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.

Round Up 1941, Part Two

Also in 1941 we have William Dieterle's classic The Devil and Daniel Webster (aka All That Money Can Buy). I caught a bit out of the middle of it on television within the last five years or so and was struck by its unusual, bleached cinematography and odd atmosphere -- at least in the scene I saw which, granted, was the initial 'deal with the devil' sequence, which I seem to recall took place out of doors and may very well stand apart from the rest of the picture. Legal genius Daniel Webster (Edward Arnold) takes the Devil (Walter Huston) to court to win back the soul of a New England farmer who got the prosperity he contracted for but lost his family in the bargain. Criterion have seen fit to include this one in their library. This one makes the list.

The Ghost Train (Dir: Walter Forde) They had me at 'haunted train station'. Unbelievably, this is the sixth filmed version of the 1923 British play by Arnold Ridley, wherein a group of passengers stranded over night at an out of the way station are frightened by the station master's dire warnings that they should find someplace else to be before the titular engine arrives, as all who see it die. I don't think it really ruins anything to add that the conclusion is less spectral than it is Mrs. Radcliffe (or, for you youngsters, Scooby Doo). All the reviews go out of their way to caution that this version was recast as a vehicle for hyperactive music hall moron Arthur Askey, though they also agree that this may have been his best film. I have to admit that old Arthur holds a certain historical interest, but I'm not sure that of the seven versions extant at that time, this is the one I would choose. Unless, of course, it was available in its entirety on Youtube, which it is: *

 

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (Dir: Alexander Hall) Well, what an utterly useless title for a fantasy film. I mean, it communicates nothing at all, does it? I don't like Heaven Can Wait (the title under which it was remade with Warren Beatty) much better, but at least it's descriptive. Prize fighter Robert Montgomery (I'll believe that when I see it) has a near death experience in a plane crash, which an inexperienced angel misinterprets as a full-death experience, resulting in his winding up in Heaven 50 years early. It's a bureaucratic bungle on a cosmic scale, and in order to make up for it the powers that be send him back to earth in the body of just-dead business mogul, murderer and all-around stinker Claude Rains, to the consternation of the man's wife and her lover, who just got finished killing him in his bath. At some point a love interest in the form of Evelyn Keyes comes into the picture. Apparently all of this is much better than it sounds, as its scriptwriters won Oscars, and AMG's Hal Erickson calls it 'one of the most consistently clever romantic comedies of the 1940s'. I'm in.

 

Topper Returns (Dir: Roy Del Ruth) Roland Young sees dead people again in the third of the popular Topper films, but this time he does so in an old dark house, and the ghost in question wants him to discover who murdered her. I've never seen a Topper movie, and it's high time I did.

And that's it for 1941.

* Update: Having had a look at The Ghost Train on Youtube I can now report that there is a very fine print of the film available that is plagued with one unfortunate blemish on nearly every frame: Arthur Askey. Imagine Harpo Marx with a voice, but absent any comedic ability, and up in your grill for the entirety of a cold and dreary nine hour stop-over in an isolated train station. From his very first appearance, when he stops the train in order to retrieve his lost derby, you can't help but sympathise with the grumpy cricket champ who wants to put the little idiot's lights out. The cinematography, station set and supporting cast are all good, including a youthful version of the old man who played Uncle Tom in the excellent Rumpole television series starring Leo McKern. And, again, Askey is worth seeing if only as a specimen (bottle) of what the British music halls once had to offer.

Round Up 1941, Part One

According to the Internet Movie Database, of the 974 films made in 1941, 24 fall under the headings of horror, science fiction or fantasy. They are:

Adventures of Captain Marvel 
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 
Here Comes Mr. Jordan 
Hold That Ghost 
Horror Island 
Invisible Ghost 
King of the Zombies 
La corona di ferro 
Man Made Monster 
Mr. Bug Goes to Town 
Old Mother Riley's Ghosts 
Princess Cinderella 
Slaying Dragon by Supernatural Power 
Smilin' Through 
Spooks Run Wild 
Sweetheart of the Campus 
The Black Cat 
The Body Disappears 
The Devil and Daniel Webster 
The Devil Commands 
The Ghost Train 
The Monster and the Girl 
The Wolf Man   
Topper Returns   

Universal's The Wolf Man interests me less than it probably should, but if you know anything at all about classic horror films, you don't need my opinion on it anyway. What we're in search of here is the odd, obscure, and overlooked -- and yet, I find I can't go there until I find out something about the Spencer Tracy Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde (Dir: Victor Fleming).

I've never seen any of the early Jekyll and Hyde films, largely because, until fairly recently, I didn't like the concept. It just sounded like another mad scientist to me. What changed?

Well, I was unexpectedly taken with Neil Jordan's unfairly maligned Mary Reilly, starring Julia Roberts as a particularly delicate member of Dr. Jekyll's household cleaning staff. The first time I saw it I disliked it, but as sometimes happens to me, it stuck in my memory, and when I went back to it I discovered a new favourite. It's based on a novel by one Valerie Martin, which its fans say was desecrated by the film, but I haven't read it yet and therefore cannot comment.

Then I saw Walerian Borowczyk's Docteur Jekyll Et Les Femmes, aka Bloodlust, aka seven other titles, which made an even bigger impression upon me with its hallucinatory, nightmare sexuality (its unavailability on DVD is a terrible oversight that I hope some outfit like Severin will correct at some point in the near future). So I read the Robert Louis Stevenson original, and let's just say that I'm a convert. It's astonishingly fine, vivid, powerful stuff. Consider the following excerpt:

I was coming home from some place at the end of the world, about three o'clock of a black winter morning, and my way lay through a part of town where there was literally nothing to be seen but lamps. Street after street and all the folks asleep -- street after street, all lighted up as if for a procession and all as empty as a church -- till at last I got into that state of mind when a man listens and listens and begins to long for the sight of a policeman. All at once, I saw two figures: one a little man who was stumping along eastward at a good walk, and the other a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running as hard as she was able down a cross street. Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man trampled calmly over the child's body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn't like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut. I gave a few hallos, took to my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought him back to where there was already quite a group about the screaming child. He was perfectly cool and made no resistance, but gave me one look, so ugly that it brought out the sweat on me like running. The people who had turned out were the girl's own family; and pretty soon, the doctor, for whom she had been sent put in his appearance. Well, the child was not much the worse, more frightened, according to the Sawbones; and there you might have supposed would be an end to it. But there was one curious circumstance. I had taken a loathing to my gentleman at first sight. So had the child's family, which was only natural. But the doctor's case was what struck me. He was the usual cut and dry apothecary, of no particular age and colour, with a strong Edinburgh accent and about as emotional as a bagpipe. Well, sir, he was like the rest of us; every time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that Sawbones turn sick and white with desire to kill him.

Now that I read it again I see that the little girl was not as horribly injured as for some reason I misremembered her being, but the callousness of Hyde -- he is so indifferent to suffering that he doesn't even notice her until the mob stops him -- frightens me on a level to which only Dostoevsky, David Lynch and (oddly enough) G.K. Chesterton have ever penetrated. And when the doctor has that atavistic reaction to the man -- a revulsion as violent and powerful as if he beheld a poisonous spider or reptile -- and his professional instinct suggests that it would greatly benefit the human condition if he were to simply cut Hyde out of it, well...

It's the human being without empathy, but fully equipped with all the other usual drives and desires, that frightens me more than just about anything else. They're like sharks with pants on. And that's why Jekyll and Hyde, now that I think I understand where Stevenson was coming from, interests me very much indeed. Borowczyk understood it; Neil Jordan's Mary Reilly appears to have been inspired by Stevenson's trampled innocent; the question becomes, did Victor Fleming connect with the material, or is the Spencer Tracy Jekyll and Hyde just another day at the studio?

Well, the story goes that Tracy was forced into the role against his will, and the All Movie Guide review suggests that his Hyde looks more drunk than diabolical (check the Nick Nolte style mugshot on the left to see if you agree). On the other hand, it appears to be the consensus that the previous, pre-code version starring Fredric March is very good indeed, and it comes on a double feature DVD with the Tracy. So that's appealing.

Horror Island (1941)

This movie is comfort food to me, and I'm so attached to it I probably can't see it objectively. It appears to be the consensus that it represents the low point in Universal horror of the '40's, but it's my hands down favourite. I first saw it as a child, when my father set the VCR to catch it on the late, late show, and I watched that tape repeatedly, until it either wore out or somehow got recorded over. It was many years before I was able see it again, and I purchased two gray market prints on DVD-R from sellers on Ebay before Universal finally saw fit to include it in their Universal Horror: Classic Movie Archive, which as far as I'm concerned is worth the price of admission on this count alone. However, I shouldn't be a bit surprised if your mileage were to vary.

Horror Island is your basic old dark house movie, except this time it's an old dark castle on an island. Dick Foran (invariably summed up as affable by anyone who writes about him) is dodging creditors and hiding out on his sure-to-be-repossessed boat with his sidekick Fuzzy Knight, trying to cure their financial woes with yet another in a long line of failed get-rich-quick start-ups. Fuzzy suggests that maybe it's time they started thinking about getting real real jobs.

"Do you want to break a perfect record?" Foran replies. "Why, two thirds of my graduating class at Harvard have been out of work since graduation!"

"Can I get a job?" asks Knight. "I never went to university."

Happily, peg-legged sailor Leo Carillo shows up with a map to pirate treasure supposedly buried on an island Foran recently inherited. Foran doesn't consider himself chump enough to take the treasure seriously, but it occurs to him that the three of them might offer guided tour packages wherein they will take suckers to the island on his boat, put them up in his 'haunted castle' for a night of pre-arranged thrills (including plastic skulls in the bed and sinister laughing piped over a loud speaker), and let them occupy themselves the next day in searching for pirate gold. A fender bender with the lovely but mildly acerbic Peggy Moran and a lack of auto insurance compel him to offer her a free trip to the island and double or nothing on the cost of the repairs if she doesn't have the most thrilling time of her life. An appealing cast of character actors sign up for the cruise and they make it out of harbour just ahead of a process server (they think), but one of the guests is likely to be the cloaked 'Phantom' who's been lurking around the docks...

Dick Foran and Peggy Moran make a wonderful B-movie pairing. The previous year the two of them had made companion piece The Mummy's Hand for Universal, and apart from the presence of the mummy himself it's essentially the same winning formula: feckless but affable operator hero, pretty but cynical heroine, light banter, even lighter peril, utterly charming. I wish they had preserved this teaming for a whole series of identical programmers, perhaps direct sequels to Horror Island, and called them the  'Haunted Harbor' films, to steal back a great title from a serial that didn't deserve it. Sort of a horror analogue to Roy Roger and Dale Evans, or a low rent William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Is Horror Island scary? Not even a little. What it is is cosy, comfortable -- comforting, in fact -- and just, well, nice, which may not sound like a recommendation for a horror film, but you know what? It is. I picture comic book auteur Richard Sala watching Horror Island at about the age I was when first saw it and finding the nucleus of his entire career there. If you don't know Sala, you should: I'd been aware of his unmistakable style since his animated Invisible Hands shorts ran on MTV's Liquid Television in the 80's. Unfortunately, though as a long time comic collector I was used to seeing his work around, it took me a further few decades to realise that I was missing out on one of the great pleasures in life by not seeking out everything he'd ever done. Imagine a fetishistic, straight-faced ironic, hermetically sealed dreamworld of narrow, twisting alleyways and leaning buildings, populated exclusively by monsters, mad scientists, man-apes, lurking shadowy figures, secret agents, black gloved killers, turbaned psychic mediums, beautiful body-stockinged cat burglars, gingerbread house witches, wolves, wolf-men, trap doors, secret passages, murder victims, boy reporters and, most importantly, girl detectives, all drawn in a marvelous kind of cartoon Kafka Central European woodcut style, with bodies facing forward but heads in profile as in ancient Egyptian art.
This extreme stylisation of his earlier work (as seen on the cover of Hypnotic Tales, above) has relaxed recently (as in the absolutely wonderful Peculia, on the left), presumably because simplifying his approach allows him to create at a greater rate and spend more time in his wonderful world, exactly the way the move away from the aforementioned Egyptian style pictograms expedited the process of writing! It's all so obviously the product of quirky obsession that it almost amounts to a species of personal pornography (although there's no actual sex beyond the occasional bared breast), and as such takes some getting used to. It took me far too long to embrace it, but once you do it becomes as indispensably delightful as that of Edward Gorey, Gahan Wilson or Henry Darger.

In conclusion, I love Horror Island. Love it.  It's the absolute nicest of safe horror films, which sounds useless, I know, but it has its place. When I'm near the end and in need of some warm nostalgia to distract me from my fate, put a TV at the end of my death bed and let the warm, knowing, yet innocent sexiness of Peggy Moran, and the benign pantomime spookiness of Horror Island usher me into oblivion.

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!