Man in the Attic. 1953. USA. Directed by Hugo Fregonese. Screenplay by Robert Presnell Jr., Barre Lyndon, from the novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes. With Jack Palance, Constance Smith, Byron Palmer, Frances Bavier. 35mm print courtesy of 20th Century Studios. 82 min.
This was at least the fourth cinematic go-round for Marie Belloc Lowndes’s 1913 novel—following adaptations by Alfred Hitchcock (1927), Maurice Elvey (1932), and John Brahm (1944)—and it’s perhaps the darkest, dominated by an intense, early Method performance by Jack Palance as the mysterious lodger who may or may not be Jack the Ripper. For the first time, the screenplay (by Barre Lyndon and Robert Presness Jr.) explicitly ties the Ripper’s activities to early sexual trauma at the hands of an unloving mother. One wonders whether Hitchcock, a voracious filmgoer who certainly would have seen this variation on his first international success, was influenced by the Fregonese film in creating Psycho (1960).