictable moods and surliness bring immediate attention to his nosey landlady, who is still happy to take his rent money rather than to ask him to leave. Palance capably handles his part and is suitably weird and creepy, especially when courting the landlady's pretty niece. Unfortunately, she's also being wooed by a police inspector who is on the The Ripper case. So the seeds of doubt are sown and rivalries become interwoven with biased motivations. This propels everything to an ultimately unhappy though inevitable conclusion.I found this very watchable and entertaining, if perhaps a bit of it's time. It had a good production quality and good performances all round, although Palance himself really gives the movie the level of depth required to be engaging.

I recently saw an old movie from 1953 called "Man In The Attic." It stars Constance Smith a young Jack Palance. No spoilers below. Evaluations only. The setting is London of the past, where a scientist (Palance) who boards at a family's home is suspected of being the infamous Jack the Ripper. Cons: Much of the acting was wooden, some of the stage-show scenes were downright ridiculous or at least out of place, and the accents were truly awful (especially seeing Frances Bavier--Aunt Bee from Andy Griffith--try and do an English accent! Very funny as she tries at it all the way through-- the way she tries to say "bag" as a Brit, and just sounds like she's from Alabama: "bayyg" "bayyg"). Pros: I liked how all the confusion made it frustratingly impossible to determine if the 'evidence' was saying it was or was not Palance, and they did that on purpose. Is he deeply troubled because of his childhood experiences, or is he actually the madman Jack the Ripper? So hard to tell during the film, and that's the hook! Almost Hitchcockian in that way. So, obviously I thought the story line was good, and the progression-to-arc was very textbook. You can tell this would make an excellent book----which it had, actually. It had been adapted from a book called The Lodger by a lady called Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes (I never heard of her before). The movie ended somewhat too abruptly, and without so much as a post-climax wrap-up or epilogue (said epilogues seeming to be more or less a post-modern convention and conspicuously 'absent' from the older films), but one assumes that the novel holds the appropriate denouement. Overall it exceeded my expectations; it was a worthy rental, a brief movie at that, and so I recommend it to you.

***SPOILERS*** Third remake of the 1912 novel about the notorious Jack the Ripper who terrorized the Whitechaple/Kensington districts of London in the late 1880's.In this updated version were, like in the previous two, kept in the dark to just who the Ripper really is. Even though it doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to spot his identity within the first few minutes of the movie! Thats even before he,in his secret identity, even comes on the scene!Looking for a place to stay Slade, Jack Palance, finds his home away from home, the local city morgue, at the Harley house. Having the use of the attic Slade can conduct his secret experiments without anybody bothering or spying on him.While Slade, who works night at the morgue, is doing his day-work in the attic for what he explains to the Harleys is the benefit of future generations, in the field of pathology, the mysterious Jack the Ripper is out murdering young women in the neighborhood. It doesn't take long for Slad's landlady Mrs. Helen Harley, Frances Bavier, to suspect him of being the Ripper. It's Helen's husband Willliam, Rhys Williams, who's always making excuses for Slade in his secretive and suspicious behavior that has Slade from either being thrown out of the Harley home or even being reported to the police as a suspect in the Ripper murders!The most unusual and at the same time naive character in this whole scenario is the Harley's niece the beautiful showgirl girl Lilly Bonner, Constance Smith. Lily who despite Slade's weird and even threatening behavior in her presents is somehow in love with the neurotic mortician. Not really knowing if Slade is the Ripper or not his very actions should have warned Lily to stay at least at arms, or knifes, length away from the nut-case! But being both fascinated and in love with the eye popping and what seems like religiously fanatical wacko Lily instead takes him into both her confidence as well as her dressing room! That's as she's undressing, in prudish and Victorian England no less, right in front of the sweating and goggling mental case.Jack Palance is at his sinister best as the mysterious Slade the Lodger who lifts the movie a few notches above what it would have been without him being in it. Having a good idea of who the Ripper is I was far more interested, as well as entertained, by Plalance's over the top performance then anything else, in having to do with the movie's plot, in the film.***SPOILER ALERT*** The ending is much like the 1944 movie version-"The Lodger" with Laird Creger-with the Ripper disappearing into the night, or the Thames River, never to be seen or heard from again! That's until Hollywood, or a foreign or independent film studio, decide to make a new and updated movie version of Jack the Ripper and his criminal adventures.

Curiously tepid re-telling of the Jack the Ripper legend. Jack Palance certainly looks the part. With his rictus-like face, long lean body, and sinister smile, he's the most unusual of figures. However his Ripper comes across as more neurotic than menacing. As his scenes with Smith suggest, he's emotionally vulnerable, soft-spoken, even with a slight unmasculine lisp and a rampant mother-fixation. Now this is an interesting interpretation of the serial killer. Still and all, it works against Palance's appearance and the menace the role needs. In short, it makes for an interesting psychological profile, but not for the imposing personality that would stir an audience. Palance certainly can't be accused of overplaying the role.There's also too little of the glistening cobblestone streets and alleyways that create the needed background gloom. Likely the budget didn't allow for much of that atmospheric embroidery. Then too, director Hugo Fregonese does't appear to have a stylish feel for the material, which he films in a pretty straightforward unimaginative manner. What the movie does have is a gorgeous Constance Smith in a lively and compelling performance. Whatever happened to her. With her looks and talent, she should qualified for A-list parts, but her career looks a little mysterious, petering out in Italy in the late 50's.Anyway, it's a good chance to scope out the early Jack Palance in a performance that unfortunately falls short of his absolutely spine-chilling gunfighter in the classic Western Shane (1953).