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

Jack Palance is perfectly creepy and tormented in this highly atmospheric remake of THE LODGER. It certainly is a tour-de-force for him, no other way to describe it. I think his Ripper is much sexier than Laird Cregar's in THE LODGER. It is a lot easier to imagine (to "see") the repeated violent sex acts that are no doubt occurring just off-camera. Palance makes it seems like frustration getting its high-voltage release. Cregar, as fine an actor as he was, does not even come close to suggesting that. As a result, I think Palance's version is much more tortured and ultimately more sympathetic. I also like Frances Bavier, pre-Mayberry, who makes the woman of the house very no- nonsense, yet likable. She guides some of our impressions of the man staying in her home. When she trusts him, we trust him-- when she grows suspicious, so do we. So in some ways the story is told through her perspective. And the interiors are absolutely gorgeous-- Fox outdid itself with the set design in this 50s remake.

The performance of Jack Palance is the main reason to see The Man in the Attic. It is one of his most restrained performances and all the better for it, he is perfectly cast, looking the part with his tall slender frame and Machiavellian features, and his emotionally vulnerable and also sinister interpretation is a most interesting one.He is well supported by most of the supporting cast, with Rhys Williams being very good and Constance Smith is very charming in a rather caricatured role. Byron Palmer is appropriately business-like in the police inspector role. Frances Bavier just about passes muster and suitably cynical but her accent with those twangy vowels(the pronunciation of bag jars) is not convincing at all while Tita Phillips is weak and wooden as maid Daisy. The Man in the Attic looks great, with Victorian London being sumptuously and chillingly evoked and the black and white cinematography is beautifully done. The Man in the Attic has a haunting, chilling even in the first five minutes(which is also the most suspenseful the film gets), music score that adds a great deal to the film's atmosphere, it is more 1950s than authentic 1888 but it is not that jarring actually.The script while predictable in places is at times subtly amusing and often thoughtful without falling into the traps of being too speculative, one-sided or insisting it's the truth. The story is staid in action but it is involving and neatly structured with a truly exciting horse and carriage chase, having enough to keep you hooked. Slade is an interesting character, the film entertains and is well-paced, deliberate but never dull.It's a good film that does a lot right but at the same time it felt that something was missing. It is lacking in suspense and feels at times a little too neat and too careful, with the exceptions of the opening and the chase, with not quite enough to keep you guessing, mainly because I was convinced that Slade was guilty early on. This could have been improved a little if Slade was introduced later and that more was done with the investigating, what made Jack the Ripper so infamous and the murders, while what the film did with focusing on Slade was admirable it was a little too character driven. Jack the Ripper's murders were among the most shocking in history, and The Man in the Attic handled its murders rather ordinarily with them only being described.The Man in the Attic does end very abruptly and predictably with it being obvious how things were going to end, though keeping things ambiguous and open for interpretation was a wise move and the right(and only) thing to do, otherwise there would have been criticisms about the film butchering history. The Man in the Attic is also severely hurt by the musical numbers which should have been scrapped altogether. They are completely out of place, completely irrelevant to the story, are uninteresting choreographed(being more vulgar than sexy) and only manage to slow the film down. Overall, a good, enjoyable and well-made film with a great Palance and the many good things done very well indeed but something was missing. 6.5/10 Bethany Cox

Almost 130 years after the notorious series of brutal murders in the Whitechapel district of London, the identity of who the culprit was is still being pondered. There have been theories as to who it was, and a fictional culprit became the source of a Marie Belloc Lowndes novel and five movies spawned from it. Of course, the most famous are the 1927 Hitchcock film and a 20th Century Fox 1944 remake with Laird Cregar and Merle Oberon of which this is pretty much an almost identical remake of. The only difference really between the two is in the casting of the title character. Laird Cregar was a portly character actor who pretty much took over where Z-grade British horror star Tod Slaughter had left off, although his films were definitely higher budgeted and certainly better detailed. Here, the role of Slade has been seemingly youthened (and definitely thinned) with the casting of Jack Palance, fresh from his Oscar nominated villain turns in "Sudden Fear" and "Shane".While Palance may seem younger and definitely thinner, the creepiness of Slade is still prevalent with his deep set eyes, somewhat gaunt facial features, and that cloak that screams "Jekyll and Hyde". The lovely Constance Smith takes on the role which Merle Oberon had played in 1944, a personable music hall star who has a compassionate nature and an unexplained attraction towards the mysterious lodger. The music hall numbers are practically identical to the previous version, and in the final one (where Palance attends), the terror really erupts through his eyes as he notices the lust of the male audience staring at Ms. Smith.As this is pretty much a re-tread of what film audiences had just seen only nine years before, there really aren't many chills, just the tension leading up to the exposure of Palance as a psycho. In fact, I'm not really sure that the writers intended to say that Palance was the actual Jack the Ripper. He could have just become obsessed with Smith, been sympathetic to what he psychotically felt the ripper's mission was, and just took it in his own hands to try to "save" Smith from herself. Frances Bavier ("The Andy Griffith Show's" Aunt Bea) and Rhys Williams offer decent characterizations as Smith's aunt and uncle, but Byron Palmer seems ineffectual as the inspector determined to expose Palance.While the London atmosphere is definitely appropriately murky, the story is much better fictionalized as the 1979 Sherlock Holmes mystery "Murder By Decree" which gives a more logical explanation as to who the killer was and why Scotland Yard was never able to solve it (or at least reveal the truth). This should be viewed strictly as a moody thriller that doesn't really try to claim its telling the real story, but either as a possibility or the story of a wronged man who may have been crazy but only had circumstantial evidence which lead to him being believed to be the notorious serial killer of ages gone by.