Round Up 1946, Part Two: Strangler Of The Swamp

In the wake of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, Frank Wysbar left Nazi Germany with his 'non-Aryan' wife Eva. Changing the spelling of his name to Wisbar, he would find success in American television production in the 50s, but prior to that he did his time in the PRC trenches. His Strangler Of The Swamp has been classed, with the works of fellow PRC plugger Edgar Ulmer, as a model of the kind of rabbit a very good director can pull out of even the shabbiest of filmic hats. It is a penuriously cheap remake of his last film completed in Germany prior to emigrating, Faehrmann Maria (aka Ferryboat Woman Maria and Death and the Maiden), which the Aurum Horror Film Encyclopedia compares favourably to Murnau's Nosferatu and Dreyer's Vampyr, and calls his greatest achievement. Like Val Lewton, Wisbar knew better than to try to stretch a budget any further than it could comfortably reach, and the entirety of Strangler was shot on one studio set: a stretch of river, the ferry landing, spectral trees, and lots and lots of dry ice fog for the characters to appear out of and disappear into. Rosemary LaPlance takes over as ferryman when her grandfather dies, and encounters the specter of an even earlier ferryman who, hanged for a murder he didn't commit, has come back from the dead to return the favour to the descendants of his accusers, one of whom Rosemary is unfortunate enough to fall in love with. A modest, atmospheric chamber piece, that succeeds solely on the verve of its director, this is exactly the kind of little-movie-that-can that I love to get wind of. And it's actually available on DVD. Nice.

Round Up 1946, Part One: Cocteau's Beauty And The Beast

According to the Internet Movie Database, of the 1,209 films made in 1946, 36 contain elements of horror, science fiction or fantasy. They are:

A Matter of Life and Death
Ang iyong ina
Angel on My Shoulder
Bedlam  
Devil Bat's Daughter
Devil Monster
El ahijado de la muerte
El jinete fantasma
El moderno Barba Azul
El sexo fuerte
El superhombre
Fight That Ghost
Floarea reginei
Hay muertos que no hacen ruido
House of Horrors
It's a Wonderful Life  
Kamennyy tsvetok
La belle et la bête
La tentation de Barbizon
Les portes de la nuit
Reka caruje
She-Wolf of London
Strangler of the Swamp
Sylvie et le fantôme
The Bandit of Sherwood Forest
The Beast with Five Fingers
The Brute Man
The Catman of Paris
The Cockeyed Miracle
The Crimson Ghost
The Curse of the Wraydons
The Face of Marble
The Flying Serpent
The Spider Woman Strikes Back
The Time of Their Lives
Valley of the Zombies

Not to downplay the value of Capra's inverted version of Dickens' Christmas Carol, It's A Wonderful Life, the milestone fantasy film of 1946 is Jean Cocteau's Beauty And The Beast. Stately, beautiful, and, though based on a fairytale, not pandering to children, it is the kind of film that could only have been made by a bisexual ex-surrealist who thought of himself as a poet, and, whether or not it entirely succeeds, attempts to be a work of art in an arena that, at that time, was playing host to an awful lot of mad scientists.

It represents a return to the kind of serious, pure fantasy film making that was the province of the Germans prior to Hitler having decided such stuff was 'degenerate' and inflicted his own rigid political aesthetic 'ethic' (typified by the music of Wagner, the architecture of Speer, the films of Riefensthal, and the bizarre portrait pictured at left) on his country's movie industry. Beauty And The Beast is also the expression of a single individual's uncompromised vision, rather than the too-many-cooks product of a compartmentalised studio system, making it more akin to a painting or a novel than the latest Universal monster movie. A true auteur film, is it going too far to suggest that it probably couldn't have existed in the world we would have had if the nazis had won the war?