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Dead Men Walk (1943)

Oct 091943

Good Dr. Lloyd Clayton recently killed his evil brother Elwyn (George Zucco in duel roles), but Zolarr (Dwight Frye) digs up his old master’s body, and Elwyn rises as a vampire. He sets his sights on Gayle (Mary Carlisle), their niece. It’s up to Lloyd and Gayle’s fiancé to save her, a task that becomes more difficult as the town’s people come to believe that the living brother is the killer.

It’s not uncommon in the independent film world to claim that money doesn’t matter, only ingenuity. Well, sometimes it’s money. Dead Men Walk is a poverty row cheapie that looks like it was shot in three days, and probably was. The sets are few and simple, and obviously missing their fourth wall since the camera rarely moves. I’d be very surprised if there was paid rehearsal time; the actors show no sign of getting into character or reciting their lines with anything close to comfort. The entire town consists of no more than a dozen people, and only two of them are women. I’d hate to live there. Maybe the picture could have been saved in editing, but it looks like it was cut in less time than it was shot in. As an after thought, music occasionally swells in and vanishes again, with no connection to what is happening on screen, which makes me wonder if there was a sound editor at all.

George Zucco was an easily identifiable and always enjoyable character actor in the ’30s and ’40s, but was not strong enough to carry a picture. His kindly doctor is too drab to be of any interest, and his vampire brother is far from horrific. Zucco isn’t given much help. Only Dwight Frye (most famous as Renfield in Dracula) is memorable, and he just performs a poor version of the many psychos he’d played before.

There are no surprises in the script. It could have been cobbled together from previous vampire movies. Nothing’s new. And since there was no money for stunt men, it would have been smart to leave out the fight scene. Zucco just stands there holding a chair in the air as Frye whacks at it with a knife.

Dead Men Walk is a sad little film. There are plenty of more entertaining silver screen vampire flicks, so there is no reason to waste time with this one.

George Zucco appeared in multiple Universal monster movies, including The Mummy’s Hand (1940), The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), and House of Frankenstein (1944) as well as the mystery After the Thin Man (1936), the old dark house film The Cat and the Canary (1939), and the ghost comedy Topper Returns (1941).

Dwight Frye also has a long resume with Universal, playing small roles in Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Vampire Bat (1933), The Invisible Man (1933), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Son of Frankenstein (1939), The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), as well as the swashbuckler The Son of Monte Cristo (1940) and the original version of The Maltese Falcon (1931).

Poverty Row, Reviews, Vampires Tagged with: One Reel

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)

Oct 061943

Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), the Wolf Man, is freed from his tomb by grave robbers. His search for a way to die takes him to the remains of the Frankenstein manor and the still-living Monster.

The Frankenstein franchise had died a well-deserved death, having less than nothing of interest left (but they wouldn’t let it lie). Luckily, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man is more of a sequel to The Wolf Man and there was still fun to be had there. This isn’t deep stuff; it’s monster mash fun, and while this is the worst version of The Monster yet, the Wolf Man, still my favorite version of a werewolf, looks great. In a film that’s a big drop from the emotional The Wolf Man, Lon Chaney Jr. manages to impart his cursed man with a good deal of pathos. I cared about Talbot and could understand his suffering. I understood a whole lot less on why his immediate move on finding a monster frozen in ice is to free it, but what else is a guy to do in a monster mash movie?

Patric Knowles does a better mad scientist than the one in the Ghost of Frankenstein, though it’s hard to figure why this scientist caught the monster-making bug. For a start, he isn’t even a scientist. He’s a doctor. Nor can I find any good reason for him to be hunting Talbot all over Europe instead of informing some German police about a killer. But it is such a short film that it’s over before the silliness becomes too obvious.

While mainly tied to The Wolf Man, this was also a sequel to Ghost of Frankenstein, so The Monster now has Ygor’s brain and is blind. Test audiences couldn’t accept the voice, so before the picture was given wide release, all of The Monster’s dialog was cut along with any reference to his blindness. However, nothing was re-filmed, so The Monster walks with a strange gait, his hands stretched before him (so that he wouldn’t knock into things). This is the origin of The Monster’s strange walk which has become such a comic cliché.

The other films in the series are Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Son of Frankenstein (1939), Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), and House of Frankenstein (1944), and House of Dracula (1945).

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Classic Horror, Mad Scientists, Mad Scientists, Reviews, Werewolves Tagged with: Three Reels

Titanic (1943)

Oct 041943

The board members of White Star, led by Bruce Ismay (E.F. Fürbinger), use the fragile financial condition of the company brought about by the expense of building The Titanic, as an opportunity to buy up stock. If the ship’s maiden voyage can break speed records, the stock price will rise and they’ll make a fortune. Captain Smith (Otto Wernicke), securely in Ismay’s pocket, ignores the danger of high speed in icy waters, with well-known tragic results. Only German officer Petersen (Hans Nielsen) opposes the actions that will cause the sinking of The Titanic. At least he finds an ex-girlfriend (Sybille Schmitz) on the ship, so he has someone to help him when things go horribly wrong.

Before Leo and Kate turned the deaths of over a thousand people into a romance, the German film industry used it to demonstrate the decadence of British capitalists. It’s hard to argue against their broader point, but they were playing fast and loose with the facts. But hey, it’s safe to say that the plot of this film wasn’t the biggest lie to come out of NAZI Germany, and the greed of wealthy industrialists is easier to believe than Leo’s yell of “I’m king of the world.”

As a disaster flick, divorced from its propaganda aim, it’s not too bad. There are plenty of slimy characters whose unpleasant deaths will make you smile. There’s a reasonable amount of tension, and plenty of the twisted relationships that would mark the Irwin Allen films of the ’70s. The special effects are adequate, although they don’t build excitement. The best shots of the ship were reused (without permission) in 1958’s A Night to Remember. The only real dramatic flaws are the dropping of the youthful romantic subplot two-thirds of the way through the movie, and the lack of a likable primary character. The second is the real problem. In a disaster film, half the fun is watching people drown, burn, or fall from great heights, but the rest comes from struggling with someone you want to live. There’s no such person here. All the main characters are amoral scum-buckets who are cowardly to boot, except for Petersen, who can charitably be described as a dick. He whines, he cajoles, he demands, he insults a kindly woman, and in the middle of the disaster, takes time out to say, “I told you so” to everyone he can find. Perhaps I missed a socio-history lecture, but I find it hard to believe that even in NAZI Germany this guy would get invited to any garden parties.

So, is Titanic a piece of corrupt propaganda that should be grouped with Triumph of the Will? Not really. You can’t blame them for putting a German front and center. It’s less obnoxious than making a movie about Samurai and placing a white guy in the lead (The Last Samurai) or having another white guy, surrounded by hot American Indian women, finding the only Caucasian chick in a hundred miles (Dances with Wolves). Filmmakers want an entry point that their viewers can understand. It’s raciest and nationalistic, but it hardly sets Titanic apart. And as previously mentioned, that German entry point is an unpleasant jerk, so it hardly puts Germans in a superior light. Yes, the movie does attack English and American aristocrats as greedy SOBs, but Hollywood has produced a lot of films doing the same thing. And in many other ways, the flick is kinder to the Brits and Yanks than the 1997 version. The poorer passengers are not imprisoned below deck, and are even allowed to walk into the grand ballroom to be informed of the situation. It’s hard to find a NAZI outlook here (except for a text sentence tacked on at the end condemning the British). If anything, the movie has a communist slant (it did play well in the East after the war). The propaganda may be slight due to director Herbert Selpin, who was less enthusiastic about The Third Reich than was good for his health. He was arrested by the Gestapo during production for making disparaging remarks about the German navy, and died in prison—almost certainly murdered.

By the time Titanic was complete, the war wasn’t going well for Germany. Joseph Goebbels decided that the panicking celluloid passengers might inspire actual panic in a population that was living through nightly bombings, and banned the movie. So it wasn’t very successful propaganda anyway you look at it.

Titanic is a slightly above average disaster movie that is made more interesting due to historical context. And there are worse takes on the story.

Actress Sybille Schmitz also appeared in Vampyr.

Disaster, Miscellaneous, Reviews

The Seventh Victim (1943)

Oct 021943

Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter) leaves her boarding school to search for her sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks), who had been paying her bills and has mysteriously vanished. Mary’s quest leads her to private investigator Irving August (Lou Lubin), who is murdered in a shadowed doorway, and also to helpful failed poet Jason (Erford Gage) and paternalistic Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont), the second of whom was secretly married to Jacqueline. Jason and Ward then bring Mary to suave and unscrupulous psychologist, Louis Judd (Tom Conway), who seems to be keeping Jacqueline hidden, perhaps to protect her, perhaps because he is having an affair with her, but most likely both. Behind all of the sinister activities, and adjacent to Mary’s new acquaintances, are the Palladists, an organization of Satanists.

Any discussion of The Seventh Victim must be a discussion of Val Lewton. It is the 4th of 9 horror and horror-related low budget films he produced at RKO in the 1940s, saving the studio when the excesses of Orson Welles almost sunk it. These were producer-driven movies. Given only a title, a run-time limit, and a painfully low budget, Lewton was free to do as he liked, and what he liked were psychological stories hung on a fairy-tale frame. From film to film, he’d reuse ideas, scenes, characters (sort of), actors, and crew. These were all Val Lewton films first and foremost. His directors were the superb though practical Jacques Tourneur, the novice Robert Wise, and the more mundane Mark Robson. Robson, also a neophyte director having been promoted from the editor of Lewton’s previous two films, does his best imitation of Tourneur as he takes the big chair for The Seventh Victim. He’s not Tourneur, but close enough, and for a low budget picture, he’s a good get.

Unlike most 1940s horror producers, Lewton cared about his films. He wasn’t making throwaway films for the low end of a double feature matinee. His films had to mean something, and had to leave you with something to think about. Oh boy, does The Seventh Victim do that. There’s the journey from innocence to sad reality. There is the revelation that while the world may be very frightening, the great evils we imagine are more likely to be dim, weak, and prosaic. But above all, The Seventh Victim is about life and death: how to live, how to die, and when to do both. THE scene has Jaqueline encountering her neighbor (Elizabeth Russell) who is slowly dying, and after a brief discussion, both decide how their lives will end. It reminded me of a Ray Bradbury story in which he posits that all people, deep down, have one of two desires: either simple joy right now or to die.

The Seventh Victim is filled with the shadows that infuse all Lewton films, and even more, the tension and mystery. The world is simply wrong from the first moment to the last. Mary’s boarding school principal is sinister and Mary is warned never to return by the principal’s assistant, but this isn’t a plot point or a clue. It’s just an unsettling part of an unsettling world. The first person Mary encounters in the city is the old manager, now new owner, of Jacqueline’s business. She too appears sinister. Later we find that she is, but she could have appeared normal or friendly. But no. This is a dark fairy-tale and kind people and relaxing moments are few and far between. This is Noir turned even darker and the tone, individual scenes, and even the story influenced many movies, most obviously Psycho, Rosemary’s Baby, and Eyes Wide Shut.

But all is not well. Lewton films tend to suffer from the same problems, most of which I put down to the restraints he worked under, particularly budget. The acting is uneven. The best of his stock company, Conway and Russell are always good, and when he could pick up an actor who knew what to do, such as Boris Karloff who starred in three Lewton pictures, things worked beautifully. But if an actor had no such self-direction, or simply didn’t yet have the skill needed, Lewton and his director’s couldn’t shape what was needed. I blame the lack of time for rehearsals, coaching, and re-shoots, though perhaps I’m being kind. In The Seventh Victim we have two acting problems, Hugh Beaumont is acceptable. That’s it. Nothing more, and he needed to be more. He acts in exactly the same way he did as Ward Clever in Leave It To Beaver. The bigger problem is Kim Hunter. She would become a fine actress, but in this her first film role, she needed guidance and didn’t get it. She’s stiff and monotone. She doesn’t sell any of the emotions she’s supposed to be feeling. It does make me wonder if that’s the reason for the odd structure of the film. It should be all about Mary, but the big, frightful march through those shadowed backstreets is given to Jacqueline. I’ve no proof, but it is clear that Jean Brooks could handle it, while Hunter was not yet ready.

Then there are a few character irregularities. Jacqueline leaps from catatonic insanity to (near) mental clarity in no time at all. Judd is terror-stricken at the thought of running into the Satanists, but later gives it no more thought than dropping by the library. And both Jason and Ward go through substantial life changes in seconds, and mostly off screen. A bit more time for yet another draft of the screenplay, and a longer runtime to fill in some missing pieces would have worked wonders. So much of The Seventh Victim is too quick. There needed to be more steps and more growth.

There’s also the matter of the cringey recitation of part of the Lord’s Prayer to the Satanists. I blame that one on trying to appease the censors.

So for me, The Seventh Victim is a failure, but it’s a failure that leaves me thinking about so much, one that my mind goes back to for days after viewing. Given greater resources, this could have been a masterpiece. As is, it is eclipsed by other Lewton films. But in the 1940s, when so many horror films were empty, I’ll take a failure that’s overflowing.

Classic Horror, Reviews Tagged with: Three Reels

Son of Dracula (1943)

Oct 021943

Occultist Kay Caldwell (Louise Allbritton) brings Count Dracula (Lon Chaney Jr.)—not his son no matter what the film’s title might be—using the name Alucard, to her Louisiana plantation. This vexes her conventional sister (Evelyn Ankers), her unstable boyfriend Frank (Robert Paige), and the pushy Dr. Brewster (Frank Craven). Her plan is to marry Dracula, gain eternal life, and then get rid of him. Not the greatest of plans.

This second sequel to Dracula is even weaker than its predecessor: Dracula’s Daughter. There’s a good movie here in concept, though not in execution. Trading British/Euro-gothic for Southern-gothic was an excellent idea, giving us a new setting for Universal and allowing for scenes of long flowing Southern gowns floating over a fog covered bayou. Heat and sweat and decay are marvelous metaphors for evil. Kay’s desire to become immortal and Frank’s insane subservience are the basis for great melodrama.

The direction is B-movie level, but nothing’s wrong with a fun B-movie. It all goes wrong with the casting of Chaney. He could play a hulking brute, a friendly playboy, or a tragic victim, but a cultured master of evil was not in his range. He doesn’t know what expression to use from moment to moment and can’t match them to his actions.

The second error was a refusal to choose a protagonist. Kay seems to be our main character at first, but then Frank takes over, but not for long. Dr. Brewster slips in as an exceptionally uninteresting hero. Then we’re back to Kay and Frank before moving back to Brewster. If we’d stuck with Kay (and insane Frank) verses Dracula, we’d really have something. Everything with Brewster and company should have been cut and replaced with relationship material for Kay and Frank. But that’s what should have been, not what is. Instead we get a mildly watchable C-film, and one of the weaker Universal monster pictures.

Classic Horror, Reviews, Vampires Tagged with: Two Reels

Ossessione (1943)

Sep 291943

Gino (Massimo Girotti), a listless wanderer, falls for the wife (Clara Calamai) of an older bar owner (Juan De Landa). When she won’t run off with him, the two murder the husband. But neither deal well with the guilt and begin to mistrust each other. A homosexual peddler and a prostitute offer Gino alternative life-paths, but he can’t escape his fate.

Made in 1943 and based on James M. Cain’s dark novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ossessione must be Film Noir. And I suppose it is, though the Italian setting and language, as well as the direction by Luchino Visconti, whose style was already approaching the neo-realism he would become known for, leaves its classification in doubt. No matter. We’re back to that most basic of Noir plots, where the sexy femme fatale seduces the flawed man into committing murder. Except here, she’s less a femme fatale than a tired housekeeper.

For a movie entitled Ossessione there’s little obsession on screen. The character’s talk about it, but there is no heat. Gino must lust after Giovanna, the wife, since he mentions it repeatedly, but we never see it. As for Giovanna, she’s no siren. She’s oddly dull, wanting nothing more than to run a restaurant, and her only displays of passion are connected to her fear of not having a proper home. Ah, nothing spells excitement like hanging around talking about security. They are good looking people, but exhibit no sensuality, which makes their desperation hard to feel. Since they also aren’t multifaceted, deep, or even smart, they aren’t interesting or engaging.

The murder plot can’t even be described as a plan. They look at each other, decide to kill the husband, drive a bit, and then there’s a jump to after his death. Once that’s done, so is the plot. The Noir elements depart to be replace by ponderous melodrama.

Things pick up with the introduction of two characters who have little to do with the story. The first is Lo Spagnolo, a homosexual drifter who is the voice of the director. Fulfilling the role of an angel, he tries to talk Gino out of adultery and murder (and apparently into his bed). He’s enigmatic, perhaps because there are mysteries around him to examine, but more likely because he doesn’t make sense. The other is a kindly prostitute Gino meets in the park. She is considerably more erotic than Giovanna and shows Gino that there can be excitement in life without betrayal and corruption. I would have been interested in her tale, but she pops into the film and leaves again with little effect.

Ossessione was shot in fascist Italy during the war, but nothing in it is of that time. Perhaps the events are supposed to occur before Mussolini came to power. Whatever the setting, the movie did not go over well with government censers, though Mussolini himself had little problem with it. It was released only in substantially cut form and the negatives were destroyed. However, Visconti saved a nearly uncut print, and all current versions come from that. Until the ’70s, the movie could not be shown in much of the world because no one connected to it ever attained the rights to the source material, but the picture is now readily available.

Cain’s book has been filmed four other times: as the French Le Dernier Tournant (1939), twice in Hollywood with the novel’s title, the first in 1946 with John Garfield and Lana Turner and the second in 1981 with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, and finally as Szenvedély (1998) in Hungary.

Film Noir, Foreign Language, Reviews Tagged with: Two Reels

Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943)

Sep 241943

Doctor Watson (Nigel Bruce) summons Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) to Musgrave Manor to look into an attempted murder. The wealthy Musgrave family has allowed part of their mansion to be used as a convalescence home for injured soldiers, so living on the property are multiple family members, servants, soldiers, and the medical staff. Soon, in the old dark house, people begin to die, and Holmes sets out to find the killer.

When Universal took over the Holmes franchise, they kept actors Basal Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, but updating the setting to then present day. They also ill-advisedly changed the genre from mysteries to propaganda spy pictures, with Holmes chasing Nazis. And for an unknown reason, gave Holmes a comically bad hairstyle. After three of these, they did a partial reset, putting Holmes back in Gothic murder mysteries. They didn’t change the date, but had Holmes popping up in places where the modern world would have minimal effect, such as out of the way fishing villages or old castles on Scottish crags. Sherlock Holmes Faces Death was the first of these, with the setting being an old manner house of a landed family. We are still very much in wartime, with the house filled with soldiers, but they could have been from any war as far as the story is concerned. The appearance of the house (generally) and the social norms followed by the rich and their servants fit more naturally into a 1890s setting than a 1940s one.

The switch had another huge advantage: Universal knew how to do Gothic. Not only were we back into mysteries, but some, such as this, The Scarlet Claw, and The House of Fear, drifted into horror, particularly Old Dark House horror. Here we have a house Holmes describes as having a personality, and being “gruesome.” The grounds are foggy, there are long shadows everywhere, the building is filled with secret passageways, and under it all is an ancient crypt. Add in a strange ritual incantation a family member must say over a dead body, and stories of ghosts haunting the halls, and we’re solidly in horror territory. And Universal even had the sets already prepared for that; they just repurposed what they’d used for Dracula and the Frankenstein series. It’s no surprise that it all looks good.

Rathbone is also in great form. He’d later tire of the part, though even at his most disinterested he was still enjoyable, but that was in the future and here his Holmes has a bit of an imp about him. It helps that he’s given sharp, playful banter to toss at Dr. Watson.

The mystery itself is not one of my favorites (although worlds better than the spy stuff) and the killer is given away in a far too obvious way too early, but this is a fun, creepy film, and one of the better Holmes movies.

I’ve ranked all of the Rathbone Holmes films here.

Dark House, Reviews Tagged with: Three Reels

Phantom of the Opera (1943)

Sep 111943

Timid opera violinist Erique Claudin (Claude Rains) is fired, which is awkward as he’s been using all his money to secretly pay for voice lessons for Christine DuBois (Susanna Foster). He hopes publishing his concerto will fix everything, but when he thinks it’s been stolen, he breaks and murders the publisher and has acid thrown in his face. He then hides under the opera house and threatens and murders to propel Christine’s career. But none of that matters. What’s really important is that Christine wants to be a great singer, and both bland baritone Anatole Garron (Nelson Eddy) and police inspector Raoul Daubert want her.

The Phantom of the Opera was never horror, but the 1925 version was horror-adjacent. It had a gothic look, macabre elements, and thrills, and those are what made it famous. So Universal remade it, without any of that. What it has is more opera. Well, faux opera as the studio didn’t want to pay for the rights to actual operas, so they constructed them from classical melodies and sometimes unrelated lyrics, not that I’d know the difference. The problem isn’t that the operas aren’t real, it’s that there’s so much opera, and so little Phantom. Claude Rains as third billing, and he shouldn’t even have that. This is a cross between a melodrama, and operetta, and a romcom. The Phantom is just there to complicate the love-triangle.

Universal wanted to class things up and they didn’t give a damn if the result was interesting. So they put big bucks into costumes and sets, and revamped their original Phantom opera set from ‘25. They paid for technicolor, and they got their money’s worth. It’s beautiful. Everything is beautiful. And that includes the music. You’ll rarely hear better singing in any film. Fisher is a mediocre actress, but a superb singer. The same can be said for Eddy. So if you are here for the singing, like absolutely no one, then you’ll be happy. I doubt if many others will be happy. This sold tickets, but didn’t thrill anyone, with critics at the time having the same complaints I have now.

After the many songs killing the pace, the biggest problem is the story. At 92 minutes, there’s not enough time for musical numbers, the secondary plot of the Phantom, and developing the characters. So the characters suffer, and that’s a problem for the romance. Really, they’d have been better off pulling out the Phantom all together and making this a comedy. Anatole and Raoul would make more sense then.

Everything with the Phantom doesn’t work. Rains only signed on if the makeup wouldn’t be grotesque, so instead it’s not much of anything. Since the story takes place in a short time period, and Claudin just snapped, there’s no legend of the opera ghost, and no mystery. There’s also no explanation of why this quiet little old guy suddenly knows poison making, is great at killing, and has become an athlete. In an earlier script, Claudin was Christine’s absent father, which at least makes the motivations clear. But they trimmed that, instead having him love her for some reason. I guess because she’s cute. All of which makes it absurd that they kept the masking-pulling scene; Christine knows what Claudin looked like a short time ago, knows he was splashed with acid, and has no particular connection to him, so why does she have an urge to see his face?

But then it turns out Christine is an idiot as she just really wants to interfere in a police investigation.

I do like how they wrapped up the love-triangle. It was the ending of a comedy, but I still liked it. And I like the costumes and sets, which makes Phantom of the Opera bearable for one watch, but I won’t be going back.

Universal wanted to make a sequel the next year, because making a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera has always been a good idea… Yes… Always… However they didn’t have Rains or Eddy under contract and couldn’t come to a deal, so they altered the plot a bit, and made a very similar film, called The Climax, using the same sets and costumes, keeping Foster in essentially the same part, and getting Boris Karloff to step in as a pseudo-Phantom.

Artists, Classic Horror, Reviews Tagged with: Two Reels

The Leopard Man (1943)

Aug 061943

Kiki Walker’s (Jean Brooks) boyfriend and manager, Jerry Manning (Dennis O’Keefe), brings a tame leopard to a restaurant as a publicity stunt which backfires when fellow performer Clo-Clo (Margo) frightens it with her castanets. Soon after, the leopard kills a girl, and soon after, more. Museum curator James Bell Dr. Galbraith helps in the hunt for the cat as the only educated person around. But Jerry doesn’t believe the additional deaths were due to the animal, and suggests a human is at work.

This is another RKO horror film from the master of low-budgets, Val Lewton. If you haven’t read my other reviews, the quick summation is: Lewton was given a film title, a painfully small budget, and a runtime limit of 77 minutes, but otherwise, freedom to do what he liked. He used that freedom to make expressionistic fairy-tales, filled with shadows and fear and questions of life and death. The financial limitations, as well as the runtime, did harm the films, making them less than they might have been, but they are far more than they have any right to be. Lewton was a producer, and the films were completely his, but for his first three films, he was blessed with Jacques Tourneur, a director who knew how to shoot darkness. The two worked excellently together. Unfortunately, The Leopard Man is the last of their collaborations.

I hate to tie so many earlier films to the slasher craze of the ‘80s, but there’s no way around it. The Leopard Man is a proto-slasher, and better than most that followed. Unlike other films of killers at the time, this one changes its focus from character to character, introducing us to the victims. For a large section of the movie, I didn’t know who the leads were, and that works here, getting us to care about those about to die.

Lewton’s films are always close to death and depression. The Leopard Man is suffused with malaise. Few people are happy, and the ones that seem to be…, well, it doesn’t work out well. And there are symbols of death everywhere. The lovers meet in a graveyard, one with a caretaker that prefers the dead. A fortune teller repeatedly deals out the death card, and then tries to hide it. The climax takes place during procession of weird, almost Silent Hill-looking cloaked figures, marking the day when local natives had been slaughtered by the Spanish. It’s gloomy, and beautiful.

This is about as stressful of a film as you’ll ever see. The treks through the darkened streets are disorienting, and tense. This is Lewton and Tourneaur at the top of their game. While in those back allies, with darkness all around and some unknown thing following, this is Lewton’s best picture and one of the best of the decade.

It is at those time, but not all the time.

For a film this good, it almost had to fall. 66 minutes isn’t enough time. The scares and macabre tone are great. The mystery is less interesting. The killer was obvious to me as soon as the character came on screen. And uncovering the murderer was way to fast. The Leopard Man would have been better with no solution. Leave it all uncertain. Like most of Lewton’s films, it doesn’t all come together, but what’s good is very good.

Classic Horror, Reviews, Slashers Tagged with: Three Reels

The Mad Ghoul (1943)

Jul 301943

Chemistry professor Dr. Alfred Morris (George Zucco) has discovered an ancient Mayan gas that turns people into zombies, though they can be restored, briefly, with the aid of a fresh heart. Ted (David Bruce) is Morris’s naive and obsessed student, who loves singer Isabel (Evelyn Ankers), though she no longer cares for him. Dr. Morris assumes Isabel loves him, and turns Ted into a zombie to get him out of the way, and then restores him, for a short time, by robbing new graves. But things become even more complicated as whenever Ted is restored, he insists on following Isabel around. Additionally, Isabel never loved Morris, but is in love with her pianist, Eric (Turhan Bey), causing Morris to send zombie Ted to kill him.

Universal finally made a zombie picture, though with less zombie killing then I would expect. Sadly it wasn’t an A-picture, or what counts as an A-Picture for 1940s Universal horror, but was the second billed feature to Son of Dracula. It could have used a bit more attention, and money. It could certainly have used a better director than James Hogan, who was the man in charge of one of the worst films ever made, Life Returns (1935). This is considered one of Hogan’s best, which says a lot about both this film and Hogan’s career.

Luckily, all the Universal regulars are in good form. Zucco is in full glory as Morris, Ankers panics well, and Bey is as suave as they come. Plus all the familiar faces playing reporters and cops are solid. David Bruce does well with a thankless role; Ted is an immature twerp, which is fine for a victim. His zombie makeup was applied by Jack Pierce. It’s not one of his masterpieces, but any Pierce makeup is good.

What’s hard to figure is what Morris’s plan was. Turing Ted into a zombie doesn’t get him out of the way unless he’s left as a corpse. Morris doesn’t have anyone to kill at the beginning so what good is a zombie? He’d have been better off slipping Ted a few sleeping pills. And why doesn’t he let Ted go when he becomes a liability? Grave robbing in city after city is bound to get you caught.

So it doesn’t quite work and doesn’t make much sense, but there’s enough to like here for a B-movie zombie pic.

Classic Horror, Mad Scientists, Reviews, Zombies Tagged with: Two Reels

I Walked With a Zombie (1943)

May 031943

Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), a beautiful, young nurse, takes a job on the island of St. Sebastian in the West Indies to care for Jessica (Christine Gordon), the wife of a plantation owner (Tom Conway). Is the wife sick or is she a zombie, and will her cure come from medicine or voodoo?

A strange title, but a good film. Go back to a time before George Romero, before zombies were brain eating undead, but were creations of island voodoo, and you’ve reached I Walked With a Zombie. Val Lewton has become known as one of the great names in horror, and his 1940s RKO films are one of the three legs of classic movie horror (the others belonging to Universal and “poverty row”). Lewton always had to make the most of very little, so he went with subtlety. The studio was less concerned with art then quick money, so here handed him a title. He dumped the vague idea he was given, and matched that title to Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre. He kept the gothic romance, with a governess falling in love with a rich and troubled married man, but instead of a mad wife in the attic, there is an undead one.

Lewton’s films exist in an ambiguous never-never land. It’s never clear if it is magic and monsters or just the natural world. It is not a matter of clarity that brings ambiguity to judging that world, but rather that the world is both a thing of beauty and wonder and of dread and death. Often these things are the same. While this is a theme in all his films, it is clearer in I Walked With a Zombie than with any other.

A slight majority of Lewton fans and scholars place Cat People as the panicle of his career, but an only slightly lesser number, including me, label this his masterpiece. It does not pretend to be going for scares, but instead it is filled with an uncomfortable atmosphere. It is creepy. There are no cheap jump scares, but an eeriness and that stays with the viewer long after the film is over. It is poetic, subtle, and shares a writer with the classic 1941 The Wolf Man. The film also bears the mark of its director, Jacques Tourneur, who shared Lewton’s vision and had worked with him the year before on Cat People.

For such a low budget film, the acting couldn’t be better, the pacing is excellent, and occasional scenes could be plucked out, framed, and hung on the wall as art. There are few good voodoo films, and this is the best.

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Classic Horror, Reviews, Zombies Tagged with: Five Reels

Captive Wild Woman (1943)

Feb 201943

Animal trainer Fred Mason (Milburn Stone) return to the US with lions, tigers, for the circus. He also brings a female gorilla that’s fond of him. While he was away, his girlfriend, Beth Colman (Evelyn Ankers) has taken her sick sister, Dorothy (Martha Vickers) to renowned doctor Dr. Sigmund Walters (John Carradine), who is actually a mad scientist, who kidnaps the gorilla and changes her into a human, who he names Paula Dupree (Acquanetta). She has a strange power over the big cats, and begins working with Fred on his act. However, jealousy turns Paula into a were-ape.

The Jungle Woman was the last attempt by Universal in the ‘40s to add to their monster collection. It didn’t work, and although there were three ape-woman films, they were all short B-movies, and mostly forgotten in the following years. This first film looks pretty good; a Universal low budget feature was miles ahead of Poverty Row features in basic film-making skill. This one was greatly aided by reusing scenes from The Big Cage, a 1933 adventure circus movie. There’s a lot of high quality animal footage, with lions and tigers that would never have been able to be filmed on Captive Wild Woman’s budget.

But that may also have harmed the movie. If your #1 goal is to shove in whatever you can from a previous movie, the new material gets less attention. The animal stuff is amazing (and apparently lead to the death of a tiger), but it’s also irrelevant. Acquanetta is the real draw, and I wanted more time with her and the horror aspect. There’s a lot more that could have been done with her, given more time. But then maybe there wasn’t. Captive Wild Woman is clearly a take off of Cat People, but with an ape, but the Production Code Administration stepped in requiring changes so that it wouldn’t offend religious doctrine (no souls for animals) and to avoid a tone of bestiality. It’s kind of hard to tell a story about female sexuality using an animal metaphor when you specifically can’t use the animal metaphor.

John Carradine, in his first major role, makes for a charismatic and silky villain, and anything with him or Acquanetta is gold. Mason and Ankers are not so shiny. For Mason, it’s his role: He’s an animal trainer. That’s it. There’s nothing else there. Ankers can be very effective, but when she doesn’t care, it sometimes shows up on screen, and she clearly doesn’t care about this film.

It was followed by two sequels, Jungle Woman (1944) and Jungle Captive (1945).

Classic Horror, Mad Scientists, Reviews, Werewolves Tagged with: Two & 1/2 Reels

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