Val Lewton

One of my most pleasurable viewing projects of recent months has been watching the celebrated series of nine "horror" films that Val Lewton produced for RKO in the Forties. I had seen several but not all of these before; I am now six films into the current project, and they are all rewarding experiences. The "horror" tag is a misleading one for many of these films, whether you are comparing them to earlier horror cycles (the Universal monster horrors of the Thirties) or later ones (the slasher films of the Seventies and Eighties). The Lewton films vary quite a bit among themselves, and overt horror elements are sometimes completely absent. They are all shuddery, subtle, and stylish, though: those are their commonalities.

Probably the most famous of these films is the first, Cat People (1942), directed by Jacques Tourneur from a script by DeWitt Bodeen (but Lewton had a writing hand, credited or uncredited, in many of these films). The movie almost maintains its ambiguity about whether the heroine Irena does become, as she fears, a killer cat -- until a shot that, if you take it at face value, settles the matter in the supernatural column. Lewton fought that shot and the studio insisted on it; but it is an effectively scary insert that doesn't jar the poetic mood that Tourneur and his team had been at such pains to establish. Cat People is renowned for how much it unsettles given how little you see, and even this view of a black panther is the merest blink. (William Wellman borrowed liberally from Lewton's method twelve years later in his unusual adaptation of Walter Van Tilburg Clark's Track of the Cat, in which you never actually see the "black painter" -- you just see its tracks and hear its vocalizations.)

The follow-up, Curse of the Cat People (1944), which I have written about before in this blog, came two years later after four intervening films in the cycle. It's a wonderful piece about the fears and fantasies of childhood that has always been criticized for the misrepresentation of its title, which leads people to expect an entirely different sort of film than the delicate tale on view. But the plot linkage with the earlier film is indeed strong: Curse is truly a sequel, but one that has its own independent life and rationale for being.

Lewton did well with cats. The same panther that appeared in the insert shot in Cat People was brought back for a more extended role in The Leopard Man (1943). (I have written about leading man Dennis O'Keefe's nice wardobe in the post above.) This film has a flavorful Southwestern setting and no hint of supernatural agency; it is renowned as an early example of a "serial killer" story (based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich). There is a great murder scene in this movie that depends, again, entirely on the unseen (although not the unheard). You can look forward from The Leopard Man to the infamous ear-slicing in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, which people always remember as having seen in excruciating gory detail despite the fact that Tarantino's camera is pointed away during the atrocity, which you actually only hear.

In the same year as The Leopard Man came I Walked with a Zombie (coming up in my viewing schedule), The Seventh Victim, and The Ghost Ship (the Lewton unit was a busy group). The Seventh Victim is one of the most densely packed of all these rather short films (71 minutes in this case). The sheer ballsiness of the movie is striking, and one can't help but wonder how many elements of it got past the Hays Office censors. Devil worshippers? Blatant lesbians? A dark suicidal ending that has to be seen to be believed?

The Ghost Ship is the least celebrated of the Lewtons because of its odd history; a legal dispute over the source material kept it out of view for a half-century. But it is one of my very favorites because of its sea setting. This title is also misleading: there are no ghosts, really no supernatural elements unless you count a deaf-mute sailor who seems a bit clairvoyant. This is a "nautical noir" with an excellent nuanced performance by Richard Dix as a captain whose surface reasonableness and charm masks a madness that becomes gradually apparent to some, not at all to others, and plays out tragically. As in other Lewtons, there is a memorable and unexpected death scene.

The last three Lewtons in 1945 and 1946 all starred Boris Karloff: The Body Snatcher (which I've yet to see), Isle of the Dead (next up in my queue), and Bedlam. The last illustrates a good rule of thumb, that any film that starts with William Hogarth prints under the opening credits is going to be wickedly cool. Lewton, who wrote the screenplay himself (under a pseudonym) with director Mark Robson, appropriately gives Hogarth, an early "graphic novelist," a story credit. This tale of the infamous Bedlam insane asylum is cleverly thought out and beautifully executed, with wonderful and believably-in-period art direction, photography, acting, and direction. As with so many other films in the Lewton series, there is no supernatural element; Bedlam is a historical film about real horrors, and an uncommonly effective one.