Round Up 1942, Part One

According to the Internet Movie Database, of the 1,042 films made in 1942, a grand total of 28 contained elements that could be considered fantasy, horror, or science fiction. They were:

A Light in the Window 
Beyond the Blue Horizon 
Bowery at Midnight 
Cat People 
Dr. Renault's Secret 
Fantastic Night 
I Married a Witch 
I Married an Angel 
Invisible Agent 
Jungle Book   
Man with Two Lives 
Night Monster 
Sideral Cruises 
Terror House 
The Boogie Man Will Get You 
The Corpse Vanishes 
The Devil's Envoys 
The Ghost of Frankenstein 
The Hidden Hand 
The Living Ghost 
The Mad Doctor of Market Street 
The Mad Monster 
The Mummy's Tomb 
The Remarkable Andrew 
The Strange Case of Doctor Rx 
The Undying Monster 
Thunder Rock 
Tomorrow We Live 

But apart from Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur's Cat People, '42 looks like being a pretty sad year for fantastic film. A Frankenstein sequel (Ghost of Frankenstein), an Invisible Man sequel (Invisible Agent), a number of Karloff programmers, a number of Lugosi programmers (the relative merits of which I will ask my father, who has more fondness for such things than I, to comment upon later in a new supplementary feature I hereby christen: My Old Man's Two Cents), and a couple of foreign language films that don't look particularly compelling. You may as well know that international horror holds a particular glamour for me. If you don't have a problem with subtitles (or, if it's all you can get, dubbing) it's a painless way of easing yourself into another culture, aided by the familiar framework of genre -- kind of like accompanying The Accidental Tourist to a Parisian McDonalds -- and if you hang around this blog for any length of time you'll find that I take a particuar interest in fantastic film hailing from outside of the United States. I'm Canadian, and this kind of cinematic tourism by proxy makes me feel cosmopolitan. 

Here's the way it's going to work: we're going to have a kind of pass/fail system around here. For a film to get its own personal blog entry here is for it basically to receive the Biased Award For Extreme Interestingness To Me Personally. Everything else, if it gets mentioned at all, will turn up in a Round Up for its year. Let it be known that the Biased Award is not handed out lightly, which means that Cat People is the BIG WINNER for 1942, being the only film to get its own entry, while Rene Clair's I Married A Witch just misses making the cut despite appealing to a peculiar peccadillo/fetish I didn't know I had until I saw this movie. Veronica Lake plays an evil witch reformed by love, a plot that just pushes my buttons, which is why I am such a sucker for romantic comedies starring Barbara Stanwyck in urban tough cookie mode (most notably in Remember The Night, my favourite Christmas film). However, I Married A Witch just doesn't quite make it over the top. No offense to Veronica Lake, but Kim Novak will do witchy much, much more convincingly (not to mention sexier) a decade or two up the line in Bell, Book and Candle. Director Rene Clair also went on to much better things with the best screen version of Agatha Christie's 'Ten Little Indians', And Then There Were None (1945), with the great Barry Fitzgerald in one of his most memorable roles. Still, I would like to see I Married A Witch again, so I'll add it to my Want To See list.

On to the biggest disappointment of 1942, from my point of view: The Mummy's Tomb, inauspicious from two points of view. First, it was the vastly inferior follow-up to Universal's extremely entertaining reboot of their Mummy series, 1940's The Mummy's Hand (available in a couple of multiple feature DVDs, linked below), which we'll discuss in its very own entry at a later date. Second, it may have inaugurated my least favourite feature of the horror sequel: the killing of the survivors of the previous film at the start of the sequel.

Here's a simple and fair rule, horror movie makers: if the audience is good enough to invest their time and attention in your film's characters, and some of those characters survive the gauntlet to see the end of it, LET THEM GO. They've won their freedom and their lives, proven their worth according to the conventions of the genre: been rendered in the crucible of terror, stripped to their true characters and abilities by all the trauma you could think to throw at them, and they have survived. For you to bring them back in a sequel just long enough to kill them -- or worse yet, have some new character offhandedly mention that they met an untimely death between movies -- undoes the payoff of the previous film. Often the best we can hope for from a sequel is that it doesn't diminish the original (yes, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I'm looking at you), and this cheap disregard for the survivors of the last gauntlet does just that. Why should I care about your new bowling pins if any left standing at the end of the sequel can be expected to be just as callously knocked over in the interval between it and the next installment?

Like all rules, this one, obviously, is made to be broken -- but not on a whim, and not because the sequel's budget requires cheaper talent. If you must make a sequel at all, figure out some other way of doing it than retroactively ruining the film you're aping.