How John Brahm’s Trilogy Of Psychological Noir Help Us Understand The Nature Of Evil

In Silence of the Lambs, Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter quotes Marcus Aurelius in an attempt to help Jodie Foster’s novice FBI agent Clarice Starling catch Buffalo Bill. Lecter asks, “Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature?” What does he do, this man you seek?” Then to nail the point home, he asks “What is the first and principal thing he does, what needs does he serve by killing?”

Lecter’s insight into a killer’s motivation suggests that evil acts have a source beyond the moral compass of an individual. Something, somewhere, drives the killer to kill.

It is such an approach to the question of evil that director John Brahm took in the mid-1940s in a series of three films. The Undying Monster (1942), The Lodger (1944), and Hangover Square (1945) are somewhat forgotten masterpieces of suspense and horror. Their relative obscurity is unfortunate as they offer deeply profound insight into the nature of an evil that threatened the world in Brahm’s time and is rearing its head again in ours. If we take Dr. Lecter’s advice and think about what these films say about the roots of evil action, an analysis of these neglected gems might provide useful insight for our precarious present.

Escaping Nazis for Hollywood

John Brahm was born in Germany in 1893 and established a successful theatrical career for himself in his native country. When Adolf Hitler came to power, Brahm, like so many others in the German entertainment industry fled. First, he went to England where he broke into the film industry, but by the late 1930s, he had made the move to Hollywood. He eventually began work for 20th Century-Fox and had a successful, if unheralded career directing movies. By the 50s, however, Brahm transitioned into a long and successful, if relatively anonymous career in American television.

Despite his anonymity, however, Brahm left us with a fascinating body of work, and the three films I want to discuss here have retained a particular interest for us today. Each film is deeply psychological and draws on aspects of the German experience with Nazis to explore the nature of evil. Each main character in these films reveals a piece of a larger puzzle. Taken together we see aristocratic class-snobbery, misogynistic patriarchy, and elite High Art aestheticism.

These films’ exploration of duality and evil draw on the rise of fascism in Brahm’s life experience and seem eerily relevant now with the rise of neo-fascism across the world.

The Undying Monster and Class Warfare

The running time is barely an hour and the script aspires to no more than b-movie status, but Brahm and cinematographer Lucien Ballard manage to craft a truly spooky and visually stunning suspense film that is more than the sum of its parts.

The film is a somewhat unwieldy amalgam of horror, comedy, and Sherlock Holmes. It almost feels as though Mel Brooks collaborated with Jacques Tourneur on a parody of The Hound of the Baskervilles. The plot follows Scotland Yard detective Robert Curtis (James Ellison) and his ditzy partner Christy (Heather Thatcher) as they investigate a murder at Hammond Hall in the countryside.

Siblings Oliver and Helga Hammond (John Howard and Heather Angel) are the last of the Hammond line and live under the shadow of a family curse that has something to do with an ancestor’s deal with Satan. The curse turns out to by lycanthropy and Oliver turns out to be a werewolf, though the film siphons out all supernatural aspects of the story and reduces them to applied psychology. Still, Brahm uses the movie’s banal psychological reductiveness to introduce a key component of evil in his trilogy: class.

Oliver the individual is a seemingly good and kind man. He is completely unaware of his werewolfism and therefore, like most cinematic werewolves, is a tragic figure. Here the evil does not spring from the moral choices of an individual. It is structural and unconscious, lurking undetected in the hereditary lord of the manor. It is, in other words, etched into the aristocracy itself.

Look at what the lycanthropy lashes out at. It is not the Hammonds themselves. It destroys the working class that challenges the aristocracy’s authority. A young working girl is the film’s murder victim and everyone is quick to point blame at the c*ckney, working-class poachers that “illegally” set traps on unused Hammond ancestral lands. At the end of the film, even the law essentially forgives family doctor Jeff Colbert (Bramwell Fletcher) for explicitly obstructing Inspector Curtis’s investigation. He was, after all just protecting the family. Oliver is not a victim of the curse, he is its vessel.

The curse in this film lashes out at perceived threats to the aristocracy and established, almost feudal, power. Class is thus established as part of the equation in Brahm’s exploration of evil, and it carries over in the second film in 1944.

The Lodger and Unhinged Misogyny

In Brahm’s 1944 remake of the Alfred Hitchc*ck silent-era film, The Lodger, the killer’s class status, like Oliver Hammond’s, also shields him from suspicion for his crimes. In this film, however, another component of the villain’s psychology is introduced: pure misogyny. He simply hates women, particularly actresses, as he blames them for the decline of his beloved brother.

The story is an unfaithful adaptation of the Jack the Ripper slayings in the Whitechapel district of London in the 1880s. As the film begins, the Ripper (Laird Cregar) has been terrorizing women in the London slums when he arrives at a boarding house in a well-heeled neighborhood nearby. Taking the name of a street in the vicinity, Slade, he finds lodging with a family under financial strain. His ability to give them money, along with his upper-class manners, are more than enough to earn their trust. Unfortunately, their niece, Kitty, (Merle Oberon) is an up-and-coming stage performer, perfectly suited to set the stage for an ultimate conflict with the Ripper.

As with each of Brahm’s films, the visual style of the film is remarkable. Again teaming up with cinematographer Lucien Ballard, the director creates visually stunning images that draw upon German expressionism to explore the psychology of the Ripper. In addition, the film employs a powerful motif, water, to emphasize the depths of the Ripper’s misogyny. Water has long been associated with femininity (think of the oceans under the sway of the moon in their own “cycle”) and Slade’s obsession with it here drives home the severity of his hatred for women.

But as with Oliver Hammond, he is not entirely evil and is capable of not only civility but also acts of kindness as well. Brahm works to put this complicated psychology on display in shots like the one in which Slade is reflected in three mirrors simultaneously. It is a remarkable work of cinematic craftsmanship and the director uses it to emphasize the shattered psyche of his villain. This theme is also reflected in the many shots of high contrast between light and shadow. Slade is not only the perpetrator here, he is truly haunted by something, and Brahm’s direction along with Cregar’s excellent performance give fascinating complication to his character.

Evil, as Brahm presents it in these films, is not as simple as an individual’s moral decisions, it arises from social and economic structures that fragment the individual personality.

Hangover Square and Authoritarian Taste

If the casting of Laird Cregar in the leading role is a powerful connection between The Lodger and Hangover Square, the organizing motifs of the films contrast starkly. In The Lodger, Brahm employed the motif of water to symbolize Slade’s misogyny. In 1945’s Hangover Square, that motif gives way to fire, which opens, closes, and permeates the film throughout. Here, fire must represent a violent sort of purification in accord with the killer’s murderous psychosis.

This film is perhaps the most morally complex of the three. It follows the tragedy of George Henry Bone, a talented composer who suffers from blackouts when he is under stress and hears loud, discordant sounds. These blackouts have a kind of Jekyll/Hyde effect on him and he frequently commits murder in this alternative state. The film follows Bone as he is torn between finishing his masterpiece sonata and his lust for lounge singer Netta Longdon (Linda Darnell). The stress of this battle between his calling to High Art and his sexual lust leads to an existential crisis that triggers a murderous spree.

The film surely represents the height of Brahm’s directorial artistry. Teaming up with cinematographer Joseph LaShelle this time, the film features several astonishing sequences that include intricate staging and wild, sweeping camera movements. The ending of the film is surely Brahm’s masterpiece. But the technical achievement of the film is not simply the director showing off. Each decision works to explore the sources of the deep, fragmented psychology of Bone.

As with The Lodger, there is misogyny at work here. Netta is the kind of wily performing girl that Slade detested and murdered. She uses Bone’s talent for her own career goals and keeps him on the hook with sex. She is, in fact, doubled in the film with her cat, that Bone takes into his own home at the beginning of his relationship with Netta. Films like Cat People had already established the link between felines and female sexuality in horror films and Brahm makes full use of that association here. And as if to drive the point home, at the moment of Bone’s murder of Netta, the film cuts to the cat being run over in the street.

This film also adds a subtext of racism to the formula. The strangulation method that Bone uses reminds the police of a technique employed by the Thuggee cult. The most famous cinematic representation of this group is certainly Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which employs many of the colonialist racist stereotypes that the investigators here assume as well. The world in which Bone operates clearly organizes itself around rich white men.

Finally, the misogyny and racism combines with the film’s exploration of aesthetic snobbery. The class and gender ideologies that drive Bone’s alter-ego to murder are centered around the distinction between “High” and “Low” art. Netta is a lounge singer in search of popular songs and she seduces Bone into abandoning his sonata to write pop songs for her to sing. Much of his rage can be traced to class snobbery centered around art.

All of this leads to the film’s overwhelming use of fire as a motif. Without question, the movie’s centerpiece is Bone’s disposal of Netta’s body during the annual Guy Fawkes celebrations. Tradition calls for the townsfolk to heap effigies of Fawkes on a huge bonfire and to burn the image of the traitor out of patriotic devotion. Bone carries Netta’s body (disguised as a Guy) and carries her to the top of the heap just before it is set ablaze.

The implication is clear. Bone’s ideology requires a violent purification of those that subvert the hierarchy that gives him power and status in society.

Predicting the Alt-Right

Brahm’s films not only emerge from his experience with the rise of Nazis in Germany. They were also produced during World War II when then horrors of fascism were apparent to everyone. If there were any lingering doubt about Brahm’s attitude toward the German regime, the fact that he directed a vehemently anti-Nazi war film in 1943, Tonight We Raid Calais, should dispel it. The Guy Fawkes scene in Hangover Square resembles the iconic, satanic imagery of a Nazi part “night rally” and this is certainly no coincidence. Brahm drew on his own experience with evil to create these profound examinations of its origins.

The collective portrait of evil in these films is still useful to us today. First of all, the monster is not an isolated incident. He emerges from a context that drives his evil acts. That context is one of power: over women, over the poor, and over elite institutions and the sway they hold over society. His villains are basically good people driven to madness by the structures of power in society and they lash out against challenges to that aristocratic, patriarchal power.

John Brahm would no doubt be dismayed that the tyrannical evil of fascist ideology has re-emerged at the end of the postwar liberal order. Alt-Right groups across the world gain momentum and inspired by racist and sexist ideology. “Incels” and other disgruntled young men commit horrific acts of mass murder and other forms of violence. Too often our focus in such instances lies strictly in making moral claims about the individuals involved. Surely these people are responsible for their actions, but by making them into one-dimensional monsters, we miss an important part of the story. Brahm’s trilogy offers us insight into the social and political conditions that make right-wing violence possible.

What other films can teach us about fascism? Please let us know in the comments below.