The Woman Who Came Back (1945)

Walter Colmes' The Woman Who Came Back goes well beyond 'Lewtonesque': it's an outright Val Lewton pastiche, yet still my favourite fantasy film of 1945.

It begins in the present day, with former runaway bride Nancy Kelly returning by bus to her family's ancestral home of Eben Rock in Massachusetts. An old woman leading a German Shepherd dog on a leash stops the bus and attempts to pay her fare with an ancient pound note, then sits next to our heroine and calls her by name before claiming to having been personally acquainted with her ancestor, a witch burning judge who died over 300 years ago. Shortly thereafter the bus goes off the road, over the cliff, and into the town lake, killing everyone except Kelly, who stumbles into the local pub and the waiting arms of local doctor John Loder, whom she had previously jilted at the altar. Ultimately all the bodies are recovered from the lake except that of the creepy old hag, and the neurotic Kelly begins to think she may have been earmarked as the reincarnation of a witch who, along with her dog 'familiar' was burned at the stake. Apparently always something of a square peg, a condition not ameliorated by her having thrown over that nice Doc Loder, her neighbours begin to share her delusion, particularly when the daughter of the doctor's a-little-too-loving sister becomes ill...

After a wonderfully promising opening the film settles down to a number of nicely foreboding but restrained set-pieces, the elements of which can all be tracked back to Val Lewton: the male protagonist worried by the apparent psychological fragility of his fiancee, and the anxious walk taken by his sister who is pursued by the sound of a jangling dog collar, are both lifted wholesale from Cat People; the suggestion of a neurotic woman as danger to a small child derives from Curse of the Cat People; and the menacing figure of the old woman's roaming dog echoes the jungle cats freed from their cages in the zoo in both The Leopard Man and Cat People. It is clear that whoever devised these scenes (story author John H. Kafka or screenwriter Dennis J. Cooper) had studied the Lewton playbook very closely and made a list. And it's an extremely pleasing simulacra, even if Colmes' careful direction is sometimes let down by a small budget and attendant inability to obtain adequate coverage. This is evidenced by the infrequent appearance of soft and ill-proportioned cutaways that are obvious optical zooms untidily cropped out of the carefully composed two person master shots that make up the bulk of the picture, to substitute for alternate angles the editor simply didn't have and therefore had to invent. Colmes also fails to rein in the performances of his cast as carefully as Lewton was wont to do, hardly surprising in a film whose budget apparently usually did not allow for more than one camera set-up per shot, but it's particularly problematic in the case of his heroine, whose hysteria is unrestrained and obvious a bit too early on, somewhat out of step with the more leisurely and subtle build of the plot. But if the limitations of a small budget sometimes proved too much for its second time director, the benefits of a great deal of meticulous planning prior to shooting are writ large on the screen, and easily outweigh any criticism -- and one criticism in particular.

Most reviews of the film admit to feeling let down by the explanation offered by Otto Kruger's rational priest at the conclusion. The final scene does feel tacked on and lazy, and the film would have been better served by its having been omitted (in which case it would have faded out on a perfectly good shot of the wind-dappled surface of the mysterious lake). Without it, The Woman Who Came Back might enjoy a greater reputation today. But the reviewers appear to take it for granted that the explanation offered for the film's biggest mystery (the disappearance of the witch from the drowned bus) neatly ties off all the loose ends. It really doesn't.

Yes, the supposed witch's confession is discovered to have been forced for political reasons, but just because she wasn't a witch doesn't mean there wasn't a ghostly presence in the film, does it? For instance, a book on the evils of superstition is shown with its pages being riffled by a breeze, but there's no way it could have blown from the table on which it lay to burn in the fireplace: it's simply too big, and the fireplace too far away. There's also a scene involving a heavy trap door, left lying open flat on the floor, that is shown to close but couldn't possibly have fallen shut (seeing as it would have had to fall up in order to do so), it could only have been lifted. And even if the old lady was an ex mental patient, where'd she come by that museum piece currency she tried to use on the bus? Bad props, I hear you say: bad writing, or bad directorial choices. I don't think so. A great deal of obvious care went into this production, and intended or not those details, if recalled them, leave lingering doubts in the mind of the viewer as to the veracity of the pat solution we are offered.

Besides, whatever its very minor faults, The Woman Who Came Back is remarkable in that, coming from Republic Studios, it manages a creditable Val Lewton with even less money and far fewer resources than Val Lewton had access to, which makes this just the kind of modest, industrious, effective and very endearing little gem we here at Biased Observer are digging for.

Round Up 1945, Part Four: Pillow Of Death?

Ah, yes. The Picture Of Dorian Gray. I developed a prejudice against Oscar Wilde's story when I was a kid, having caught one or another of the versions of it on television. The honest truth is that while I didn't much like the central conceit of the portrait that showed the ravages of the dissipations of its subject while the original did not age, what I really objected to was the fact that there was nobody in the movie to really like. I still need a reason to care about what's going on in a film or novel, and if I can't sympathise with someone in the story, I find it difficult to care about what happens in the story. Which, I suppose, limits me somewhat. That said, reading about the Albert Lewin directed version made of 1945, with George Sanders in the role of the decadent, witty cynic Lord Wooton to Hurd Hatfield's empty, vain Dorian, it sounds as if I may have been hasty. I didn't think I was a fan of Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde (one of the major influences on Wilde's tale) either, but have since been shown the error of my ways.

The thing is, I've only read two of Wilde's works, and I remember being scandalised at recognising recycled witticisms -- identical memorable dialogue shared in common between Dorian Gray and The Importance Of Being Earnest. Can anyone confirm this, or did I somehow imagine it? Not that it would be out of character for Wilde, who regularly espoused a love of the artificial and empty: on the contrary, if he didn't do it, I imagine that if it were possible for him to read this he would wish that he had done. After all, as one of the characters in Dorian Gray so archly puts it, "I like persons better than principles, and persons with no principles better than anything in the world." AMG's Hal Erickson calls this version Lewins' "fascinating follow-up to his expressive-esoterica masterpiece The Moon and Sixpence" which I have never seen, but that phrase 'expressive-esoterica' certainly piques the curiousity. Is his Dorian Gray a piece of expressive-esoterica, too? One certainly hopes so, as the only thing worse than a film being expressive-esoterica would be its not being expressive-esoterica.

Huh. Here's an odd one. The British They Came to a City is an Ealing production, based on a play by J.B. Priestley, who also appears in the framing sequence. A disparate group of people from various social strata stand outside the gates of Utopia and discuss which, if any of them, might be able to adjust to life within it. George Perry, quoted at Britmovie.co.uk, says of the film:

It is a tract for socialism, presented in allegorical form, with... a city wherein poverty, exploitation, slums, class distinctions and the profit motive have all been abolished...  The film’s action – if that is not a misnomer – is confined to stylistic sets. It is one of Ealing’s most unsatisfactory films, a venture into an area that would be fairly difficult for any filmmaker, but one which for this studio, with its tradition of realism and a view of ordinary lives, was a disaster. Priestley’s radicalism was based on the concept of universal friendship, but this play failed to offer any ideas as to how his Utopia could be achieved. And because we are never given a chance to see inside the city we have no way of knowing whether its idealism works or not.

Call me crazy, but I find utopian discussion of interest, and this sounds so weird it's actually kind of compelling, though quite possibly more fun to think about than to actually watch. I do like to see fantasy pressed into the dead serious service of philosophy/politics, even if it proves deadly earnest and deadlier dull.

Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase is supposed to be the protoypical gothic romance film. I find it difficult to get worked up over the very familiar plot wherein the pretty young nurse falls for the possibly murderous son of the mysterious manor. There's no supernatural element here, just some nut killing the neighbourhood cripples. However, this particular nurse is a mute played, by all accounts, to great effect by Dorothy McGuire (pictured nearby) using only her piercing eyes, the direction is said to be noirishly expressionistic, and if it sounds cliche it's only because it was so successful is spawned legions of imitators, so, yeah, worth a try.

Finally, yes: Pillow Of Death. And, no, it isn't of even mild interest, at least not to me. Another of the six Inner Sanctum programmers starring Lon Chaney Jr, I only mention it here because the title amuses me, and because reading a description of its plot has helped me solidify my personal definition of what constitutes a horror film, for the narrow purposes of this narrow-minded blog anyway.

A man smothering his wife with a pillow is horrible, certainly, but it's exactly the kind of horror that appears in the newspaper every day, which I look to the movies to escape. It's not fantastic, it's all too sadly real. The same goes for torture, sadism, and most particuarly sexual violence. These things scare me profoundly, but to be honest, my interest in horror as a genre has little to do with a desire to be frightened, and nothing whatsoever to do with being disgusted. What I want is wonder: a darker, perhaps meaner, but no less wonderful form of the strange, alien, and essentially out of the realm of ordinary existence that fantasy and science fiction, at their best, provide. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Dario Argento's Suspiria, for instance, though it has his trademark nasty sadism, also has scary witches. That's a horror film, and in my opinion his very best. But his repellant The Stendhal Syndrome, which involves Argento's own lovely daughter, Asia, being repeatedly raped by a sadistic psychopath, while certainly disturbing and horrible, is not what I'm looking for in a horror film, because there's no fantasy element (at least, not my idea of fantasy). All of Argento's black gloved killers deserve to be relegated to the separate genre the Italians class them as: not horror, but giallo.

Now, I love a good detective film, and a particularly dark crime makes for a particularly urgent investigation (ala Silence Of The Lambs, Seven, or my favourite, Citizen X), which is good, but I don't take pleasure in watching people die, particularly in terror, and certainly don't wish to see them do so for protracted periods, least of all women. The crime under investigation can be brutal, it helps my involvement in the investigation that I'm afraid of violent crime, but I'm much happier having the horror suggested than being subjected to it myself at length, particularly if it's already been established once: I certainly don't need to be subjected to it twice, let alone three or four times. I also have a real aversion to the sound of screaming, and tend to turn down the volume until it's over, and I'll fast forward through lengthy depictions of human suffering to get it over with. If there's simply too much of it (or if I just know it's going to end badly, and there's no chance our hero is going to catch the psycho or our heroine is going to escape) I will simply give up and turn the thing off. I just don't like to feel abused when a movie is over. That isn't to say that I think a film shouldn't deal with serious subject matter, or that the viewer shouldn't be made to feel the violence with which our cinema is so replete. David Cronenberg has recently made two very fine films in which violence is at the heart of the narrative, and in which the prospect of violence is a source of great anxiety for the audience, as it should be. I think we should fear the consequences of violence.

It's just that there are things I don't feel the need to experience. I won't watch terrorists cutting off the heads of real live journalists on the internet, nor the simulated snuff of The Guinea Pig films (almost certainly one of the spiritual inspirations for Eli Roth's Hostel, and thus indirectly the mainstream American genre dubbed torture porn), for instance, because neither is something I want in my head. I am actually less bothered by the prospect of seeing the latter than by the fact that someone wanted to make them, and even moreso that they were correct in thinking there was an audience for them. On the other hand, I'm in the minority who liked Joel Silver's 8MM, which involves a private detective tracking down the sick vermin responsible for having made a genuine snuff film, and killing them for it. This I freely admit to finding most satisfying.

To digress a bit further, I'd like to say that you hear a lot of psychobabble in regard to horror films and the tendency of beautiful young women to get cut up in them. There are entire unversity dissertations dedicated to this theme, carefully tabulating the male/female ratio of victims and concluding with the assertion that the slasher film in particular contains an ingrained conservatism that punishes modern sexual freedom with death. Gene Siskel was a particularly vocal proponent of the idea that such films revealed a deep hatred of women in both their creators and the audiences who consume them. While I don't deny that some film makers may dislike women -- a great many males do -- and I am not a fan of the slasher genre myself, I think these critics overlook a fairly obvious motive for so many axe murders coming hot on the heels of some young lovely taking off her shirt.

Both explicit gore and explicit sex on film made their first appearances in exploitation films, for the simple reason that these ingredients were forbidden in mainstream movies, and therefore offered a sure way for small independent productions to compete. Producer David Friedman, a carny before he got into movies, knew that the darker thrills offered by the carnival -- the strip show tent, the freak show tent, and the geek show tent (where some mental deficient would bite the heads off live chickens) -- were money makers because what they contained couldn't be had elsewhere, and it was just good economic sense for him to get his start in features with nudie cuties: benign films, often shot in nudist colonies, with a lot of skin but no actual sex. The problem was that once exploitation film makers got their hands on something lucrative they would run it into the ground, and not only would the audience become numbed to that particular thrill, the bar would thereby naturally be lowered for Hollywood as well. Mainstream films gradually became more risque, and exploitation film makers had to find something else that would fill those seats. Friedman and his buddy Herschell Gordon Lewis sat down to try to figure out their next move, and came to a sound business decision: they would make horror movies, and what would distinguish them (because it certainly wouldn't be the writing, directing, acting or production values) would be gore.

The merchantability of this kind of extreme bloodletting had been proven by the success of Paris' Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, founded in 1894, where audiences, male and female, had gone to enjoy graphic and shocking plays depicting horrible crimes ripped from the headlines and from history. These were geek shows, pure and simple, and so are the Lewis gore films. But once Friedman and Lewis had thrown open the doors to more extreme violence, international films and the mainstream, inevitably, began to close the divide between them again, Sam Peckinpah began spraying blood in slow motion, and there was only one choice left for the true exploitation merchants who didn't have the chops necessary to sell a film on any merits but the fact that Hollywood simply couldn't follow where they were going: hardcore pornography or retirement. Friedman, at least, bought himself a carnival.

Meanwhile, however, low budget independents had learned that two affordable ingredients could almost guarantee a return on a minimal investment. You might not have the money for established actors, but pretty nobodies would do just as well, if not better, as long as they would agree to take off their blouses. The supporting characters, such as they were, were mainly there to have simulated sex. The leading lady, for whom it was perhaps more important that she be able to act, might not have to strip, which has the effect of making her look virtuous, essentially by accident. The other sure fire money maker being violence, it was necessarily the sexy supporting cast who had to do the dying, usually after they had done the thing they'd really been hired to do: get naked. Not very psychological at all, more of an accident really.

Pure economics, in fact, because that's entirely what those films were all about.

Round Up 1945, Part Three: The Green Chamber Of Linnaisten Mansion

Okay. With Linnaisten Vihreä Kamari, we now have a Finnish horror mystery that is not described on the IMDB or even mentioned at AMG, so do not bother asking me the names of the women in these pictures from the movie. Thus it would appear that it is no longer just Mexican movies I am going to have a hard time finding out about. The Aurum Horror Film Encyclopedia and Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural are likewise silent -- surprising, considering their usual thoroughness. Not only that, but ever since I cut and pasted the title of the film into this blog entry my keyboard will no longer type an apostrophe, quotation mark, slash or exclaimation point: I get è, È, é and É instead. It isnèt (damn!) the first time this has happened and I have no idea how to stop it, so for the duration of this post I will seem even more mannered and up myself than usual as I avoid all contractions and question marks while attempting to find something out about this film through rough machine translations of whatever the Finnish language websites have to say. I must, for you see, as far as I can recall I have never seen a fantastic film from Finland, and it is the goal of this website to find at least one (hopefully good one) from every film producing country on earth. I think I am going to find a blank outline map of the globe and start filling it in one movie at a time. Will Linnaisten Vihreä Kamari represent Finland on our map (question mark). Stay tuned, gentle reader.

First things first. One thing the IMDB does tell us is the name of the director, Valentin Vaala, about whom Wikipedia has this to say:

Valentin Vaala (born Valentin Ivanoff) (October 13, 1909 in Saint Petersburg - November 21, 1976 in Helsinki) was a Russian-born Finnish film director, who often also wrote the screenplays for and edited his own films. His career spanned several decades, from 1929 to 1973, and has been called one of the most significant, in both quality and popularity, in the history of Finnish cinema... During his career, Vaala directed 44 feature-length theatrical films, the second most among Finnish directors, behind only Toivo Särkkä. 

Maybe so, but AMG lists only two of the 44, and Wikipedia has no entry on the movie under investigation here. Cleaned up machine translation from a Spanish website follows:

Linnaisten Green Chamber: Film based on a Nordic novel, mixing suspense, terror and drama. In a high society mansion, a dramatic story unfolds involving the appearance of ghosts.

Green chamber and ghosts, then. Sounds intriguing, if a bit vague. Let us see what Finnish Wikipedia has to say about the film: 

Linnaisten Green Chamber is a classic Finnish horror romance... based on a story by Zacharias Topelius.

The rest of the translation is suggestive but too incomplete for reconstruction. Even so, now we are talking. A Google search for Topelius, Linnaisten and Green uncovers the existence of novel entitled The Green Chamber Of Linnaisten Mansion by Zacharias Topelius (the reviewer calls it dull), and a further search for that title results in a more or less English language plot capsule of the film at http://koti.mbnet.fi/basil/nest/allmovies.txt, (c) 2005 by someone identified only as Rex:

'The Green Chamber of Linnais'
Linnaisten vihreä kamari/Linnaisten kartanon vihreä kamari
Finland 1945 B/W 91min
****
Drama, mystery
cast: Rauli Tuomi, Reino Valkama, Kaija Rahola, Regina
Linnanheimo
credits: dir. Valentin Vaala 

The time is about 1800. Everybody in the manor lives happily. Two
daughters are searching their love and try to find somebody noble
enough for marrying. Somebody with a good name. A handsome architect
comes to the manor to do his business and soon there is love in the
air. But the manor has secrets which has something to do with certain
surnames and one of these surnames is mr. architects surname. The
dreams of marrying a daughter of the manor are gone because of this. Or
is it? Whose surname is really Littau and whose not? Is there really a
ghost in the green chamber? Who will marry that odd nobleman whose
home burnt? And who is that old woman? Sweetly spooky movie. Reminds of
good old days. Actor Rauli Tuomi (the architect) is just right in his
role and the others survive very well.  

Looks like that description and a few stills are going to have to suffice. Sweetly spooky. I like the sound of that, but I would say the chances of my ever getting to see this film are practically nil...

Round Up 1945, Part Two: What's up with Mexico?

As per usual, no useful information available in English at either the IMDB or AMG on Las Cinco Advertencias De Satanas, which has really got me curious about the fantasy film component of the apparently busy Mexican movie industry at this time. But curious enough to read a lot of machine translations of the only available information on the subject, with little prospect of ever being able to see the movies if they do sound worthwhile? What is it about these films that render them apparently below the radar for the English speaking world? Are they bad? Were their makers provincial and behind the times? If so, would that necessarily rob the films of interest? Or are they just victim to the cultural disregard for anything originating south of the U.S. border and therefore simply impossible to see in translation? For that matter, what is the state of Mexican film preservation? Do many of these films literally exist anymore to even be described, because a lot of Hollywood films from this period do not, having been shot on nitrate stock that has a habit of A) bursting into flames and B) turning to dust in a sealed film can. And, then, consider the BBC, who actually used to record over their videotaped archives of televised series simply to make space for new product.

Wikipedia says Mexican film makers were active from the silent era, but that most of what was produced prior to the 20's has been lost to time. Salvador Toscano Barragán is credited with having been Mexico's first film maker, and his (and his country's) first full length feature film a fantasy, an adaptation of the play Don Juan Tenorio. Despite this auspicious start for fantasy films in Mexico, Barragan was primarily a documentarist, his major subject the revolution, after the conclusion of which censorship weighed heavily on the growing industry, with strict political and moral strictures and a government dictated shift from non-fiction to light entertainment that ironically had the opposite effect of politicising film makers even further. In the 30's the country's industry began to pick up momentum and in the 40's entered what is now regarded as its golden age. Interestingly, genius Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein's visit to the country in 1930 is said to have been influential, presumably in regard to the stylistic editing that was his forte, which would argue against the idea that Mexican film making was unsophisticated. (The film he shot during that visit shows up in the 1998 documentary Sergei Eisenstein: Meksikanskaya Fantasiya.)

Film icons Cantinflas (known to the world as the Mexican Charlie Chaplin, though Charlie Chaplin regarded him simply as the greatest comedian in the world), and export Hollwood screen goddess Dolores Del Rio (pictured a couple of times somewhere nearby) emerged during this period, but from the Biased perspective things don't get really interesting until the advent of Spanish-Mexican master surrealist Luis Bunuel in 1950 with Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned). He would live in Mexico for the rest of his life, having relinquished his Spanish citizenship when he went to live there, and while there would direct the masterpiece political surrealist fantasy The Exterminating Angel (1962), in which bourgeois diners assembled for a banquet find that they can't seem to leave the dining room... So we've got him to look forward to, but for the time being it looks like information on Mexican fantasy film is going to be pretty scanty.

Crikey. I wonder what Dolores Del Rio's been in that I should see?

Round Up 1945, Part One: La Fiancée Des Ténèbres

According to the IMDB, of the 715 films made in 1945, 35 fall under the headings of fantasy, horror or science-fiction. They are:

Adán, Eva y el diablo
An Angel Comes to Brooklyn
Blithe Spirit
Blondine
Dead of Night
Fog Island
Hangover Square
He Who Died of Love
House of Dracula
Isle of the Dead
La fiancée des ténèbres
Las cinco advertencias de Satanás
Linnaisten vihreä kamari
Manhunt of Mystery Island
One Day with the Devil
Pillow of Death
Sortilèges
Strange Confession
That Witch Came from Yesterday to Today
The Body Snatcher
The Frozen Ghost
The Horn Blows at Midnight
The House of Fear
The Jungle Captive
The Phantom Speaks
The Picture of Dorian Gray  
The Purple Monster Strikes
The Spiral Staircase
The Vampire's Ghost
The Woman in Green
They Came to a City
Woman Who Came Back
Wonder Man
Yolanda and the Thief
Zombies on Broadway 

A couple of these are Val Lewton pictures (Isle of The Dead and The Body Snatcher), and you may be surprised (not to say disgusted) to find that I'm not going to be dealing with them individually. Lewton was working with Boris Karloff at this point, and while the three they made together are all fine pictures (and well worth investigating, particularly if you're fascinated by the Lewton oeuvre as a whole), they aren't as near and dear to my heart as the earlier products of his RKO B-horror unit.

Besides, their quality is known: they certainly don't need my endorsement, and I need to start being more selective here (I now realise I shouldn't have given The Leopard Man its own entry, either). What will be getting an entry? The lesser known (and, yes, Lewtonesque) Woman Who Came Back, for one. But first, what else of interest was going on in '45 that I don't know about?

As usual, neither IMDB or AMG have any information on the Mexican Adán, Eva Y El Diablo (Adam, Eve and The Devil) or El Que Murio De Amor (He Who Died of Love), apart from the year they were made and who was involved in making them, so do they even exist anymore? I don't know. Likewise the French language Blondine (which, according to AMG, actually dates from 1943). Another casualty of the war?

David Lean's version of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit is definitely among the living, and well worth seeking out. It's been a long time since I saw it, but it's an acknowledged classic and anything featuring the wonderful Margaret Rutherford (star of four delightfully comic Ms. Marple mysteries, among other things) as a spirit medium is automatically of interest. Rex Harrison plays the cynical novelist who enlists Rutherford's aid when he accidentally summons up the spirit of his first wife (Kay Hammond) who then refuses to go away. The exorcism does not pan pan out, and evenutally his second wife dies, too, and Rex finds he's got two spectral ex-spouses on his hands. You can see the trailer below. Funny: I'd forgotten this film was in colour.

Is Dead Of Night the first horror anthology? It's considered among the very best, anyway, and we can probably thank it for the raft of truly wretched imitators that have appeared in its wake ever since. There's a truism that says horror works best in a short story, so if there's one cinematic form that should, by all rights, work, it's the horror anthology, but it rarely ever does. (UK television's Shades Of Darkness is a rare exception, featuring, among other quality episodes, the best ghost story ever committed to film, The Intercessor, based on the chilling and heartbreaking novella by May Sinclair.) However, I have to admit that the reviews make Dead Of Night sound quite appetising, even the long-since-rendered-a-tired-cliche ventriloquist tortured by his dummy story. The framing sequence of the story-tellers assembled in an isolated country house, though they know not why, nervously entertaining one another with stories, reportedly works as something other than a weak device. And, too, I like the sound of haunted golf courses and haunted Christmas parties. Five stories, four directors, and it would be nice to see this dodge really work for a change. Add this one to the list. Here's the opening scene:

Now that the time comes to read up on John Brahm's Hangover Square, I find that I can't generate much enthusiam for the idea of seeing it. Reviews seem to agree that it opens with a stylistic flourish, but settles down after that, which leaves you in the company of a a pscyhotic composer played by Laird Cregar, who is experiencing deadline pressure for the composition of his latest concerto and is driven to murder by distracting noise. I suppose its conceivable that a film with a plot like that one could succeed on pure stylistic verve alone, and they say Cregar is very good in his final role, but I can't see seeking this one out. On the other hand, the only way to see Brahm's The Undying Monster and The Lodger is to purchase the box set that also contains Hangover Square, so...

But, oh ho! Now, this is what I'm talking about! La Fiancée Des Ténèbres (Bride of Darkness), a French film during the Occupation, with director Serge De Poligny under constant scrutiny from an official charged with making sure no more anti-German propaganda snuck through. Lensed in the fascinating and picturesque Carcassone region of the heresy-prone birthplace of courtly love South of France, it involves a woman cursed to bring death to her lovers, whose father, believing himself to be the last of the Albigensian bishops, is looking to revive the Cathar faith.
James Travers, at filmsdefrance.com, calls it "utterly chilling", an "unsettling mix of neo-realistic photography and fairy-tale like settings... an impressive example of the fantasy genre in French cinema of the 1940s. Although little known, it is an extraordinary work of cinema," and crowns these effusions by dubbing it a "curious melange of Jean Cocteau’s La Belle Et La Bête and the cult 1976 horror film The Omen." And while we all try to imagine what that could possibly look like, I will just add it to my list of must see movies. What are the chances I will be able to track it down? Pretty slim...

Round Up 1939

According to the Internet Movie Database, of the 1,126 films made in 1939, 27 fall under the headings of horror, science fiction or fantasy. They are:

Arrest Bulldog Drummond 
Buck Rogers 
Buck Rogers 
Charlie Chan at Treasure Island 
Every Madman to His Specialty 
Gulliver's Travels 
Night of the Mayas 
On Borrowed Time 
S.O.S. Tidal Wave 
Schneewittchen und die sieben Zwerge 
Seven Brothers 
Son of Frankenstein 
Television Spy 
The Cat and the Canary 
The Devil's Daughter 
The Face at the Window 
The Golden Key 
The Gorilla 
The Hound of the Baskervilles   
The Man They Could Not Hang 
The Phantom Creeps 
The Phantom Wagon 
The Return of Doctor X 
The Sign of Death 
The Wizard of Oz   
Torture Ship 
Tower of London 

1939 is the year of The Wizard Of Oz. Personally, I can think of nothing so destructive to the suspension of disbelief necessary to a true fantasy film than characters who break into musical numbers every ten minutes, so as wonderful as this film may be (and, personally, I'm not so convinced), it doesn't fulfill my particular criteria for this blog. It's a musical much more than it is a fantasy film, and its Dinseyfied approach to fantasy is not my cup of tea at all.

It's also the year of the Bob Hope/Paulette Goddard remake of The Cat and the Canary (see that wonderful publicity still, above?).  Bob Hope never made a movie in which he didn't play Bob Hope, and it's also destructive to true fantasy to never be able to forget that what you're watching is the latest in a series of vehicles for a star to whom nothing of consequence can ever occur, thus this falls squarely under the heading of a comedy rather than a horror film. The film is very good fun, and makes a nice double-feature with Hope's The Ghost Breakers (1940), but, again, not what I'm in search of on this blog. That said, the original and the 1978 Radley Metzger remake are both superior to this version.

And, last, but certainly not least, the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce The Hound of the Baskervilles. It's a great movie, and Conan Doyle's original novel certainly gave rise to a great many (usually lesser) supernatural mysteries, but this one goes the Mrs. Radcliffe route and reveals its spectre to be the catspaw of a criminal very much alive: thus, detective movie rather than fantasy film. Absolutely recommended, but I'll discuss this one if I ever get around to the survey of detective movies I'd like to do before I die.

Round Up 1944, Part Two: The Soul Of A Monster

1944 was a better than average year for the fantastic on film.

There's a good deal of reviewer interest at the Internet Movie Database in regard to Columbia's obscure The Soul of a Monster (Dir: Will Jason), and there are three things most everyone seems to agree on whether they like the film or not: A) It's pretentious, B) It's preachy, and C) It's Lewtonesque. I'm sold, on all three counts. No, really. I like a film with a peculiar point of view, even if it's one I don't happen to agree with: at least you know someone had some kind of personal investment in the thing, which is the necessary first step in auteur cinema -- which, let's face it, is basically what we're looking for here. The plot? A dying man's wife makes a deal with the devil to save his life, but though the man recovers, he behaves as if his soul died. Doesn't appear to be available on DVD. Cast member Jim Bannon, if I am not mistaken, played the lead in Carlton E. Morse's classic I Love A Mystery on radio; it's a great old show, and it would be nice to see this film if only to put a face to the voice of man-of-action Jack Packard. Here's the first episode of perhaps their most famous serial, Temple of Vampires (the entire series -- or what survives of it -- can be downloaded for free at the Internet Archive):

Rene Clair's It Happened Tomorrow sounds like a sure bet. It stars Dick Powell, who started out as a song and dance man, but tried to break out of his typecasting in a number of films I'm very fond of, including Murder My Sweet (also '44), one of the classic Philip Marlowe detective movies, and a companion piece of sorts called Station West (1948), in which he successfully translated his detective shtick to the old west. He also played a detective in the always amusing Richard Diamond on radio. Which you can try by fiddling with the doohickey below:


Powell was hardly convincing as a tough guy, but he was good playing a smart aleck who couldn't keep his nose out of other people's business, and I find him very appealing onscreen. According to the glowing reviews he was never more appealing than he was in It Happened Tomorrow, despite the pencil-thin moustache he sports this time out. The story involves reporter Powell coming into possession of a newspaper that predicts the future and using it to scoop all the other papers, only to read of his own imminent demise. Doesn't sound all that hot, plotwise, does it, but they say it's a real charmer, and that the romance with Linda Darnell works extraordinarily well, and I want to see it. I can't find a trailer for this one, but here's one for the excellent Murder My Sweet, which will give you an idea of what old William Powell can do, if you don't already know:

Between Two Worlds involves Paul Henreid (Ingrid Bergman's equally heroic and boring husband in Casablanca) and Eleanor Parker as a despondent Austrian couple who commit suicide when they fail to make it to the ship that will carry them away from the Nazi bombs. They are surprised to wake up on a fogbound ship midway between Heaven and Hell with other recently deceased passengers and the great Sydney Greenstreet, who will apparently decided their fates. AMG is lukewarm, except on the subject of Greenstreet, who they say saves the film (I can believe it), but it appears to have a reasonable cult following on the IMDB. This one makes my list.

Britain's Ealing Studio's The Halfway House is essentially the same gimmick transplanted to a strange Welsh inn in the guise of a comedy/mystery, which sounds like a pleasant enough way to spend 95 minutes.

Also released in '44 were two interesting films about serial killers: the always interesting Edgar Ulmer's Bluebeard, and John Brahm's apparently successful remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger. Given the choice I still think I'd rather see the original Lodger, but Bluebeard, though reportedly plagued by an irritating and omnipresent score and threadbare production values, benefits from Ulmer's eye for a weird camera angle, John Carradine's favourite among his own performances, and sounds like it might be worth a look. 

Then there's Weird Woman, reputed to be the best of the six film Inner Sanctum series, which traded on the name recognition of the famous radio show. It's most interesting for being the first filmed version of Fritz Leiber's masterpiece Conjure Wife, later remade to greater effect as Night Of The Eagle (aka Burn, Witch, Burn!) in 1962. In it, a rationalist college professor is disgusted to learn that his wife has been protecting him from the other faculty wives and furthering his career with magic, all of which he undoes when he destroys all of the charms she has hidden around the house. The book, at any rate, is great stuff, rather reminiscent of M.R. James' Casting The Runes. I've been aware of the existence of Weird Woman for years, but the presence of the seriously underwhelming Lon Chaney Jr. (he was the lead in all of these Inner Sanctum things) really puts a damper on my desire to see it. However, I'm going to overcome it (that poster makes it look pretty good, actually), and add it to my list.

Round Up 1944, Part One: The Tower Of The Seven Hunchbacks

According to the Internet Movie Database, of the 811 films made in 1944, 41 fall under the headings of horror, science fiction or fantasy. They are:

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves 
Between Two Worlds 
Black Magic 
Bluebeard 
Captain America 
Crazy Knights 
Cry of the Werewolf 
Dead Man's Eyes 
Destiny 
El rey se divierte 
Ghost Catchers 
Gildersleeve's Ghost 
House of Frankenstein   
It Happened Tomorrow 
Jungle Woman 
Kismet 
La mujer sin cabeza 
La torre de los siete jorobados   
Once Upon a Time 
One Body Too Many 
Return of the Ape Man 
The Canterville Ghost 
The Climax 
The Curse of the Cat People 
The Halfway House 
The Invisible Man's Revenge 
The Lady and the Monster 
The Lodger 
The Monster Maker 
The Mummy's Curse 
The Mummy's Ghost 
The Pearl of Death 
The Return of the Vampire 
The Soul of a Monster 
The Spider Woman 
The Three Caballeros 
The Uninvited   
Time Flies 
Voodoo Man 
Weird Woman 
While Nero Fiddled 

At long last, a real find! The All Movie Guide's review of the Spanish La Torre De Los Siete Jorobados (The Tower Of The Seven Hunchbacks, Dir: Edgar Neville) makes it sound like a surreal collision between Luis Bunuel and Robert Wiene. In it, the ghost of an murdered anthropologist prevails upon a young man to come to the aid of his niece, who is in danger from a group of hunchbacked counterfeiters operating out of an underground city beneath Madrid that was previously used by Jews hiding from the Inquisition. Other reviews refer to the counterfeiters as a 'secret society', and who can resist the idea of a secret society of hunchbacks? And just check out the wonderful set design pictured above.

I tracked down an article by one Jorge D. Gonzalez and put it through Babelfish for a rough translation into English. He calls the film "one of the strangest and most valuable films of the Post War period in Spain," and waxes particularly effusive about the influence of German expressionism, particularly Caligari, upon the film, its dream-logic atmospherics, and something tantalizingly mistranslated involving (I think) director Neville's interest in Bohemianism and the dissolution of class barriers.

A bit of context. The first Spanish films were made in 1897, but the industry effectively shut down when foreign made talkies killed the market for silent domestic product, as a result of which only one Spanish film was released in 1931. Sound film production, when it arrived in 1935, was soon pressed into political service, with both sides of Spain's civil war injecting propaganda into the movies. When Franco's right wing Nationalists came out on top they exerted strict censorship on the industry through the National Department of Cinematography. The strictures placed on the horror film in particular made it impossible for Spanish film makers to compete with films from other nations, so for the duration of the 30's and 40's they didn't really try -- which is presumably one of the things that makes Edgar Neville's film seem so remarkable. AMG says, "Neville's reputation has grown considerably over the years; some modern critics hail his works of the '40s as masterpieces of personal filmmaking..."

This one definitely goes on my list. Too bad that, by all reports, there's no good way to see it. Sounds like an important film, historically and for genre enthusiasts, so why doesn't someone take an interest?
 
Also, does the word 'conspiranoia' actually exist, or has machine translation invented something wonderful all on its own? I suppose it doesn't work that way, but wouldn't it be nice?

The Curse of the Cat People (1944)

Only one film from Val Lewton's B-horror unit at RKO in 1944? Not exactly a prodigious output. Happily, The Curse Of The Cat People, directed by Robert Wise, is one of the finest of the series.

Unwilling as ever to have his name attached to the kind of junk his bosses at RKO wanted him to produce, Val Lewton's second Cat People film is very nearly a sequel in name only, despite retaining the three surviving leads from the original. The were-cat element is entirely absent, but the sexual psychology is back in spades. Kent Smith worries that his six year old daughter may have a tendency toward madness similar to that of his neurotic and now deceased first wife, Simone Simon. Apparently he's forgotten that the woman did actually turn into a cat just like she feared she would, and even if she had been mad, couldn't have infected his daughter with it, because the girl is not her's, but second wife Jane Randolph's, sexual dysfunction having been at the root of all the previous trouble. Permanently marked by the earlier traumatic relationship, Smith seems to consider the girl to somehow be the spiritual offspring of the dead woman, which suggests that the problem may in fact be with him and not her at all. The child's imaginary friend/surrogate mother is played by Simon, but is she a ghost, or the personification of Smith's own projected fear of feminine madness, given form by an imaginative little girl?

It's a marvellous little film. Lyrical is the word that tends to come up in reviews, and it's as good a way of summing the experience up as any. It is also the end of an era. Val Lewton would produce three more horror films for RKO, but they would be of a very different sort: period costume dramas with somewhat higher budgets befitting a name star, Boris Karloff. Karloff reportedly enjoyed the experience immensely and became friends with Lewton, grateful as he was to be playing something other than a mad scientist, in films that he considered to be among the best of his career. I suspect those three films are closer to the kinds of movies Lewton would have produced all along if he'd had the resources: very good ones, but tailored to suit his new leading man, and none of them resonate as strongly with me as the five preceding them.

The Uninvited (1944)

Ray Milland and his sister Ruth Hussey (so memorable in The Philadelphia Story), move into a house on the coast of Cornwall and almost immediately receive a visit from a former resident, vulnerable and luminous Gail Russell, who is irresistably drawn to the place. Hussey knows trouble when she sees it, but Milland is smitten, and becomes protective when the house begins to show as great an interest in Russell as Russell does in the house. The place is host to not one, but two ghosts, and her life is in danger...

I'm working from memory here, because, for some inexplicable reason, this excellent romantic ghost story has yet to make it to DVD, despite having been released on a long out of print videotape in 1988. However, I can offer you the Screen Director's Playhouse adapation for radio, which brief thought it is at only 30 minutes will give you a taste.



And here's the trailer:

The Uninvited is all class, restrained and cumulatively creepy rather than clamouring for attention as if the director's Ritalin prescription has run out, which is just as it should be. The All Movie Guide review cuts right to the bone and describes it as being like a Val Lewton film, which is apt considering that there won't be another haunted house film quite as good until The Haunting (1966), wherein Lewton protege Robert Wise will apply everything he learned working on Curse Of The Cat People.  Speaking of which...

Round Up 1940

According to the Internet Movie Database, of the 1,097 films made in 1940, 32 fall under the headings of horror, science fiction or fantasy. They are:

A Macabre Legacy 
Before I Hang 
Beyond Christmas 
Black Friday 
Chamber of Horrors 
Crimes at the Dark House 
Dr. Cyclops 
Drums of Fu Manchu 
Earthbound 
El monje loco 
El secreto de la monja 
Enoken no songokû: songokû zenko-hen 
Fantasia 
Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe 
Men with Steel Faces 
Mysterious Doctor Satan 
One Million B.C.   
Pinocchio   
Sky Bandits 
The Ape 
The Blue Bird 
The Devil Bat 
The Fatal Hour 
The Ghost Breakers   
The Human Monster 
The Invisible Man Returns 
The Invisible Woman 
The Man with Nine Lives 
The Midnight Ghost 
The Mummy's Hand 
The Thief of Bagdad 
You'll Find Out

It's time this blog started living up to the 'biased' part of its name. Luckily, here we are in 1940, where one of my bigger prejudices finally emerges, full blown and unreasonable. 1940 is the year Disney's Pinocchio and Fantasia were released, but I'm not going to discuss them because I'm not interested in Disney, except in their capacity as a destructive influence on fantasy cinema in general and children's films in particular.

I don't like their cryogenically frozen founder or his tattling to HUAC.

Or the way they dumped toxic waste in the Florida Everglades on the outskirts of their Magic Kingdom.

Or their inauguration of a new James Woodsian tradition of unrestrained and unamusing voice overacting, since made even more shouty and overbearing by such luminaries as Eddie Murphy (this generation's Arthur Askey).

Or their Mouseketeer child stars who grow up dysfunctional in public, get breast implants before they hit puberty, and end by shrinking the ever-closing gap between the music video and pornography even further on their way to complete breakdowns and/or rehab. (Above left: that isn't a still from Blue Sunshine, it's a pre-teen success story!) (Now, that, below, is a still from Blue Sunshine.)

 

Or the way they tried to destroy underground comix artist Dan O'Neil and his Air Pirates in the courts despite the crucially-important-to-freedom-of-speech laws protecting satire and parody.

Or the way they've dealt with genius animator and competitor Hayao Miyazaki by buying the rights to release his infinitely-superior-to-Disney films in North America and then under-promoting and overcharging for them. (Toss all those Disney discs and show your kids Miyazaki instead, so they'll grow up to be interesting people who like good movies).

Or the fact that they now own Marvel Comics (unless they break Diamond Distributor's destructive monopoly on comics, which I suppose they just might).

And I don't like Disney animated features.

Well, except for Sleeping Beauty. I like the dragon and the bramble forest and the evil queen.

Oh, and Atlantis -- Atlantis was okay.

And Winnie The Pooh was quite nice.

But, boy, they sure ruined Alice In Wonderland, Peter Pan and The Wind In The Willows, three peculiarly British classics that American animators should never have been allowed to touch.

Of course, now that I think of it, the Headless Horseman half of Ichabod and Mr. Toad was better.

And their live action Child Of Glass is one of my favourite children's films, and still holds up for me even today. Wish that was on disc...

Also wish there was some information available for these Mexican horror films I keep seeing mentioned when I generate my Internet Movie Database lists for each year, but apart from their titles and personnel I can't find anything anywhere on the net (not in English, anyway).

And, finally, I wish there was something else to say about 1940, but when The Mummy's Hand is as good as it gets, it's a pretty miserable year for fantastic film. The Bob Hope/Paulette Goddard The Ghost Breakers is entertaining in a non-life-changing kind of way, but the title and the presence of Hope probably tell you all you need to know about it. Otherwise, apart from Republic's not-as-good-as-it-should-have-been Drums Of Fu Manchu serial, the year was one long round of mad scientists and lizards dressed up to look like dinosaurs (One Million B.C.), which is not my idea of a good time. I didn't read about a single film I feel compelled to add to my Want To See list. So we close the book on 1940, and it's onward to 1944 and backward to 1939.

The Mummy's Hand (1940)

The companion piece to my beloved Horror Island (1941),  Universal's The Mummy's Hand stars that film's Dick Foran and Peggy Moran. Excuse me: affable Dick Foran and pretty Peggy Moran, as they are invariably described, because there's really no better way of describing them. Both films are so entertaining, and the chemistry between the two leads so comfortable, I wish they had been teamed together fifty more times. The Mummy's Hand is essentially a 'B' sequel to Universal's previous 'A' The Mummy (1932) starring Boris Karloff, but it's a different kind of beast altogether. Where Karloff's film was a moody romance with a body count, its sequel is a fun and funny pulp adventure with a monster, and almost certainly the direct inspiration for Stephen Sommers' big budget The Mummy (1999), which is itself notable for being an infinitely better Indiana Jones rip-off than the miserable and insulting Indiana Jones And The Temple Of The Crystal Skull (2008).

(Sommers would go on to diminish the slight achievement of his Mummy movie with a couple of sequels that completely blew the modest charm of the original, and then drove the final nails into a promising genre film making career's coffin with the truly dire Van Helsing (2004), which after Ford Coppola's Dracula viewer's had a right to expect would star Anthony Hopkins and not be almost entirely computer generated.)

Dick Foran plays an avid but perpetually broke Egyptologist who happens upon an ancient pot decorated with the map to a lost Pharaoh's tomb. When he and comic sidekick Wallace Ford take it to George Zucco, director of the Cairo Museum, he tells them it's a fake and contrives to drop it on the floor, shattering it. Fortunately, Foran remembers what was on it, doesn't believe it to have been a phony, and convinces traveling magician Cecil Kellaway to finance his expedition. Peggy Moran, as Kellaway's daughter, thinks Foran and Ford are a couple of hustlers, and insists on accompanying the group into the desert, where against her will a mutual liking develops between her and Foran. Little do they know that Zucco, actually a priest of the cult of the soon to be revived Mummy, is not far behind, and has a yen for Peggy himself...

The whole enterprise is just great, unpretentious, sweet natured fun, light as a souffle and good for your soul.

P.S.: As an added bonus, here's the trailer for Horror Island, which I forgot to post with its review: