Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Continuing the Val Lewton Box Set (I’ve discovered I’m missing a disc, and so one will be out of order while I get it. I apologize to all completists)

Curse of the Cat People – 1944

     This sequel to the previously reviewed Cat People has one major shortcoming. No Cat People. Well, there’s a ghost of a Cat Person, but that’s it. If you can get past that, what you will find is not really a horror movie at all, but another character study, that of a father worried that he’ll repeat the mistakes he made in letting his first wife slip into insanity with his daughter. Also, a little girl who doesn’t have a lot of friends, and how she copes with that. If you think that this sounds boring, be assured that it is not. And at only 70 some odd minutes, it doesn’t lollygag around, every scene an important piece of the puzzle.

As good as this movie is (and it’s excellent), the commentary tells such a fascinating story that it’s almost better than the movie. This movie, it turns out, was both a slap in the face of the studio by the producer, and a self-confession by the same producer. By that I mean, he wrote it from experience, and is both the little girl, and the unsure father. This is really fascinating stuff. A man this talented, nearly strangled by his own internal demons.

Also revealed in the commentary is that this movie had 2 directors. It started out with Gunther von Fritsch, who had only one shortcoming. He was a perfectionist. So after shooting for 7 days, was three days behind. At the end of 20 days, he was seven days behind schedule. The studio had enough at that point, and told Lewton to replace him. He did, with Robert Wise (who just past away last September). That name you should be more familiar with, having directed such films as The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Haunting (as a tribute to Lewton), and a couple of films for which he won Oscars (The Sound of Music and West Side Story). He had been a sound editor at RKO, and had even edited Citizen Kane for Orson Wells. This was his first big break, and although the studio hated the movie (something about it NOT being a horror movie and not having any Cat People in it except a ghost of the original character), everyone recognized his talent. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Four beers out of five. (Can you tell I’m enjoying these flicks?)

I Walked With A Zombie – 1943

     This is, of course, a voodoo type zombie, not the flesh eating sort we are used to today. Believe it or not, before George Romero reinvented the genre, zombies were slave laborers created by evil plantation owners. There are a number of classic movies that have such zombies, such as Revolt of the Zombies (1936) and Bela Lugosi’s great White Zombie (1932). What that means is that there already was knowledge of how these movies worked and what to expect. Val turns it on its head by revealing late in the movie that a character you previously had thought was just sick was in fact dead and a zombie! A creepy idea today, but horrific to folks in 1943. This kind of shock, along with the big box office results for this cheaper “B” films are what allowed Lewton to get away with such things as the fact that Curse of the Cat People was not what the studio wanted at all.

Interestingly enough, Val shows that he has a fixation with superstition and death by this little piece of dialogue. Its delivered by Tom Conway (who had played Dr. Judd in Cat People the year before):
“You’ll find superstition a contagious thing. Some people let it get the better of them”

This is a theme that Val returns to time and again. Perhaps the clearest is in The Isle of the Dead (reviewed Monday), where Boris Karloff surcomes to superstition while sick from the plague.

Great stuff, this. And this too has a great commentary, this time by a pair of British chaps who put an interesting spin on things.

Four beers out of five.