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.

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 Leopard Man (1943)

Presumably wishing to cash in on the unexpected success of his Cat People, RKO handed Val Lewton  another feline title and told him to do it again. Leopard... Man. Now, the title Cat People isn't so bad, maybe even has a certain je ne sais quoi; you can do something with Cat People, which is probably why Lewton elected to do it first of the list of titles they gave him when they hired him. The best of a bad lot. I Walked With A Zombie? Have the lead crack wise about the title's tabloid style, acknowledge its awfulness in the first line of dialogue in the film and put it behind you. But Leopard Man? Clearly an attempt to marry the success of Cat People to Universal's Wolf Man of the previous year, how does one get over a stumbling block of this magnitude?

Well, Lewton and three time co-conspirator Jacques Tourneur manage it, but though it contains one of the very best suspense sequences in the Lewton canon, the whole is considerably less memorable than some of its parts (to mangle a phrase). I'm often working from memory here, which is why you should always double check anything you read on the internet, particularly in a blog. So I admit that it's been a while since I saw The Leopard Man, but it's unusual for me not to remember anything about the characters in a film. The plot is also the weakest in the bunch thus far: jungle cat escaped from zoo becomes convenient scapegoat for sex-killer (no, there's no mention of rape, but the victims, as the poster screams, are all women, which means the killer has a predilection). It's an idea lifted wholesale from Cat People, in which Simone Simon releases a panther from its cage before finally giving way to her own animal nature.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect is one I had forgotten: Lewton sets it against the backdrop of Mexico's Day Of The Dead, the sad upshot of which is that, for the second picture in a row, though we are still firmly located in the present, we are out of the city. Cat People and The Seventh Victim profited immeasurably from their urban Amercan settings; I Walked With A Zombie left the city for a tropical island, but the setting was interesting and necessary to the voodoo plot. Leopard Man takes place in Mexico, but aside from the added colour provided by the death obsessed festivities, there's no very good reason for it to do so, and that dash of flavour is not enough to make up for the loss of the city. On the other hand, we do get the classic scene in which a little girl, suspected of malingering by her mother, is sent on an errand after sundown. Not believed when she pounds on the locked door of her home and shrieks that she is being chased -- and not allowed in, to teach her a lesson -- her mother is finally convinced when the girl's blood leaks in under the door. Oh, sorry: SPOILER ALERT.

Ultimately, however, this one is most interesting in context as part of Lewton's total canon, though on that count alone it is one of the most interesting films of 1943.

I Walked With A Zombie (1943)

 

The Hollywood B movie was originally intended, literally, as filler. Filler (particularly in the context of, say, pet food) is intended to give the illusion of 'more' -- and therefore better value for money -- without actually providing added nutrition. Likewise, the B programmer was intended to give Depression era movie goers a longer evening at the movies without really giving them two movies for the price of their ticket. Thus, the movie substitute was born: the B as questionable bonus for paying to see the A, produced on a penurious budget and shooting schedule, with a truncated running time that made it the missing link between the short subject and the feature. These films weren't actually meant to be good; they certainly weren't meant to be better than the headliner, just the warm up for the real show. Like the homely friend of a pretty girl, the B made the A look even better by comparison. Give the audience a good B and they might start to expect it. 

They didn't reckon on Val Lewton's inability to waste an opportunity.

When RKO gave Lewton an essentially free hand, artistically, to produce cheap horror films in competition with Universal, I wonder if he knew he was eventually going to have to make one called I Walked With A Zombie. If he did, he might very well have thought twice about leaving his dead-end position as right hand man to prestigious David O. Selznick at MGM. After all, Lewton considered himself a man of taste, and O. Selznick productions might have tended a bit toward the antiseptic and dull, but they were always classy. Still, Lewton was all about rising to the challenge, and I firmly believe that he would never have created films of anywhere near as much interest if it weren't for the adversity he had to face. In fact, given his rather genteel tastefulness, I suspect his films would have been quite as slick and unengaging as most Selznick product. 

For me, the most fascinating genre stuff often comes from authors and film makers who do not consider themselves primarily 'of the genre'. Comics writer Warren Ellis freely admits to disliking superheroes, yet his Planetary series mined superhero comics for archetypes and produced something truly special. My absolute favourite Cthulhu Mythos story -- superior, in my opinion, to the originals penned by H.P. Lovecraft -- is The Return Of The Lloigor (anthologised in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos), written by Colin Wilson (still best known for his first and best received book, The Outsider) on a dare from August Derleth, who took exception to his criticism of pulp fictioneer Lovecraft and his followers. Wilson, champion of existential optimism, considered Lovecraft to have been a depressive and essentially anti-life, but acknowledged a certain visionary power in his work; that of his emulators, on the other hand, he considered largely worthless. He didn't connect with the material at all, but took up the challenge anyway, and in order to find his way in he had to work to discover some aspect of it that did appeal to him and that he could work with. In doing so he essentially subverted elements of Lovecraft to the concerns of his own body of work, applying the personal stamp that is most often the difference in genre fiction between rank imitation and something of genuine interest. 

(This was such a successful medium for discussing what might seem to the uninitiated like dry philosophical ideas that Wilson did it again the same year in his marvellous The Space Vampires, which was later made into an over-the top space zombie disaster movie (in both senses of the term) called Lifeforce (1985) by Tobe Hooper and Dan O'Bannon. Complete with a chesty lady vampire who walks full-frontally naked through all of her scenes, it's a prime example of wretched excess that for some reason I consider one of my best ever DVD purchases and will be discussing in due time.)

Where the hell was I? Oh yes. So, in 1943 Val Lewton found himself saddled with a title ripped from the headlines of a supermarket tabloid, but if RKO thought they could beat his anti-genre tendencies out of him this way, they were mistaken. As ever with him, it was modern psychology rather than the supernatural that provided an entry point into the material, and he zeroed in on the power of suggestion/superstition over the victims of hex 'magic'. The result is a West Indies island recasting of Jane Eyre in a voodoo setting, complete with the now standard gothic romance set-up of the pretty private nurse who comes to the isolated mansion to care for the disabled (in this case apparently catatonic but prone to night time sleepwalking) wife of the brooding and handsome husband. Jacques Tourneur, having done such a nice job on Cat People, is again under strict orders to restrain the hysteria of the accursed title, which they get out of the way in the opening lines of Frances Dee's voice-over. To paraphrase: "I walked with a zombie. Sounds idiotic, I know, but let me explain..." The theatricality inherent in the very concept of zombies is further diluted by the strategy Lewton devised for working with the stock company of contract players he had at his disposal, which was to force them to deliver their lines in muted conversational tones, dialing it down, down, down, rather than playing, Bela Lugosi style, to the cheap seats. Always, always striving against the sensationalism RKO was counting on to put Frankenstein fans in seats. 

There isn't much more to say that hasn't already been said repeatedly elsewhere, except that I Walked With A Zombie becomes even more interesting in the context of Lewton's small ouevre of 'little movies that could'. It is primarily remarkable in that it shouldn't be possible for it to have come out of that system at that time, just as it could never have come out of any other system at any other time or combination of circumstances. In its own steadfastly low-key way, it is as miraculous a feat of B film making as Richard Fleischer's wonderful The Narrow Margin (1952), Edgar Ulmer's poverty row masterpiece Detour (1946), or the Ranown Productions sequence of Randolph Scott adult B-westerns (1956-1960) directed by Budd Boetticher. 

All of these are stunning proofs that less money -- and thereby less studio interference -- is often good for the movies, if not necessarily in the short run then certainly in the long, as indy film makers have since gone on to demonstrate time and time again. Fewer cooks mean a single personality has more ability to assert control and imprint itself. Hitchcock neatly achieved his obsessive need for control by undershooting, getting exactly the footage he needed and no more, thus depriving the studio of anything they could cut or add or otherwise meddle with, and managed to impress so identifiable a personal style on the product of an assembly line system that he came to be recognised by the new wave of young French critcs as an auteur -- literally the author of his films, a theoretical impossibility in a studio film, and particularly in our current age of 'market research', test screenings and scripts typed by an infinite number of monkeys to be shot largely in front of a blue screen by Michael Bay. 

Val Lewton did it by working in a dim corner of the factory where they didn't care what was being made, just what it would be called.

The Seventh Victim (1943)

1943 was a very good year for horror, with three true classics issuing from the Val Lewton B-Horror unit at RKO. Of the three, my favourite is The Seventh Victim, directed by former editor Marc Robson after his banishment to the B basement for having worked closely with Orson Welles' on the cutting of The Magnificent Ambersons. As in the previous year's Cat People, the setting is contemporary, dealing with a naive young Kim Hunter's search for her missing older sister (played by a haunted looking Jean Brooks), who has become involved with a Manhattan devil cult. This time out the supernatural is entirely absent, the Satanic cult in question comprised entirely of jaded urban sophisticates in search of tawdry thrills, and it is from them alone that the film's threat emanates: no demons ever appear. Breaking ranks with this pathetic group carries with it a sentence of death, and big sister has made the decision to leave. 

Existential despair hangs over every scene. It's clear that Brooks -- like the other members -- joined the cult in a desperate attempt to bring some spark to her empty existence, only to find it and the people involved every bit as pathetic as her daily grind: more so, in fact. Another woman living in her building has just been given a death sentence herself (her's is medical), and makes the hopeless decision to go out into the nightlife of the city, dance, drink, and take any lover she can find while there is life left to spend. Tom Conway reprises his role as psychiatrist Dr. Judd from Cat People, and anyone who recognises the character knows that, even if he is necessarily safe from harm for the duration of what is obviously intended to be a prequel to the earlier film, he too is already dead in the future (where he will be murdered by Simone Simon). Of course, as the economist Maynard Keynes once quipped, in the long run, we're all dead -- even pretty young Kim Hunter, who gets her first taste of a cold and uncertain world when her school tuition simply stops coming, the first clue that something has gone wrong with the sister who raised her after the untimely death of their parents.

When you get right down to it, The Seventh Victim is more crime noir than horror movie, but it really isn't that, either. More than anything else it is perhaps the best indication we have that Val Lewton may not have been entirely kidding when he told a horrified exhibitor that the main message of his pictures was, "Death is good." But don't let all this doom and gloom put you off: it's also very entertaining, and my pick for the best fantastic film of '43.

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...