Round Up 1942, Part Two: The Undying Monster

Delving further into 1942 a number of interesting titles emerge from the list of 28 horror, fantasy and science fiction films made that year. Little that I'm going to add to my Want To See list, but worth noting, if only in point form (click the title if you must know more and you'll wind up on the IMDB):

The Undying Monster  (Dir: John Brahm) This sounds like a rehash of The Hound Of The Baskervilles, complete with a Scotland Yard detective and his female Watson, set in Wales, with a werewolf instead of a spectral dog. Brahm went on to direct The Lodger and Hangover Square, about which we hear such good things, and all three films are now available on DVD in the Fox Horror Classics Collection, (you'll find a link below). Of the three, The Undying Monster is considered the least interesting, but the presence of an investigator is a big selling point in a horror film for me, this is an old dark house movie with a detective, and lovely Heather Thatcher, pictured blond and monocled somewhere in the vicinity of these words, can be my Watson any time. Yes, I would very much like to see this, and it makes The List. 

Beyond the Blue Horizon (Dir: Alfred Santell) Dorothy Lamour as a jungle girl. I've had a weakness for jungle girls since discovering Maureen O'Sullivan's Jane in the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films, and will probably be noting them as I find them, but this one isn't a List contender.

Fantastic Night (Dir: Marcel L'Herbier) This one does sound interesting. French film detailing the surreal attempts of a man (Fernand Gravey), who believes he is dreaming, to foil a plot against the girl of his dreams (Michelene Presle). At the time Garvey was spending the hours he wasn't making movies working with the French Resistance. List? I think so. Surprisingly, this is available on DVD, and I've linked to it on Amazon, below.

Tomorrow We Live  (Dir: Edgar Ulmer) Ulmer, best remembered for the Z-noir classic Detour (starring Ann Savage, pictured here seductively courting lung cancer) is very nearly as fascinating a Hollywood figure as Val Lewton, and anything with his name on it is of at least passing interest. Ulmer ran into trouble in Hollywood when he fell in love with the wife of a Universal Studio exec and married her, after which he couldn't get work except at bargain basement PRC, which he ultimately laboured mightily to spruce up after spending some time making Yiddish films on the East Coast. This particular PRC release has to do with a gangster with mesmeric powers (a la my beloved Doctor Mabuse?), called The Ghost because so many have attempted to whack him. As far as I know there's no decent book about Ulmer, though there exists a career-spanning interview with him conducted by Peter Bogdanovich that I would love to get my hands on, as well as an underwhelming documentary available on DVD from Kino that's about the best you can do at the moment.

The Devil's Envoys (Les Visiteurs Du Soir, Dir: Marcel Carne) Another film made during the Nazi occupation of France, this time by the director of the classic Children Of Paradise (1946), which I have also not seen. One of a pair of 15th Century minstrels employed by the devil to destroy desperate people has the misfortune to fall in love with his mark and must then figure out how to save her, and himself, from his employer... This description mostly just makes me want to see Fritz Lang's Destiny again. No List for you. 

The Night Has Eyes (Dir: Leslie Arliss) Two female school teachers take refuge in an old dark castle on the Yorkshire Moors on a dark and stormy night, but they'r really there to find out what happened to a friend of there's who disappeared while visiting the area the year before. Did shell-shocked James Mason have something to do with it, or was it one of the other creepy occupants? The film apparently has a bit of a cult following, which is enough to make me curious. Let's put it on The List, shall we? 

Sideral Cruises (Croisieres Sideral, Dir: Andre Zwoboda) The only sci-fi movie made during the Nazi occupation of France, this film reportedly isn't much more scientifically sophisticated than the first cinematic moonshot imagined by Georges Melies (apparently the space craft is a diving bell suspended beneath what looks like a hot air balloon), and is probably most interesting for the fact that its director got into trouble for his main plot hook. Girl astronaut goes into space for two weeks and comes back 25 years older; boy astronaut, who was unable to make the first trip, likewise blasts off in order to come back the same age as his lady love. This being a cockeyed take on Einstein's theory of relativity, the director was called on the carpet by the Nazi authorities to explain what he was doing publicising 'Jewish science'. Also contains a kind of Busby Berkely dance number? In case you're wondering, as I was, 'sideral' means 'relating to the stars', and in astrological terms 'unfavourably affected by the stars'. Sounds kind of diverting actually, but perhaps not quite enough for The List.

And from here on in you'll only hear about it when a film makes my Want To See List, not when it doesn't.

Well, that finally satisfies my obsessive compulsive need to know everything that was going on in fantastic film in 1942. Moving on (backward and forward in time) to 1941 and 1943 when next we meet...

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.

Cat People (1942)

So, 1942...

As I said last time, in 1942 there were, according to The Internet Movie Database: 20 feature films released that could be at least loosely categorised as having horror elements; 9 science-fiction; and 10 fantasy. Rene Clair's I Married A Witch appears on two of those lists, and Ghost of Frankenstein on all three, so there's quite a bit of overlap. 39 films in the 3 categories drops to 28 when you remove repetition.

Top of the list for 1942 is the small miracle that is Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur's Cat People, the horror/fantasy that changes everything. Commissioned by RKO to compete -- on a strict budget -- with the Universal Studio monster machine responsible for, among others, the Karloff/Whale Frankenstein and Lugo/Browning Dracula, Cat People is adult, tasteful, urban, psychological, and, perhaps most importantly, contemporary. Rather than villagers with flaming torches we get sex, the city and the long shadows of film noir: horror in a detective film setting.

The film being so up to the minute was due at least as much to the need to economise as it was to any overt desire on producer Lewton's part to create the contemporary horror/fantasy film. Val Lewton, who had been David O. Selznick's arbiter of taste, unacknowledged collaborator and doormat over at MGM for far too long, jumped at the chance to head up his own B-horror movie unit at upstart RKO. He would have almost complete freedom, working within a peculiar framework: they didn't much care how the films turned out as long as he could bring them in on a tiny budget, making use of existing assets such as standing sets and contract players, and they had to have luridly marketable titles from off the top of the head of some studio exec, like Cat People and I Walked With A Zombie.

Lewton, a literate perfectionist with something to prove, had learned how to pinch a penny at MGM, and knew that the best way to make use of a low budget was not to spread it thinly, but to spend it where it would do the most good, and on his best pictures for RKO this meant setting them in the present, which worked marvellously. But no sooner had he proven himself in the low-budget arena than he was given more money and began making costume dramas with Boris Karloff. I think that's sad, good as those Karloff films are. Personally, I find period dress and sets distancing in Hollywood studio soundstage pictures of the 20's to 50's, because they tend to be about as convincing as the ones used in the musicals being made just across the lot. This is particularly disastrous for fantasy film, where suspension of disbelief is so important: to be continually popped out of the action by how clean and pressed the villagers and their clothes are, how new and shiny their pitch forks, how unnatural their dialogue and stagey their delivery, and how that burning windmill -- picturesque though it may be -- is clearly standing in front of a painted sky. Well, unless the film is really something special, I tend to drift. Don't get me wrong: a good studio set can be a joy to behold, and it's nice to see James Whale giving tribute to Caligari in the visuals of his Universal horrors... but maybe it's too nice to generate much in the way of real frisson. The fact that Cat People takes place against the backdrop of the city makes it very immediate, so that it still seems utterly modern all these years later.

Cat People is essentially a Freudian werewolf tale: urban architect falls in love with repressed young woman who turns into a panther when sexually excited. The image that says it all is contained in the shot (pictured at top) of said architect and co-worker/rival for his affections being stalked in their office late at night: note the T-squares on the wall, like useless substitutes for crucifixes to ward off vampires. Also note that the film's VanHelsing, when he arrives, comes in the form of a sleazy psychiatrist rather than an expert in the occcult. Not that it saves him...

Though Cat People was directed by Jacques Tourneur, the Val Lewton seal of quality is writ large on every film that came out of his RKO horror unit, and the story of that unit and the people involved is one of the most fascinating to come out of the Hollywood studio system. Tourneur would remember his short time with these people as the most creative and rewarding of his career. Working on an impossibly tight schedule, Lewton devised a formula -- "A love story, three scenes of suggested horror and one of actual violence." -- and a very economical theory of horror: that the viewer's imagination was capable of conjuring more terrifying things than he could afford to show them, and the best way of allowing this to take place was through the strategic placement of lights to generate shadows. A true auteur despite never being credited as a director on any of them, Lewton damaged his health and took years off his life pulling all-nighters during the intense and abbreviated production schedules of his films, obsessively rewriting and polishing the scripts without credit, overseeing all aspects of production, and turning a motley assortment of B-teamers into crack professionals, only to have the studio promote them out from under him. Marc Robson and Robert Wise, who both became fine directors under Lewton's tutelage, only wound up working for him as punishment for having worked closely with Orson Welles as editors on Citizen Kane and during the self-destructive genius's spectacular flameout while making The Magnificent Ambersons!

How we wind up with a bio-pic of Ed Wood, but not one on Lewton's horror unit is a mystery to me. Happily, there are a couple of books (Bansak's Fearing The Dark: The Val Lewton Career is the one currently in print) and a couple of documentaries on the subject, and all of the films are available in one of the best DVD box sets ever released. It's a fascinating body of work, complete in one place, and I cannot recommend it more highly.

That's it: my first real blog entry. Next up we find out what else was shaking in 1942, and then it's onward to '43 and backward to '41!

Mission Statement: Forward and Backward

I'm beginning this blog because I have long intended to do a thorough survey of 'fantastic film' (that is to say, horror, science-fiction and fantasy movies) from around the world and in all periods. I'm a fan, and I seem to have gone through all the usual suspects: now it's time to find out what else is out there. What I'd really like to do is get a handle on ALL film, but I figure this is a good, somewhat less overwhelming place to start.

And where is that, you may ask? Well, in 1942. Why 1942? Because that's the year Val Lewton made Cat People (that's star Simone Simon on the phone in a still from the film), which, as far as I'm concerned, is as big a milestone for fantasy film as the arrival of the talky was for movies in general. There were, of course, horror, sci-fi and fantasy films prior to 1942 -- great ones -- and I have no intention of ignoring them, but a year by year survey of these genres beginning at the start of celluloid would take quite a long time to build up much momentum.

So, what I propose to do is work both forward and back from Cat People in 1942, meaning that after I've dealt with 1942 I will move on to 1943 and 1941, then 1944 and 1940, 1945 and 1939, 1946 and 1938, etc., until I run out of descending history and am left only with ascending, which should come as something of a relief. For just consider these numbers:

According to The Internet Movie Database, in 1942 there were: 20 films released that could be at least loosely categorised as having horror elements; 9 sci-fi films; and 10 fantasy. Keep in mind that Rene Clair's I Married A Witch appears on two of those lists, and Ghost of Frankenstein on all three, so there's quite a bit of overlap.

By contrast, in 2009 alone there were 448 horror; 152 sci-fi; and 137 fantasy. Again, lots of overlap, I am sure, but still...

So, what will I be doing here? Basically reading about movies and listing anything that strikes my extremely biased fancy. It's to be the diary of my researches, comprised largely of notes to myself as to what I've seen that I liked, and what I've read about that I would dearly love to see. I will also take every opportunity for endless digressions, particularly when a tangent will allow me to talk about something that interests me, but which doesn't neatly fit within the confines of the stated purpose of the blog.

You may as well know a couple of things right now. First, I'm not a huge fan of Universal's classic horrors (well, with a few exceptions -- I like Horror Island, generally thought of as the least of the Universal horror offerings, enormously). Second, I find the fact that 'torture porn' has made it into our pop cultural lexicon extremely worrisome. Third, I consider Un Chien Andalou 'fantastic film', and it's going to be discussed here, in due course, right alongside Horror Island, Friday The 13th and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was scarred for life by Bad Ronald, which I won't be discussing because, frankly, you had to be there, but which might give you an idea of how old I am.
I love Suspiria, Valerie's Week Of Wonders, Wings Of Desire, Nosferatu (silent and remake), The Legend Of Hillbilly John, and Walt Disney's Child Of Glass, among many, many others. (If you want to a bit more evidence as to whether or not it's worth your while to hang around, check my Top 10 in the major genres by clicking here.)

It's movies like these last mentioned -- little genre pictures that just try harder -- that I am in search of.

So here's a message in a bottle: if anyone ever finds this, please let me know if I've overlooked anything of peculiar interest. Or even just peculiar...

Well, then. Let's begin. Turn the dial to 1942...