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THE AUTEUR ON THE HILL

One of the most memorable films of the forties has to be THE LODGER, with a tour de force performance from that underrated character actor Laird Cregar. This was the second and perhaps definitive adaptation of the famous novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes about “Jack the Ripper” The first was of course by Alfred Hitchcock in 1927, with Ivor Novello. This version, with Cregar, was directed by John Brahm, whose Germanic background proved invaluable to the Victorian melodrama. The film was a huge success and director Brahm was asked to follow it up with yet another shocker entitled HANGOVER SQUARE, also starring the obese Mr. Cregar. This film proved the undoing of its star as Cregar, by all accounts a “tormented homosexual,” dieted himself to death right after filming ended in a desperate attempt to consummate his first heterosexual relationship.

Today both of these films are highly regarded by the critics and most especially by yours truly. When I first came to Los Angeles and started making the rounds, my friend Reggie Nalder took me to afternoon parties at the beach house of Stuart Whitman’s father, Joe, who in turn introduced me to Baron Eric Von Bulow, the special effects wizard who designed the Pillsbury doughboy for television, as well as the terrifying Zuni Doll that terrorized Karen Black in Dan Curtis’s memorable TRILOGY OF TERROR TV film. Well the Baron, it turns out, was great friends with the very man who brought my favorite Jack the Ripper film to the screen, John Brahm.

John Brahm lived in a modest (by Malibu standards) beach house high on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Mr. Brahm was by then in his mid-eighties, confined to a wheel-chair, yet fiercely independent. He created and designed his home to include a living room where everything was level to his chair and could be moved or pulled out of the wall. Mr. Brahm still loved to entertain and weekends were always filled with a variety of writers, actors and artisans making the conversation always interesting. James Mason was a close personal friend and always saw Mr. Brahm when he was in Los Angeles. One of my favorite memories of him was actually kind of scary, you see Mr. Brahm loved the sun and sat out on this veranda all day long. One afternoon he was dozing in his chair when some strands of his hair actually caught fire. Fortunately we saw it in time and no harm was done except to freak me out, as I never have before or since known this to happen. Needless to say John Brahm was very tanned indeed.

The most amazing coincidence was yet to reveal itself as one of my close friends at that time was Barbara Steele. Barbara was recently (1978) divorced from screenwriter James Poe, and they had a young son, Jonathan, who was about seven years old at the time. Mr. Brahm had sublet his guest house to James Poe, and in the months that followed I would sometimes drive the boy to see his dad on weekends. This enabled me to do Barbara a favor and also see Mr. Brahm as well. Sadly, James Poe died quite prematurely in that very same guest house several months later, upsetting all concerned as you can imagine.

Sometimes Mr. Brahm could remember his career in great detail and then some days he would go for hours without saying much at all. He had in his personal library the filmbook adaptations of both films with Laird Cregar and these were the only film related things he had in the house. I was fortunate to catch him on one of his good days and taped what was to be his last interview. Now for the readers of Camp David I have published that interview online with John Brahm’s daughter Sumishta Brahm’s amazing website “Sumishta’s universe www.thirfg.demon.co.uk Please do yourself a favor and have a look as you will find a uniquely gifted and spiritual person whose interests are universal in every sense of that word.

John Brahm was part of the golden age in Hollywood and his films at 20TH Century Fox will stand the test of time as we are beginning to appreciate not only his thrillers but his work in film noir and the overwhelming amount of work in television on such classic shows as ‘The Twilight Zone’ and ‘The Outer Limits.’ My personal favorites of his were the hour long episodes of Boris Karloff’s ‘Thriller’ series where he created some mini masterpieces of the macabre from screenplays by such authors as Robert Bloch.

When I think back of John Brahm today I always seem to conjure up the voyage up and up this dirt road until you are finally at the top of a crest looking down on the ocean and there is his rambling house. Once inside I can still hear that very Germanic voice asking me what I wanted to drink, or asking me to examine his latest invention to make his environment even more compact and modern. He was such a vital man and a brilliant craftsman. Just watching one of his films like THE LODGER will make that abundantly clear.

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