Icons of grief: Val Lewton's home front pictures 9780520240995, 9780520241008

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Icons of Grief a

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this __ | book provided by the General Endowment Fund of the University of

California Press Associates. | a

Icons of Grief — Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures

Alexander Nemerov —

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS |

Berkeley + Los Angeles - London ,

University of California Press

| Berkeley and Los Angeles, California , University of California Press, Ltd. ,

London, England ,

© 2005 by The Regents of the University of California |

p. cm.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nemerov, Alexander. | Icons of grief : Val Lewton’s home front pictures /

Alexander Nemerov. |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-§20-24099-5 (cloth : alk. paper)—IsBN |

0-520-24100-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) ,

I. Title. | oe | PN1I998.3.L469N46 2005 , 1. Lewton, Val—Criticism and interpretation. 2.

World War, 1939-1945—Motion pictures and the war. , , 791.4302 33—dc22 2004022512

Manufactured in the United States of America

14 C6 Of 10139 12 8 7I 106 09 § 4083O07 2 FT 0 os

Printed on Ecobook 50 containing a minimum 50% , ance contains virgin pulp, including 25% Forest Stew- ,

post-consumer waste, processed chlorine free. The bal- | ardship Council Certified for no old growth tree cutting, processed either TcF or ECF. The sheet is acid-free

and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO

Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).co

| For my daughters, Lucy and Anna, | |

and for my parents, : who met during the war |

BLANK PAGE

It was the war that gave me a sense of usefulness.

—Joan Clews (Phyllis Calvert) in Val Lewton’s |

My Own True Love (1948) . ,

BLANK PAGE

Contents —

, Acknowledgments | | | | xi :

Introduction _ Oo | Fragments of the Home Front , a a I 1. The Madonna of the Backyard | | Simone Simon and Ann Carter in The Curse of the Cat People — 13

2. The Power of the Minor Actor | a a |

Skelton Knaggs in The Ghost Ship 58 | 3. Stillness and Recollection | _ : Darby Jones in I Walked with a Zombie 97 |

| 4. This Pretty World | | | Glenn Vernonin Bedlam , , 132

| |Selected Notes , 171 Bibliography - 197 Index | a p05

BLANK PAGE

- Acknowledgments

Many years ago I met Val Lewton Jr., who told me about his father’s movies. I put them out of my head until a few years later, when I decided to teach a course on American film of the 1940s. When I finally sat down to watch I Walked with a Zombie, I was overwhelmed by its beauty and _

| melancholy. This book is the result of many years’ thinking about where © that sadness comes from, and now that it is complete, I owe my first debt _

of thanks to Val Lewton Jr. He allowed me to consult his personal col- ,

| lection of his father’s letters, and he loaned me rare copies of his father’s | - novels 4 Wives, A Laughing Woman, and This Fool, Passion, all of them

| a great act of kindness. | a

crucial in the pages that follow. Val’s generosity with these materials is

_ My research benefited from the expertise and kindness of many people in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C.: Barbara Hall, Heather von Rohr, and other staff members at the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills; Edward _ Comstock, senior library archivist at the Cinema-Television Library at USC; Yvonne Behrens, of the UCLA Film and Television Archive; the staff at the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library, and at the Museum of the City of New York; the staff at the Divisions of Man- _

| , | , x1 uscripts and Films at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.;

Richard Mangan, administrator at the Raymond Mander and Joe | Mitchenson Theatre Collection in London; Richard Lees, steward at |

Tewkesbury Abbey in Tewkesbury, England; Steve Pool, of Sheffield, En-

xil Acknowledgments

Angeles. — , a

gland; my colleague Tim Barringer, who put me in touch with Steve; Paul _ ~. Root, of Syracuse, New York; and Kristy Kubrin and Eryn Brown, of Los

~ Many scholars of film and American visual culture have helped me

think about the issues I present in this book. Scott Bukatman encouraged my work on Lewton from the first, starting with my presentations at the _ Stanford Film Workshop in the late 1990s and continuing with a careful reading of the finished manuscript. Without Scott’s encouragement, Iam

~ sure I never would have written this book. David Lubin likewise en- | couraged the project, and he has been kind enough to give my ideas a

tough critique all along the way. At Yale, Dudley Andrew, Charlie |

shape. | |

Musser, and Noa Steimatsky kindly supported the idea of a scholar like | me from outside film studies writing on a film topic. Iam especially grate- |

ful to Noa for her comments on a synopsis of the book as it was taking , I have received great editorial and technical support throughout this |

project. At Yale I am grateful to Jude Breidenbach, Carl Kaufman, Phil

Kearney, and Joseph Szaszfai of Media Services. At the University of | California Press, I am indebted to three editors: Mary Francis, for her | faith in the project even before a word was written; Susan Ecklund, for

and kind encouragement. | -

her attention to detail; and Stephanie Fay, for her superb editing skills |

Last, right at home, I must say—as how could I not say?—that I owe |

the greatest thanks to my wife, Mary. We were driving down the street

one day, and I was saying, for the umpteenth time, that I wasn’t sure that | . I could write this book. She turned to me and said, write it. So I did. )

Introduction | Fragments of the Home Front | | |

World War II haunts the horror films of Val Lewton. He produced nine

| of these movies for RKO between 1942 and 1946: Cat People, I Walked _ | with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, and six others. Though noneisabout . the war, it appears in them all the same, even if we never catch a clear glimpse of it. Like a ghost moving through the house, it slams doors and _ tips over the pottery, inverts pictures on the wall, and shatters windows with rocks never thrown. In movies celebrated for their portrayal of the unseen, the war is the singular invisible beast, the Damned Thing, that

or hair. | | |

stalks around and bends the grass as we look in vain for shade of hide

| How is this so? Horror films were popular in the early 1940s, and _ _ that might seem to be the answer. People wanted to be scared when | they were afraid. “During war, for some mysterious reason, people | | love to be frightened,” said Jacques Tourneur, who directed the first three films Lewton produced, Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and

||,I The Leopard Man, all in 1942-43.1 Lewton agreed. “Strange to say,

servicemen overseas seem to like the fantasy-mystery idea,” he told the

Los Angeles Times in 1945.2 When the war ended, the market for hor- | ror movies sharply declined, and Lewton never made another one after Bedlam, which he filmed in July and August 1945, just as fighting in the Pacific was concluding. The “mysterious demand” for fright that the New Republic film critic Manny Farber noted in 1944 ended with

the hostilities.% | |

2 | | Introduction 7 Edmund Wilson, writing in the New Yorker in 1944, offered the two sharpest explanations for the craze: First, the longing for mystic experience which seems always to manifest it-

self in periods of social confusion, when political progress is blocked: as soon as we feel that our own world has failed us, we try to find evidence for

, another world; second, the instinct to inoculate ourselves against panic at the real horrors loose on the earth—Gestapo and G.P.U., tank attacks and airplane bombings, houses rigged with booby-traps—by injections of imaginary horror, which soothe us with the momentary illusion that the forces of madness and murder may be tamed and compelled to provide us with a

mere dramatic entertainment. |

Wilson called it “homeopathic horror,” and Cat People and other Lewton pictures met this public appetite.* The Seventh Victim and The Ghost Ship, The Body Snatcher and Isle of the Dead, to name several, took their — place alongside the productions of other Hollywood studios such as Uni-

versal and Paramount, all aiming to capitalize on this market for “spine- , chilling nights, titillated nerves, and goose pimples,” as Boris Karloff put

it in the introduction to his 1943 anthology, Tales of Terror. But this desire to scare does not give Lewton’s work its deepest energy, —

nor does it explain how the war flows through his films. As many people | have noticed, Lewton’s movies are usually not very scary. “Val Lewton is the man responsible—for horror pictures with no horror to speak of,” wrote Barbara Berch in Collier’s early in 1944.° Even allowing for the erudite Karloff’s distinction between horror and terror—“the terms are

| literally poles apart in their true meaning and impact”—Lewton’s films

, are rarely horrifying or terrifying but more often gentle, sweet, and sad.’ , Lewton had what Farber called “an almost delicate distrust of excitement.”® The Curse of the Cat People, with its lurid studio-assigned title, is actually the story of a little girl and her imaginary/ghostly companion,

and it would have been better called by Lewton’s preferred title, Amy and | Her Friend. Home front audiences were shocked from time to time by some of Lewton’s well-designed scares, but this is not the films’ most pro-

- found allusion to wartime. | ,

The war lurks in Lewton’s films in a subtler way. It appears in their

melancholy beauty, the visual poetry that James Agee singled out in | 1944, when he called The Curse of the Cat People and Lewton’s juvenile

delinquency film Youth Runs Wild (one of two nonhorror pictures he : made during the war) “the best fiction films of the year,” and that later ) admirers ranging from the Argentine novelist Manuel Puig to the film-

, maker Martin Scorsese have also noted.’ At the center of this beauty is _

Introduction | 3 a logic, a set of visual effects, that rigorously recurs in all the producer’s

films and helps to stamp these indisputably corporate productions as | | Lewton’s. This set of effects is their repeated imagery of immobilized figures—I call them icons—standing statuesque and alone. _ These figures are often played by minor actors all but forgotten now, and the roles themselves are minor and sometimes speechless. In the one | case when a star performs in this iconic role—Simone Simon as Irena in The Curse of the Cat People—she appears in only a few short scenes. Even

in their most exalted manifestations the icons appear during just a tiny _ fraction of the films’ sixty-six- to seventy-nine-minute running times. But they are granted an extraordinary visual intensity that makes them stand

out like nothing else in these movies. Plots flow around these frozen fig-

| ures like colored smoke around a stationary object in a wind tunnel. Made to look carved or painted, they show a desire to arrest the flow of images that constitutes a film, to give the viewer something to look at that is thick and dense, like stone or metal—something that might endure © amid the ephemeral stream of pictures. What we see with such intensity _are figures of social and psychological deprivation, figures even of death itself. Together they constitute Lewton’s vocabulary of the tragic, a static visual language of grief haunted, as we will see, by the war. _ These icons stand out amid American visual culture of that time. On the home front the war remained curiously abstract, almost as if it were not happening. Agee wrote in 1943 that Americans at home “remain untouched, virginal, prenatal” about the war, and that “our great majority will emerge from the war almost as if it had never taken place.” !° The literary historian Paul Fussell notes that during the war “analysis, criticism, ©

| evaluation, and satire yield[ed] to celebration, charm, and niceness,” and that “increasingly, the tone that [was] felt appropriate to wartime” was “folksy, coy, over-simplified, [and] self-satisfied.”!! The War Department

contributed to the situation, as the historian George Roeder notes, by © censoring all images of dead, wounded, and disturbed American service-

men until late 1943, when it realized that the public’s widespread ignorance about the brutality of the fighting was a potential drain on morale.”

War movies were rarely a help, especially prior to 1944. Early that year Farber described how the classic war film formula sterilized andab-

stracted death: | , |

, At an early point in the picture the hero finds he is fighting a righteous war, | because he sees the Germans or the Japanese taking blood from children to use for their own soldiers, firing on survivors of ships they have torpedoed, —

behaving ruthlessly in Pearl Harbor or Czechoslovakia, ripping up a paint- ,

4 | , : Introduction ing by Picasso or the house that Tolstoy lived in. The only conflicts inthe __

pictures arise out of someone’s discontent with the way things are going, oe

e.g., that he should have been promoted instead of flunked out of pilot 7 school, that he is too conceited, surly and know-it-all to be liked, or that he

_is asked to be officer of the day too many times in a row. . . . This conflict is a

resolved during the first battle . . . or when he finds that the captain is not | | the hard-boiled egg he supposed, because the captain asked him to play parchesi. .. . Usually there is a father in the battle whose son is killed, or has to have his leg cut off, which is meant to imply that the war is as grim

as could be imagined. | |

War movies, Farber concluded, were “slight.”23 | In this vacuum Lewton appeared with memorable figures that bring the fact of tragedy intensely before the American public. Not that the icons

are simple allegories. If they were, they would succumb to the formulas | outlined by Farber. They carry no flags or guns, and they never speak of _ | the war, when they speak at all. Instead they exemplify the “precise, inexhaustible poetry” of Lewton’s images, the quality the film scholar Kim |

Newman notes when he writes that each viewing of Cat People “has revealed some new aspect, some unnoticed detail carefully crafted, some __ resonance perhaps unintended.” Agee summarized this aesthetic when : he wrote in 1945 that “somewhere close to the essence of the power of — moving pictures is the fact that they can give you things to look at, clear | of urging or comment, and so ordered that they are radiant with illimitable suggestions of meaning and mystery.” His topic was John Huston’s -

combat documentary The Battle of San Pietro and, more precisely, a “simple, wordless use of children” near the end of the film that struck him

as “the first great passage of war poetry that has got on the screen.” Lewton’s icons are like that: each presents an infinity of connotation. | They are versions of his belief in the suggestive power of darkness, the al- |

lure of the unseen over what is plainly visible. But in the icons this illim- | itable darkness resolves into exact shapes, and though it continues to pal- |

from the war. ,

pitate mysteriously, it also takes coherent form, and draws this coherence _

How this is so is the subject of the four chapters that follow: the first |

on Simone Simon’s and Ann Carter’s roles in The Curse of the Cat | People; the second on Skelton Knaggs’s performance as the Finn in The | Ghost Ship; the third on Darby Jones as Carre-Four in I Walked with a Zombie; and the fourth on Glenn Vernon as the Gilded Boy in Bedlam. These minor figures visualize the murmurs of grief and lost gestures of — mourning, transient and sensuous as the touch of a finger on nylon, that

_ Introduction , , 5 moved beneath the home front’s official slogans. They try to commemorate the inchoate sway of sadness that otherwise remained inarticulate and concealed amid the unsettling gleam of brave smiles and clenched

teeth. The great visual intensity still discernible in these solitary icons | shows Lewton’s wish to find a portrayal more durable and true than the © belting bright tunes of the Andrews Sisters, the pious intonations of sacrifice, and the home front’s whole mellifluous amnesiac cavalcade. This |

means that Lewton’s films are not simply more or less good horror , movies but among the most eloquent expressions of the war years in

| America. They take their place alongside pictures by Vincente Minnelli, | Elia Kazan, Alfred Hitchcock, and a few others able to hit occasionally : on a wartime sense of sadness and trauma, but they also exceed these more exalted works by providing a sustained memorial imagery in film ©

after film, icon after icon. oo | :

—. -Lewton (1904-51) both was and was not a likely figure to produce | | these memorable tragic figures. He came to the United States with his mother and sister in 1909 from his native Russia at the urging of his aunt, the Broadway actress Alla Nazimova, herself a recent immigrant. | _ He embraced the new culture, changing his name from Vladimir Leven-

| ton to Val Lewton, and soon became an expert in the more low-brow American arts. Living in and around Manhattan in the 1920s and early | | 19308, he generated advertisement copy, movie publicity, radio scripts, tabloid journalism, and pornography.'® Between 1931 and 1934, he | published a quick succession of skillful pulp novels using either his own

name or the pseudonyms Carlos Keith, Cosmo Forbes, and Herbert Kerkow: The Fateful Star Murder, Rape of Glory, No Bed of Her Own, Yearly Lease, Where the Cobra Sings, A Laughing Woman, 4 Wives, and

| This Fool, Passion. The novels are knowingly half literary: their revela- , _ tions come equally from the Bible and transparent negligees, sometimes in the same chapter. They show Lewton’s extensive reading in Western : literature and his proudly asserted insignificance within it. There never

| was a more effortless and self-loathing adaptation of Joseph Conrad than Where the Cobra Sings, Lewton’s tale of lust and jealousy on Cam- |

bodian tea plantations. oe : | | Lewton continued his career as a minor man of minor culture in Hol-

lywood. He moved there in 1934 to work for the producer David O. Selznick and served for the next eight years as his story editor, first at MGM and then at Selznick International Pictures, helping plan and de~ velop such films as A Tale of Two Cities, Anna Karenina, Gone with the

Wind, and Rebecca. Even when RKO hired him to produce his own ,

6 | , | Introduction © horror films in 1942, Lewton remained a minor player. He openly bor- | rowed plots from previous work—I Walked with a Zombie, as many | commentators have noted, is an adaptation of Jane Eyre—and he found himself working in arguably the most degraded of all Hollywood genres.!” “I know so surely that whatever small talent I have in this field will

be broken and ruined by working in cheap things, just as surely as my |

the job.'® | | oe

writing was ruined,” he wrote to his mother and sister upon accepting And though he was not ruined by this job—it made his reputation and allowed him to produce some of the most gorgeous imagery ever to ap-.

pear in Hollywood film—it is not as though even then he was some bril- : liant man of letters deftly inserting deep philosophy into a vulgar form. :

Newman is right to note that “too much writing about Lewton is em- | barrassed that such a tasteful man should have made horror pictures,and © many of the anecdotes about [the making of Cat People] suggest some ten- , sion between a philistine front office eager for a lurid cat werewolf movie and a daring band of film-makers intent on slipping them a serious bit of

psychiatry instead.”!? Lewton was a writer of pulp novels, after all, and | though he really was far more erudite, cultured, and humane than his bosses at RKO, he also relished the low, the little, and the tawdry, and he was much better at it than any of his superiors. The studio assigned

the lurid titles of his movies, but Lewton was inventive here, too. A cul- . |

tured lowness was his métier. A character in his novel A Laughing Woman plays King Mark’s lament from Tristan and Isolde on the organ

and then pulls out a gun in “ ‘the grand tradition of the movies andthe tabloids.’. .. With his left hand he depressed the basso profundo stop. | With his right hand he brought the revolver to his temple. The booming

note of the organ shook the heavily-framed pictures on the walls.”2° The | two sounds—tabloid gunshot and deep old-world tragedy—always blend -

in Lewton’s work. | |

So how could someone of this modest aesthetic ambition—even an-

tiambition—make some of the most vital and lasting art of the war years? The answer is that minorness gave Lewton the chance to say the most. This is true for reasons beyond his comfort in smaller-budget pic-

tures, his oft-noted temperamental aversion to grandiosity, pomp, splendor. In ways deeply informed by his Russian background, he was __ able to take the foundation of the forgotten—the brief moment usually featuring a minor actor—and turn it into a shrine of tragic singularity. — The little scene, the bit player, the spare setting all combine to make a

rhetoric of insignificance—brevity, obscurity, cheapness—lovingly ex- |

Introduction | 7 plored with a complete faith that this triviality could yield a lasting and

powerful statement. Manny Farber, in his 1957 essay “Underground | - Films,” put it best when he wrote that low-genre filmmakers including —_—

Lewton did “their best shooting .. . from the deepest, worst angle... | with material that is hopelessly worn out and childish.” In it they were

able to find “the unheralded ripple of physical experience, the tiny morbidly life-worn detail,” something “hard and formful.”2! Lewton’s icons |

take this shape. , | | : The first scene of Lewton’s first film, Cat People, exemplifies these tiny frozen moments. In it Oliver Reed introduces himself to the Serbian fash-

ion artist Irena Dubrovna at the Manhattan zoo. They chat for a few mo_ ments as she draws pictures of a panther in its cage. As they leave the

scene, the camera lingers behind to focus on a failed drawing Irena has | discarded as it is borne along on the breeze, scuttled among the leaves on

| the ground (fig. x). The drawing, which shows the panther impaled ona _ giant sword, is just a detail, a brief moment in the film, yet Lewtonand Tourneur make sure that we take notice. On one level, they concentrate | on it because it portends the whole story, providing an exact transcrip- | tion of Irena’s innermost drives, even as it also anticipates Lewton’s career-long preoccupations with forces of irrationality.22 Yet on another level, the focus on Irena’s drawing indicates something less thematic and | hence more important. I agree with Agee that Lewton’s weaknesses were

_ “romantic-literary,” his strengths “poetic and cinematic,” and thisisa book about Lewton’s strengths.** Irena’s drawing is most compelling be- | cause it is a static picture that moves, a perfect augury of the kineticim- _ mobility that recurs in Lewton’s films—an emblem of his penchant to go’

against the motion of motion pictures and to let states of stillness be swept cinematically along, like the drawing, without ever losing their | primal immobility. There is always a strangely powerful visual poetry to |

these stilled images in Lewton’s films. |

_ Trena’s drawing indicates something else about these static moments. | The drawing is trash, the last of three pictures Irena rips up in the scene. “Tm not an artist,” she tells Oliver—a highly revealing line for anyone —

to speak in the first minutes of the first Lewton film. “May I see it?” Oliver asks about one of the drawings. “Oh no,” responds Irena. “Itis

not good. If I let you see it you might never want to know any artists, , ever.” Says Oliver, “I’m afraid it’d have to be pretty bad to do that.” Just a few months earlier, Lewton had written to his mother and sister upon getting the RKO job: “I’m to work on such wretched and uninteresting

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thout.botheri | o ofOOIrena’ iscat€aw ng arded i he ay h ehem. . WwW oferaWrastays th )w |:: g: But th end e sone. stays wi

.

| Introduction _ | | | 9 | abandoned third picture, left torn and strewn upon the ground among the windblown leaves, overlaid with shadows of the panther’s cage, as

the actors vacate the scene. Beauty for Lewton lies in what is failed, — shameful, not good enough. The scene is all but a plea for us not to put —

| trash in its proper place but to attend to it where it lies. It asks us not to _ exercise the trim and decorous taxonomic impulses of the kindly philistine Oliver, who shuttles reflexively between trash and art, knowing the location of each. Instead, the forgotten still picture, made by a foreigner

| and seen for an instant, tells an important story. _ Oo _ Recounting that story means examining Lewton’s letters, scripts, and above all his novels. In their focus on trashiness and states of stillness,

these books help us recognize the forgotten powerful moments in the : films when everything comes to a stop.2” Telling the story also means consulting the work of many scholars and critics, four in particular: Alex

~ Woloch, for his brilliant theory of minor characters in the novel, put forth in-his book The One vs. the Many; Fussell, for his acid commentary on the feel-good banality of American home front culture in his book Wartime (1989); and Agee and Farber, who reviewed films during the war for the Nation and the New Republic, respectively. In their different ways, both critics provided a rich commentary on the movies and — the moviegoing experience on the home front, and both singled out Lew-

ton for perceptive praise. |

Telling the story also means going against the received wisdom about Lewton’s films. By now an ironclad set of accounts explains the pro-

| _ ducer’s work: he made the most of small budgets; he emphasized the un- | conscious motivations of human beings; he favored darkness andthe unseen generally so his audiences could imagine horror instead of see it. None of this is wrong; the trouble at this point is that it is foo correct. — The standard view of Lewton, with its informative but ready-made ex-

planations, forestalls other ways of looking, consigning the best mo- | ments of this strange and difficult filmmaker to the hallowed and dusty _ spaces of “Art,” where all the wisdom is clear and one need only recite _ a set of truisms in order to see—really, not to see—the most powerful

| | qualities of these films. | | | | The problem of these all-too-accurate views is especially relevant | now. Like the art historian T. J. Clark in his work on abstract expressionism, I believe that the 1940s film industry is distant enough now that

| we no longer need stand in thrall to its self-understandings.*® With distance comes critical detachment, and we can begin to see important connotations that producers, directors, actors, and audiences did not per-

10 | | | Introduction | | ceive, or perceived only occasionally or in fragmentary ways. My claim is that the most resonant and powerful aspect of Lewton’s films—their — |

visual language of life and death in wartime—is only just now starting to become fully visible. Even his most insightful critics, Farber and Agee, _ could not put their finger on it. This language has been there from the

first, awaiting discovery like a message encoded in special ink that re- | quires a chemical bath to be discerned, or like a body that has been concealed behind the plaster and lathing that finally, with the deterioration of the wall, begins to show through the cracks. This is true not just for Lewton’s films but for other wartime movies I examine in the pages that

follow—comedies, musicals, epics. They have all come to look refresh- | ingly strange now that they are so clearly artifacts of the past. ,

It makes special sense that the war would shape Lewton’s films. He | had strong views about the conflict. “I’m convinced it’s the return to barbarism—the savage wars that mark the end of a cycle of civilization,” he wrote on November 30, 1939, the day the Soviet Union at_ tacked Finland. “It will be horrible to see a pax germanicus saddled on the world,” he wrote in March 1940, even more pessimistic. “I think Europe will become a sort of Spartan state, with all the conquered nations as slave states. And then, if we’ve managed to stay out of the war __ that long, will come the really titanic struggle, the Armageddon, with all

the Western hemisphere and the British colonies pitted against Europe. |

It seems like the end of the world.” Under the circumstances, “the , quicker we get into the war or give aid to the Allies, the better.”*? No wonder Cat People was to have started with Nazi tanks rumbling into Irena’s Serbian village. (The idea was dropped.)*° No wonder that Lewton’s two nonhorror films of 1944, Mademoiselle Fifi and Youth Runs

Wild, both directly concern animosity on the home front. If the war never does literally appear in the horror films, it lurks there allthe same,

pathos. | , -

and, I believe, it is now coming into plain view as the source of their

Recounting this story, last, means studying the many people besides Lewton who contributed to his films. Agee and Farber treated Lewton’s

movies as singularly his own, but of course this is not entirely accurate. Lewton developed the stories, wrote scripts, chose actors, and decided myriad other details, and he probably even exceeded the crucial creative role of the producer that Thomas Schatz calls the hallmark of Holly- | wood filmmaking in the studio era.*1 Movies such as Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, the film critic Robin Wood noted long ago, “are _

Introduction oo | , II usually regarded, and with some justice,” as Lewton’s, “with much of

their taste, intelligence, and discretion .. . attributable to his planning | and supervision.”3* He was even on the set a lot of the time, according ,

, to Albert E. van Schmus, the second assistant director on The Leopard ‘Man.3 As Farber commented in 1944, “Each film has a different direc-

| tor and writing crew, but they look enough alike to make you feel that _ Lewton controlled the work on all of them.”3* Even so, other creative | people naturally made major contributions, and their work is important

to my argument: Tourneur, the director of the first three films; Nicholas | Musuraca, the director of photography for many of them; DeWitt | Bodeen, the screenwriter for a few; Albert D’ Agostino and Walter Keller,

| the set designers; and Roy Webb, the musical composer, among others. The most important artistic collaborators, however, are the minor ac- | tors and actresses often playing Lewton’s iconic roles. They are impor- | tant enough to warrant examining their work even in films and plays not made by Lewton. In these other productions they established a range of

affects from which directors and producers could choose to create the

characters they wanted. Understanding this spectrum of possibilities | helps us see how Lewton emphasized certain connotations of his minor

; actors while suppressing others; how he depressed certain keys and left | others untouched, often producing a sweeter music with the same instrument than other producers and directors at the time. Carter, Knaggs, Jones, and Vernon all had the greatest moments of their modest careers

: in Lewton’s movies. | |

| Because Lewton favored minor players for his iconic roles—actors who sometimes appear uncredited in his movies and in those of others— _ preparing this book has meant watching seventy-minute, ninety-minute,

| ~ and two-hour features by other filmmakers, waiting for the tenortwenty _ | speechless seconds in which Skelton Knaggs or Darby Jones might appear. It has also meant taking great pleasure in watching Lewton’s own. films over and over again, reviewing the moments when these actors take on an iconic power, and considering how these moments still send out

signals of wartime. No doubt there is an oddity to this process—to this | sense of excitement as the minor player in the minor role in the forgotten or near-forgotten movie finally makes an appearance—an oddity I have felt myself, as my seemingly unmotivated exclamations of wonder raise eyebrows among fellow researchers or members of my family. But

| trust, too, that there is something promising in this strangeness, for where but in the most overlooked corners, and in the briefest moments,

12 | oo Introduction does one expect to find something like the past? The critic George L. K. | Morris wrote in 1938 about Hans Arp’s little collages of torn black | paper: “A broken piece of pottery will often bring us closer to Greece than the Laocoén.”5 The four chapters that follow attend to Val Lew-

ton’s fragments of the home front. 7 |

CHAPTER ONE ,

Backyard

The Madonna of the Simone Simon and Ann Carter in

The Curse of the Cat People | |

Lewton’s fiction abounds in still figures. Olive Darcy, in A Laughing | Woman, “could sit for hours before a mirror, utterly motionless, her eyes

_ held by the reflected image of herself.” When she suffers facial paralysis as the result of an injury, the immobility only repeats her original state. In the same novel, Mary Lawrence watches her boyfriend depart on a

train: “Mary stood, silent and motionless, as he swung himself aboard. | Her arms hung down straight at her sides, the tears flowed down either _ cheek.”? Amarah, the Cambodian woman in Where the Cobra Sings, “sat motionless, looking out over the water,” later “stood rooted to the

spot,” at another point was “transfixed” and “mute, unable to move,” | and in still another scene was “as motionless as though carved out of ivory.”2 This Fool, Passion opens with the photographer Alex Sablin ask- | ing his model Barbara Tredwell to “hold the pose, please,” and later Bar- |

bara “posed, standing motionless for several minutes at a time.”> | This same stillness dominates Lewton’s films, where it appears often

in the form of ceremonially isolated figures. Take the case of Irena , Dubrovna, played by Simone Simon, in Lewton’s sixth and gentlest RKO : - production, the misleadingly titled The Curse of the Cat People, which began filming in late August 1943 and was released in March of the fol-

lowing year. Outside on Christmas Eve in a snowy backyard, Irena | stands like a statue as she sings a French lullaby beneath a frozen tree (fig.

| , oe ; 13 |

2). Inside a group of festive carolers gathers to sing around the piano. |

The two songs play off one another—one solitary and crystalline in the

, 14 The Madonna of the Backyard | night air, the other hearty and warm in the bright living room. Indoors only the little girl Amy hears the lullaby. She goes out into the cold to be » |

with Irena, who is either her ghostly friend or a figment of her imagina- | tion. We see Irena first in the long shot and then closer up (fig. 3), each time for a few seconds in which she barely moves. A Hollywood Christmas during the war usually meant “potent scenarios of family unity, re- | united lovers, and a return to the customs and traditions of an idealized past.”* The Curse of the Cat People, however, gives us not only the ~ warmhearted carolers, the tree, and the presents, but also a dead or imaginary woman standing alone and motionless in the snow. What is this isolated stillness about, and how does it connect to death and imagina-

tion? And how was the combination of these things about the war? , The answer starts with Irena’s vividly sculptural appearance. Many : factors conspire to immobilize her in the scene, intensifying her stillness. = One is the lighting. Nicholas Musuraca, the director of photography for

The Curse of the Cat People, used lighting to make objects appear “sculpted,” according to the film historian James Naremore, to give

them “a certain dimensionality or sculptural effect.” Irena, as pho- | tographed by Musuraca, seems chiseled from her surroundings, a filmic

| equivalent to Amarah standing “as motionless as though carved out of | ivory.” The sculptural figure conjured by Irena’s appearance and pose

and the Christmas Eve setting is the Virgin Mary—the “Lady of | _ Lourdes,” the PM film reviewer John McManus called her in 1944°—as represented in iconic sculpture that lacks even the illusion of movement. Lewton is interested not in the sculptor Bernini but in a more medieval __

of the stone. | | |

type of artist, whose figures, in static poses, reiterate the primal stillness =» A comparison emphasizes the point. On the day after Thanksgiving in 1940, Lewton hosted a supper at his home in Pacific Palisades for

Alec Miller, an older British sculptor who had come to live in Califor- | nia. Most of Miller’s work had been destroyed in the bombing of Coventry cathedral on November 14, “but he was so completely philo-

sophic and brave about its destruction that I was completely taken with : him,” Lewton wrote to his mother and sister.° Miller’s Virgin and Child at Tewkesbury Abbey (fig. 4), completed in 1939, calls to mind Irena’s | cowl, long fluted ankle-length robe, and columnar verticality, with each

is stilled. |

figure uninterrupted by the extension of arms or hands outside the com- a pass of the cloaked torso. Miller’s work helps us see how Lewton’sIrena alludes to a type of iconic sculpture in which even simulated movement _.

a as 4 >a~:7a-. i— ) ; —lg '‘ad : , ae Te a a — r . = lee ete. — ee :« ay at “: wT aye s- i""he '_ |‘he ‘. 5, : -::

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ime ‘7.sa ».“cans \\+ - ,* .| ¥J) »-e -“ie 7 ~~ a 4s t's. .S-aos ' .alow b+ 5 S on %T ~ me dy Oy wt “Ek : a Behn o*” r + . Yn. « - e Ah ’~ane a —— —_a' ..a y™m =Aen -|ia :.e~~|aii.*he4

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* a « “A a e © ; fy ‘ Ce ‘Ff wees. | ora.

Figure 2. The Curse of the Cat People (1944): Irena (Simone Simon) in the backyard.

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ie ah ¢fpis

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| “ ont i Ths’ Forge Baden ee wi euttilie a , 1 aae 5 SRA aes,+SS — — Figure 3. The Curse of the Cat People: Irena in the backyard, medium shot.

Ee Se oe ae -

eeCOR remAUREUS co, Pe RG RENE : a~ -=ie: Bo ROL EEC: Pe ae Soe, BESS SE = , .OR ; ; Sees atieee OS FERS Seance Sn ;he - : DORR CRN RS ses BE ESSER EE REOS : ‘fh ;.sass | .: - BORE CEU 7 an Z| - . Le NO ee

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abe SE ae 3 ne y, rn 7 2 y he . : : | ge oe es > k r : Ta e » oS 2. . ey1 iM : J &\ a}:3 '2- -Be

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Figure 6. Anonymous, The Virgin of the Great Panagia, Called the Virgin Orant of Yaroslavl, twelfth century. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo courtesy Scala/Art Resource.

Russian themes were popular among Hollywood filmmakers during the war. The North Star, Mission to Moscow, Song of Russia, and Days of Glory, among other movies from 1943-44, all portrayed the Russians as a good-hearted, heroic people not unlike Americans. Communism was strictly off-limits—The North Star (1943), a tale of peasant revolt against the Nazis, never mentions the fateful word,'’ and the film shows Dana Andrews, Farley Granger, and others cavorting in Oklaboma-style

2.2 , ~The Madonna of the Backyard | rituals of rustic togetherness before the Nazis appear strafing, pillaging, and finally siphoning the blood of schoolchildren. But Lewton, as far _ back as the early 1930s, embraced other sturdy conventions of Russianness. One was the story of high manly adventure fueled by swords, women, and drink. The Cossack whoring, backslapping, and mustachio _ twizzling of Rape of Glory emulates the fiction of Nikolai Gogol in his carousing-and-fisticuffs mode. Indeed, Lewton was brought to Holly-

| wood in 1934 as an expert in this type of Russianness to help write the script for Selznick’s proposed film adaptation of Gogol’s Taras Bulba, the |

locus classicus for Rape of Glory’s vodka-on-the-bodice tales of forni- | cation in the hayloft and scimitars to the skull. He also worked as story editor on Selznick’s Anna Karenina (1936), with its boisterous opening scene in which Russian officers literally drink themselves under the table. Other types of Russianness inform the Christmas Eve scene, however.

One was the Russia of supernatural folklore. In his advisory role to Selznick and the scriptwriter S$. N. Behrman for Anna Karenina, Lewton | proposed a scene in which Anna would read a poem to her son, Sergei, | from “a little book of Pushkin’s verses.” The poem Lewtonhadinmindin > _ his memo to Behrman of March 30, 1935, an adaptation of the prologue of Pushkin’s “Ruslan and Liudmila,” anticipates Irena in the backyard: _

great and green. , golden sheen. a | _ the wise cat sings. a wondrous things. , , and Lyudmila. | | In the forest—in the Russian forest, is an oak tree, , a

To the rounded trunk a cat is tethered with a chain of 7

Passing to the left with tread of velvet, an ancient song | 7

When she goes to the right she speaks, telling her tale of |

Of the forest Leichi and of the Bogatirs, and of Ruslan _ Oo And I have been there and have heard her.”°

In The Curse of the Cat People, Irena plays the ghost of the cat woman | from Lewton’s first film, Cat People, and in the Christmas Eve scene she | is like Pushkin’s cat beneath the oak tree, singing and “telling her tale of , ~wondrous things.” In the same way, the witnessing tone of the last line—

“And I have been there and have heard her”—prefigures the little girl Amy’s impassioned protests to her father that she really bas seen the su-

pernatural creature in the backyard. Lewton was absorbed by this type | of Russian folklore. He read Gogol’s supernatural stories in Evenings on

| a Farm near Dikanka to pass the time while serving as an all-night air-

The Curse of the Cat People | 23 raid warden in Brentwood in 1943, or so he told a reporter.”! And his memo to Selznick of March 28, 1935, makes clear how far he would go to get such fables into a film: the little boy Sergei could “act out the parts _ of the tree, the golden squirrel, the miraculous cat and so on.” Selznick ,

| and Behrman ignored Lewton’s counsel—there is no such scene in the | film. They also mostly ignored the specific lines of the Pushkin poem. In the film Frederic March, as Vronsky, speaks just two of the poem’s lines, both from an alternate version provided by Lewton: “And the breath of Russia lies sweet, and sweet over all the place broods the soul of Russia.”23 But the fable of the oak tree would come to life in Lewton’s fairy-

tale film some nine years later. There was another, sadder, type of Russianness, and it, too, findsa place in the Christmas Eve scene. During the war various filmmakers fo-

cused on this convention. “I always thought Russians were sad and ;

melancholy people—you know, sitting around and brooding about their -

| souls,” says the symphony conductor Robert Meredith in Gregory. Ratoff’s Song of Russia (1943).24 Meredith, played by Robert Taylor, | discovers that Russians are actually good-hearted people not unlike Americans, but Lewton thrived on the convention of the melancholic ~ Russian, maybe because he was one himself. His most concentrated fig- | ure of this kind is the Russian émigré Sablin in This Fool, Passion (1934),

a successful fashion photographer living in New York, haunted by grue- | some memories of his days as a lieutenant fighting for the czar during the _

| Russian Revolution. — | a |

: Sablin remembers standing in a wintry field, “staring at the scattered | bodies in the snow, at the stiff, slim limbs and delicate breasts of young _ maidens, at the fuller bodies of women, and at the ribbed, thin chests of little boys. He looked at the corpse of one girl, dark hair like a silk fan across the snow, cheeks and belly already pinched in, concave with the _ hollowness of death. An expression of sadness came to his long face... . The whole white plain, with the living and the dead upon it, seemed very

still.” He also remembers his fiancée, Irina Pavlovna, who unaccount- | ably disappeared on the day they were to escape together. Failingto find her, Sablin says, “I wanted Irina to be dead. I found beauty and peace

, in death. I hoped to find her among the killed.... WheneverI heard of a massacre, of an accident in which many had been killed, I went there © | and I searched among the bodies. I wanted to know she was dead. I wanted to tear uncertainty and fear of unknown horrors out of my heart.

knowing.”*> | ae |

I never found her. I found loneliness instead; it deadens this pain of not |

240 , _ The Madonna of the Backyard ) _ Sablin’s description informs the Christmas Eve scene. The woman out under the tree, Irena Dubrovna, is a Serbian character played bya French _

actress singing in French, but her relation to Sablin’s lost fiancée, Irina , Pavlovna, is unmistakable. There is only one dead body in the backyard, _ that of the ghostly Irena—not the many corpses of Sablin’s battlefield de_ scription—but the empty, snowy stillness seems freighted with the specif-

| ically Russian sense of loneliness he describes. For Lewton, snow was a shorthand sign for Russian melancholy. “A light snow began to fall, and

| with it a shadow of gentle sadness crept into the stern, the laughing heart of Stenka Razin,” he wrote in Rape of Glory.” Irena, alone in the back- | yard, echoes the loneliness of Sablin, not just at the scene of the slaughter, when “he felt suddenly . . . cut off... completely alone” as he gazed — on the dead, but in America, where his new life made him “even more solitary than before,” at home neither in his adopted country nor in the

thought of returning to what was now the Soviet Union. “There is no | place for me,” he concludes. No one can “bring this deadness to life—

a solitary ghost. | |

_make me feel alive and part of the living world.”*’ Like Irena, Sablin is |

The Russian sadness of the Christmas Eve scene refers also to Lew- | ton’s family, specifically his aunt, the famous Broadway and Hollywood actress Alla Nazimova, born Mariam Leventon in Yalta, Russia, in 1879. “My heart was born in a deep shadow,” Nazimova wrote in her account

of growing up in the 1880s, a daughter of the frustrated and temperamental pharmacist Yakov Leventon.”® Being a Jew in the especially anti-

_ Semitic reign of Czar Alexander III was a heavy burden as well, as Na-

| zimova’s biographer Gavin Lambert points out.?? Nazimova became an actress, adopted her stage name, and eventually got to New York, where - for nearly forty years she drew on personal experience to depict the embittered sadness of Ibsen heroines. The same melancholy informed her

last Hollywood roles, as the lonely and doomed Marquesa de Mon— temayor in The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944) and as the Polish immi-

grant Sosia Koslowska in Since You Went Away (1944), Selznick’s mag- | num opus of the home front. In the Selznick film Nazimova’s character | is a worker in a defense plant, extolling the virtues of America even as she sits before the film’s crude sign that hers is a prism of old-world tragedy: a large plate-glass window inscribed “Graveyard” (for graveyard shift) through which we see legions of defense workers walking to their jobs. Irena, in her own quieter graveyard that same year, is like a condensed, stilled version of Nazimova’s tragic persona. “I come from

The Curse of the Cat People | - , 25 deep darkness,” she tells the little girl Amy, echoing the actress’s words:

“My heart was born in a deep shadow.” |

| At the same time, Irena’s treelike acting is a rejoinder to Nazimova’s | flamboyant dramatic style and perhaps to her failure to remain sufficiently emblematic of Russian tragedy. Ever since she made her Broadway debut in a production of Hedda Gabler in 1906, Nazimova was.a

_ whirring, intensely active physical presence on stage and in film. She _ hardly let up even as she got older. During a 1939 production of A Month in the Country, the young actor Harry Ellerbe was astonished at the sixty-year-old actress’s demands that he throw her around with all his might during a confrontation scene, even in. rehearsals.2° But that | ‘same year Lewton found his aunt’s hyperbolic acting style embarrassing

| and insufficiently grave. He wrote to his mother and sister that he had

| gotten “Aunt Alla” an audition in New York for the part of Mrs. Dan- > vers in Hitchcock’s forthcoming Rebecca, but that she “so over-acted,

gave so humorless and macabre an interpretation of the part that it brought laughter to the projection room.” In the same letter Lewton ex- | pressed his annoyance with his famous aunt for being out of touch with

the old country. Nazimova’s older brother, Volodya, had visited her home in Port Chester, New York, but she reported to a friend who relayed her feelings to an annoyed Lewton that “he was the most boring : old man she had ever met, who didn’t even comment on the great city of

New York and could only sit and talk about old times in Russia. She swore ... that she would never have him out again.”*! Irena, like Sablin, represents the old-world pathos and stillness Lewton felt his famously

_ fast-paced aunt had tried to abandon. | |

Above all, it is Irena’s iconic form that incarnates this stasis and even _

| deadness. The Russian icon “derives not all that distantly from the a Egyptian portraits of the dead, placed in mummy cases, so as to be visi-

| ble from within the mummy bands,” Annette Michelson writes inher study of Dziga Vertov, another Russian filmmaker indebted to the coun- |

try’s icons.*? Belting concurs: “The memorial portrait of the dead, which preceded the icon and determined its early development, is best known

today from the mummy portraits in Egypt.” The saint icon of later peri- | ods “initially resembled the private funeral portrait to such an extent that it was virtually indistinguishable from the latter,” and even when these

icons developed separate pictorial conventions, “they made use of the a aesthetics that had been developed in ancient portraiture.” *? a The icon’s funerary meaning extended to cinematic uses of the form. —

26 The Madonna of the Backyard Michelson notes that Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (1934) connects — filmic stillness to death by using photographs and other stop-action de~ vices. A photograph, she notes, “cuts into time, causing a kind of gap,

bringing it to an instant of arrest” that embalms the past forever at that | moment. Ordinary cinema, in contrast, “grounded in the persistence of vision,” prevents us from realizing this stasis even as it is composed of — _ innumerable still images. Instead we apprehend only a “flow” like the

unfolding of time in which nothing stands out ina moment of posthumous arrest. But when a film such as Vertov’s uses freeze-frame and

“other cinematic forms of temporal digression,” these frozen moments constitute a deathly stillness, “a kind of posthumous life within the flow ! of the film” that commemorates the person or objects shown.™ The still 7

first icons. | | |

image in cinema is an effigy, a fixed portrait of the dead, not unlike the

The formal and ideological differences between Vertov and Lewton | are clear enough. Vertov used freeze-frame and other innovative tech-

niques (slow motion, reverse motion), whereas Lewton achieved effects

of cinematic stillness largely by freezing actors and settings rather than the actual frame. One scene in The Curse of the Cat People does freeze —

at its conclusion, leaving Irena and the little girl Amy in a strange state of photographic stillness, and there are other odd formal moments in the | film, including two when Amy goes slightly out of focus as the camera closes in on her during her reveries, but Lewton’s techniques mostly dif- -

| fer from Vertov’s. Lewton was working within the conventions of nar- _

strict format. 7 | , oo

rative film, and his moments of stillness had to find a place within that

Ideologically, the differences are just as pronounced. Vertov used the —

Russian icon in the name of Communism, whereas Lewton used it to | evoke a romantic conception of pre-Soviet Russia. For Vertov, the Rus- | sian past was a source he could appropriate to fit changing times. For Lewton, the Russian past offered an escape from change, providing a source of romanticized national traits, especially melancholy, that he felt | had no place in the Soviet Union. As he put it in This Fool, Passion, “Sablin had seen the Soviet brutality, their thrusting-away of all that was old and well-founded in the land.”?5 The Curse of the Cat People was no more Communistic in its Russianness than any other Hollywood depiction of that nation during the war era. In fact, it was less so, since even

_° the Americanized folk dances of The North Star and the guerrilla cama_ raderie of Days of Glory at least centered on groups, whereas Lewton’s

Russia was always about romantic loners like Sablin and his cinematic |

The Curse of the Cat People _- | 27

mourning. , , | echo, Irena. But both Lewton and Vertov made profound cinematic use of the Russian icon, and in each case they linked it to stillness, death, and

_ The significance of Lewton’s icon during wartime is complicated. In _ one sense it shows his belief that only foreigners, and especially Russians,

know what it is to suffer and die. Only they know what it is like to re- , member the past obsessively, and only they give its many tragedies the | due of tearful commemoration. Americans do not. Lewton enjoyed his | | adopted country in many respects, and he finally became a citizen of the

| United States in 1941 (after thirty-two years in the country). He also did | _ his defense duty during the war. But his novels teem with satire of American attitudes. Everywhere they voice his sardonic distance from the national propensity, as he saw it, to value dull conformity, common sense, and insipid entertainments—“the American code of light-heartedness,” as he calls it in No Bed of Her Own.** When a character in Yearly Lease

hears a “falsely cheerful voice” on her radio announcing that “Ben Wig-

gin and his Grenadiers” have been playing on New Year’s Eve and that, _ as the radio announcer puts it, “That poor old year hasn’t got much of a chance now; one foot in the grave and one foot on a banana peel. Ha!

Ha! Listen to that crowd yell! Are they having fun? Oh boy!” the canned | remarks capture Lewton’s view of much American entertainment (even the kind he himself practiced as a scriptwriter for MGM publicity) and _

| of American culture as a whole.?” The banana peel and the grave, comedy and tragedy, reduced to the delightful antitheses of a moment’s mock — |

- hilarity—that about summed up Lewton’s view of the national ability to

| |appreciate pain and suffering. | | Against these episodes of false cheer and empty culture, the novels pit loners and losers like Brenner, the masochistic writer fascinated by the © book of Revelation in A Laughing Woman; Rose Mahoney, the street-

walking Irish immigrant girl of No Bed of Her Own; and Sablin. Plain | Americans in Lewton’s novels cannot understand these outsiders. Larry | Cunningham, the regular-guy film director in A Laughing Woman, dis-

misses Brenner’s interest in both Casanova’s Memoirs (“too thick a book , for me”) and Revelation (he “can’t make head or tail of it”). In one scene Cunningham “carved his way through the inch-thick steak he had ordered,” not noticing “how Brenner averted his eyes when the bloody __‘ juice was pressed out of the meat with the pressure of the knife blade.”38 __ Jack Burden, another of Lewton’s Americans and the protagonist of — _ Where the Cobra Sings (1932), was “brought up in the American spirit | of fair play and a square deal for all” and cannot make sense of abuse,

: 28 , The Madonna of the Backyard | ~ loneliness, and pain.*? Yet that masochistic triad is the very element in which Lewton’s losers breathe, and even when an American grieves, the | tragedy is expressed through foreign culture. “I'd like to write a Madame

Bovary of Culver City,” Lewton noted in 1940. “Call it ‘Mrs. Williams,’ | or some such name.”*° In A Laughing Woman the lovesick millionaire Alvin Hawk pours forth “billowing waves of grief” as he plays “King 7 ~ Mark’s lament from Tristan and Isolde,” but his bored call-girl mistress | Jean Daly can only impatiently shift her weight from one foot to the _ other. “It’s a little beyond you, Jean,” says Hawk. Then he kills himself.*!

| In Sablin’s disastrous relationship with his American fashion model, _ 7 Barbara Tredwell, Lewton most sharply contrasts tragic foreign culture | and bright-eyed America. Sablin’s moodiness separates him from Barbara’s father, Jasper Tredwell, “at heart a most simple soul,” who used to regale “his brother Elks in Maryland” with “long, earnest political

discussions,” and from other characters such as Barbara’s friend Aubrey | ~ Marshall, whose “face was too pleasant and too friendly for Sablin’s | taste, wide-jawed and creased from constant smiling.” It also distances | him from Barbara herself. At first they are drawn together by the death of Barbara’s sister—the Russian sees a kindred sadness in his model—but

soon Barbara starts to feel better, and when he overhears her chatting about what type of makeup Joan Crawford wears, he feels that the gulf separating Russian and American sensibilities is vast beyond repair. Even

| an ikona.”” | | co when Sablin and Barbara met, she did not really know tragedy: he | “could see from her expression that she did not know what he meant by

Long before Lewton, writers and filmmakers had dwelled on the contrasts between simple-hearted Americans and foreign sufferers. Herman | Melville’s kind but naive Captain Amasa Delano and the eponymous

tragic Spanish captain in Benito Cereno (1856), for example, and the cheery mystery writer Peter Alison and the death-obsessed Vitus Werde-

gast (Bela Lugosi) and Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) in Edgar Ulmer’s | film The Black Cat (1934) all exemplify the trope. But the formula appears with special intensity in Lewton’s work, notably in This Fool, Passion. Barbara’s loneliness, Sablin tells her, “is passing—yours was born of shame and grief and these pass and loneliness passes with them—mine is for always, a part of me.” Barbara is bored by Sablin’s recurring “long

_ harangue about the soul and about how it may be dead in a body and brain that live, work and suffer.”*? In 1938, after he had movedto Hol_ lywood, Lewton reread the novel and wished that he had been even clearer in telling “the story of the couple’s differences and their gradual

The Curse of the Cat People. | 29 | , drawing apart from each other.” Still, he liked what he read—“I’m quite proud of the book”—and he noted that he especially liked “the characterization.”** The antithesis of Russian loner and American optimist re-

| mained important to him even when he was in the film business. | _ True enough, the Christmas Eve scene in The Curse of the Cat People shows the split. The carolers gather in the brightly lit living room. The

| house is cozy and snug—the work of longtime RKO set designer Albert D’ Agostino, who was used to receiving fan letters from viewers wanting

to emulate his pragmatically dreamy conceptions of all-American homes.*5 The mood in this ideal domestic space is convivial enough. Everyone is content, and even relieved, to take part in expressions of con-

| certed uniformity and conventional manifestations of good cheer. | | The American normalcy of the scene centers on the father of the house, Oliver Reed, played by Kent Smith, in a reprise of his role alongside Simon in Cat People. Smith was a ubiquitous face and voice of na-

tive goodness during the war, and it is conceivable that his modest acting abilities would not have come to the fore in any other environment ——

| except one stressing, even demanding, plain decency as the most patriotic of signs. In several films Smith played the moralistic American: Pro-

. fessor Nicholls, the kindhearted master of an American school in prewar | Germany in Edward Dmytryk’s huge RKO hit of 1943, Hitler’s Children;

John Hill, an American technical engineer gravely injured in a plane

| crash and saved by volunteer Russian nurses in Three Russian Girls (1943); Danny, the father figure serviceman trying to talk sense to way-

ward adolescents in Lewton’s Youth Runs Wild (1944); and the narra- | tor of the armed services instructional film called How to Become a Civilian (Smith himself was an enlisted man at the war’s end). But the two Cat People movies feature his most memorable performances as the

- twists of obtuseness. | - a

_ decent American—and Lewton alone gave that decency sharp little

In the first film Oliver is a self-described “good plain Americano,” a __ man into whose life not a drop of darkness or depression has fallen, who __ at first can only joke about his Serbian wife’s grim and accurate fear of |

3 the animal within herself. In the second film’s Christmas Eve scene, Oliver hosts the cheery gathering while outside his dead first wife sings alone and unheard in the cold. The scene is a diptych of light and dark,

_ schematic in its distinction between American prosperity and foreign melancholy, between Irena’s Russian-Serbian-French foreignness and Oliver’s thick American decency. His kindly ignorance is an intention- — ally flat characterization—it shows “the deliberate quality of [Lewton’s]

30 The Madonna of the Backyard | insipidly normal characters,” as Farber put it. Oliver and his second wife, Alice, have an “ideal innocuousness,” Farber wrote in his review , of The Curse of the Cat People on March 20, 1944. They look “exactly like the young married pair that used always to come on in small-town movie advertisements for the local grocer or shoe store.”*° As the film historian Robin Wood noted about Cat People, “If the American protagonists embody a norm of straightforward decency, all the poetry em-

cidedly limited.”*7 | | |

- anates from the foreign elements,” and the “decency is revealed as deTranslated to the home front, the scene might mean only one thing:

Americans do not know how to grieve. They might even barely know | that a war is on. Death is all around, yet inside the American home the | rituals of repression based on hearty togetherness, optimistic slogans, and cheerful making-do drown the plaintive song of the dead. The War Department recognized this as a problem in. 1943, as George Roeder has

pointed out, and in that year a grimmer word and image began selectively to reach the American public. Life magazine published the essay “Three Americans,” along with a photograph showing the bodies of — three dead GIs on a beach in the South Pacific, the tide having washed over them at least once.*8 Ernie Pyle reported from Italy, in a piece called

“Mountain Fighting,” how the body of a likable twenty-five-year-old, Captain Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas, was brought down from the |

mountains stiffly crosswise on the back of a mule and placed on the ground in the gathering darkness: “The first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the captain’s hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the

| dead face. And he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.” - William Wellman reenacts the scene as the conclusion of his 1945 film

The Story of G.I. Joe. : oe |

Yet when Lewton made the film in August through early October 1943, _ |

this deathly reporting from the front was still new. The prevailing separation between light and dark still held, as it largely would for the rest of | the war anyway. The split in the Christmas Eve scene is identical to the one Agee described in his column in the Nation on October 30, 1943, 4 little more than three weeks after The Curse of the Cat People finished produc-

tion. “A unique and constantly intensifying schizophrenia,” he called it: _ Those Americans who are doing the fighting are doing it in parts of the world which seem irrelevant to [people in the United States]; those who are

not, remain untouched, virginal, prenatal, while every other considerable , : population on earth comes of age. ... While this chasm widens and deep-

The Curse of the Cat People | es ae , ens daily between our fighting and civilian populations and within each ~ mind, another—much deeper and wider than any which geography alone could impose—forms and increases between this nation and other nations of the world. Their experience of the war is unprecedented in immediacy

: and unanimity. Ours, even in the fraction which has any experience at all, is _ , essentially specialized, lonely, bitter, and sterile; our great majority will

emerge from the war almost as if it had never taken place.°° , Agee’s opinion is a virtual diagram of the Christmas Eve scene. The | wartime chasm between the home front and the battle lines, the warm

and the cold, the living and the dead, is the scene’s subject. Even so, the scene is not exactly a critique of American cheeriness during the war. The idiot optimism and oblivious thankfulness of the home front _ are not necessarily the stuff only of condemnation. The adult Americans on-screen may be as “untouched, virginal, prenatal” as Agee describes, but the film is more hopeful for the actual audiences in the theater. It gives them credit for knowing that they have a grief that requires only the proper form to find release, even as it condescends by | assuming that their own culture uniformly lacks such tragic means.

, The correct form would not be the sight of likable GIs disappearing | into the jungles of Guadalcanal or the happy-go-lucky airman whose |

Corsair just fails to make the carrier off the Marianas. It would not _ | find expression in the sonorous words of a newsreel narrator or the. - pieties of the minister bowed in prayer in the church of the bombed | ceiling beams pierced by rays of sun to the drone of our avenging

squadrons overhead. It would not even be in the voice of Ginger Rogers reading her dead soldier fiancé Robert Ryan’s letter to their lit- 7 ee tle son at the tear-jerking conclusion of RKO’s home front drama Tender Comrade (1943), a film whose backyard set doubled as the Reed |

form of Irena. | | | backyard in The Curse of the Cat People.*! Instead, it would be in the

| Her iconic presentation was designed to relate directly to viewers. She

sings to the little girl Amy inside the house but also, just as clearly, to the

audience. The goal of most soundstage movies like The Curse of the Cat | People was to take the audience elsewhere—to transform the shallow set

into a believable narrative space—and it was the goal of the increasing number of on-location films during those years to portray a vastly greater depth, an infinitude even, in which an audience could lose itself _ as it became engrossed in the story. The location footage of the Pacific © | Ocean ina film such as A Wing and a Prayer (1944), and the endless blue

air in William Wyler’s air force documentary Memphis Belle, a filmre-

32 | | The Madonna of the Backyard leased in the same weeks as The Curse of the Cat People—these and other movies created new standards for the depiction of depthin Amer- __ | ican cinema in the year of Lewton’s movie. Watching the vapor trails and flak bursts and hearing the drone of B-17 engines in Wyler’s film, an au-

dience could be transported into another space, an on-screen world, as never before, and so profound would be the phenomenological patriotism of the aerie and the ocean that they would show up in displaced form as the expansive deserts and ranges of postwar westerns such as Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948) and John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) as signs

of limitless America itself. |

| These and other dramatic new ways of carving cinematic space—the ©

famous deep-focus photography of Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane | | (1941), for example—made sound stages and limited depths of field look _ . more and more fake, as when a theater manager wrote that the combat sequences in RKO’s Marine Raiders (1944) were “less realistic than

those now coming up in newsreels.”5? But in that same year, amid the fifty-mile visibilities, there was Irena in her flattened universe. She did not _

invite viewers to enter into her space so much as she projected herself into the space of the audience. “The ceremonial frontality of the icon... _ does not draw the viewer into its space but is directed forward: depth is conceived not as behind but in front of the icon, in the space of the de-

vout,” writes the film historian Noa Steimatsky in her study of another

filmmaker indebted to icons, Pier Paolo Pasolini.3 | Icons simulate the presence of the being they represent, as in the case of Veronica’s veil, and Irena is iconic in this way, too. The film theorist André

Bazin wrote that “it is false to say that the screen is incapable of putting us | ‘in the presence of’ the actor,” citing the indexical properties of photogra- | phy and “the artificial proximity provided by photographic enlargement” as two crucial reasons, and the Christmas Eve scene is especially bent on

forcing this recognition.*+ With Irena filmed in medium close-up facing the , audience, the scene has the quality of a live performance. Like an icon, the

| live performer at the microphone is static and front facing. Irena merges both visual traditions into her role as she sings her song. She embodies what

| Farber in 1944 called the techniques of “theatrical movies”—films in which events take place before the camera “as though it were the eye of the __ audience.” In such cases, Farber wrote, singling out Alfred Hitchcock’s

Lifeboat (1944), the film is “a re-enactment toward an audience—the _ : process is no longer that of watching an action but of acting it toward those who watch it.”*5 Irena’s theatrical orientation derives from a technique of ,

The Curse of the Cat People 33 a early silent cinema, the open address to the viewer. The actor looking out _ | at the audience, a device much in use before 1908, “indicates the space on | the screen is not a self-contained fictional world, but can be directly linked

to the space of the spectator,” writes Gunning. Such a device, he notes, came from the stage—an adaptation of the way vaudeville and burlesque

actors, not to mention Elizabethan ones, would make asides to the audi- | ence. It had long fallen out of favor by the 1940s—as early as 1910, one ©

critic wished for a film in which “the players appear to be ignorant that | there is a camera taking their picture.”*° Yet Farber’s comments and Irena’s

| orientation indicate that the technique carried over even into narrative films of the war years and into the practice of movie houses, which included both

live and filmed entertainment on the same bill. | | In The Curse of the Cat People the connotations of live theater and the

| iconic presence of the actress are especially strong. One of the other char- | acters is the elderly and once-famous actress Julia Farren, who at one © point stages a performance of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” for Amy. |

In the scene she faces the camera (as Irena will later), but she accentuates the effect of a “live” address by emerging from behind a theatrical curtain and moving closer and closer to the camera, intensifying her role not only for Amy but also for actual moviegoers. The reference is one of a dizzying many to theater actresses in the film. Julia Farren bearsthename

of the famous late-eighteenth-century British actress Elizabeth Farren, whose portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence was exhibited in the Master- => pieces of Art exhibition at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.5” The actress Julia Dean, who plays Julia Farren, took her name from a famous

nineteenth-century American actress named Julia Dean, and, like the orig- | inal, had been a famous American stage actress. She was now appearing | in her first film since 1915.5* The nineteenth-century Julia Dean is one of | the subjects of the book Ladies of the Footlights, an account of famous | American stage actresses written in 1937 by DeWitt Bodeen, who col-

laborated six years later with Lewton to write the screenplay for The | Curse of the Cat People.’? Then there is Nazimova lurking in the roles of Irena and Farren.© These theatrical references emphasize Irena’s iconic _ | qualities—her direct address to the audience and her aura of presence. She

sings to the audience as though from directly across the footlights. , Her near-perfect stillness, however, entails an immediacy different | from that of the live performer. To judge by the Christmas Eve scene, | Lewton wanted to create a figure that would appear vividly present to audiences, addressing them directly with a sad song; this figure would

3A The Madonna of the Backyard also arrest the flow of the film, suspend the plot, and for just those mo- | ments produce the melancholy and all-but-sculptural frozenness of a world that has stopped. Amid the filmic streams of forgetting and escaping—dependent less on particular stories than on the mere fact that | the images roll on and on—TIrena congeals the film into a slow, hard, —

| commemorative form. Perhaps Lewton invented this occasion for sorrow for audiences who on the whole did not really feel it. Perhaps they | were as “prenatal” in their attitude toward the war as Agee suggested. But perhaps Lewton also gave them a moment of sad commemoration, manifest in this frozen statue, that might elicit something like grief. As

_ Vertov had used the cinematic icon to occasion mourning for Lenin, Lewton used one to solicit tears for the war dead. Irena’s song on Christ-

mas Eve would not seem the most likely place, but it is one of a few scenes in Hollywood wartime cinema that give powerful expression to. :

rows otherwise unheard. | : |

grief and loss. Her song, so sad even now, is the engraved sound of sor-

This wartime poetry perhaps explains why Lewton reprised the char-. acter in a movie the following year. The grieving-woman icon appeared again memorably in the blind street singer played by Donna Lee in The

Body Snatcher (fig. 7). The film about grave robbing in 1831 Edinburgh | premiered in New York in May 1945, just as the war in Europe was end- — ing. The street singer is Lewton’s invention—built out of the brief men-

tion of a character named Jane Galbraith in the Robert Louis Stevenson | story on which the movie is based. She is also commanding. She appears four times in the film, and each time she is a dominant figure: director _ Robert Wise underlined her character’s name in his copy of the script at | each of her first three appearances. In these she is stationary; in two she

stands against a wall like.a pilaster or piece of engaged sculpture as she | sings her lament. In two of the scenes, moreover, including the film’s opening, she faces the camera directly in the theatrical style of Irena. In | | this first scene, she even arrests the movie’s flow, for we are led to her

frozen position by following a soldier and a gamboling young boy as | they move briskly down the street: having found her, the camera stops.

Lewton was responsible for turning Donna Lee into this tragic figure. _ She had won a singing contest at the 1939 World’s Fair at age ten, moved © to Hollywood in 1942, and was a novice at movies.™ In her only other

credited role, in RKO’s Sing Your Way Home (1945), she playsoneofa rambunctious group of show tune-singing American kid entertainers on

their way from Cherbourg to New York at the conclusion of the war, a | voyage with “plenty of high C’s on the high seas,” as the film historian -

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1 4 PALACE THEATRE

| | BALLYHOO. Place a man with a | bloodhound on the street, ostensibly |

trailing a wandering zombie. If a :

| bloodhound is not available, have the |

| man bannered and carrying a dark

lantern. : | |

| Figure 26. Street ballyhoo suggestion in I Walked |

with a Zombie press book, 1943. The Cinema-Tele- | vision Library, the University of Southern Califor- a

nia.

The Ghost Ship 85 “Have a man wearing a cat mask and carrying a picket sign march up and down in front of the pictorial display. . . . This is a swell stunt to attract attention to the front of your theatre.” ®* Like these figures, Craig’s blind man walks up and down performing a stunt or shtick—in this case,

a personification of the wizened old doom-foretelling salt—and sure enough, it is not long before the singer draws the attention of a passerby, Third Officer Merriam. Even his warning to the young officer—‘“she’s a bad ship”—fits the ballyhoo artist’s role to promote attendance by cau-

tioning people not to attend, because the show was too terrifying. When Wade’s character walks down the gangway at the end of the film

to find the street singer still there, we get confirmation that The Ghost | Ship’s start and finish truly are about moviegoing—the film shows a man

entering a structure from the street and then, sixty-eight minutes later, | at the conclusion of the movie, exiting onto the same street to find the same blind singer still there, exactly as if the man were a person entering — a theater and then leaving it at the film’s conclusion to find the ballyhoo artist still at work. Like the allusion to movie advertising in the shop window, The Ghost Ship’s ballyhoo is not deliberate, yet it is palpable all the same.

The Finn adds another layer to these front-of-the-theater effects. In one sense he is part of the drama specifically evoking the movie house and its personnel. After the references to street-side posters and ballyhoo, the little man standing at the top of the ship’s gangway reads as an usher, a ticket taker, a cashier—some figure, at any rate, poised at the thresh-

‘old between the street and the voyage on which the customer we have seen plunking down a coin is about to embark. The sailor’s glinting knife would be just another name for a flashlight motioning the theater patron vaguely back into the interior, and his mute response to the innocent customer’s earnest inquiries would be strangely true-to-life, judging by Far- ber’s June 1943 column about the difficulties of communicating with the unhelpful staffs of New York movie theaters: “The cashier, who doubles in Information, never hears your question because she is cut off from the world on all sides by glass, and either you are forced into sign language

or that right-angled stance that goes with talking up through the ticket slot.”7° In a more important sense, however, the Finn conjures the person Lew-

ton imagines one might find outside a lowbrow movie theater (besides its | own employees): a man of unknown intentions, possibly malevolent, yet | above all sad and alone. The street singer functions in the same way—as a reference to ballyhoo but also a sign of an indigent man in front of a the-

86 The Power of the Minor Actor

Figure 27. The Ghost Ship: Tom Merriam and the silhouette girl. | ater, waiting for the customers to enter and exit. Each suggests that the film somehow identifies the space outside the theater as a key site of alienation. Even Wade’s character is not exempt from the film’s wish to portray the sordid space in front of the movie palace, for so the final scene shows Merriam __ and a girl in silhouette, the two having just met (fig. 27). Though nominally

part of the plot and treated tamely, in compliance with the Production Code, the scene conjures a shady and fragile world of anonymous street liaisons, in keeping with the film’s condensed images of urban dereliction.

The effect of all this is startling. Depicting a sleazy sidewalk atmosphere like that outside an urban theater, the film creates a strange specificity out of improbable and utterly forgettable materials, matching Farber’s grandest claim for the underground movie—namely, that in it can

be found the “unheralded ripple of physical experience, the tiny mor- | bidly lifeworn detail” that savors of the real. The plot did not matter next

to these moments: “Time has dated and thinned out the story excitement, but the ability to capture the exact homely-manly character of forgotten locales and misanthropic figures is still in the pictures.”7! In such

moments there was no damning generality and no neat and tidy starstudded “rich creamy lather,” only the dirty specificity that sharply ap-

The Ghost Ship 87 proximated lived experience. And as Farber recognized, “The cutthroat atmosphere in the itch house” and its environs were the richest sources of down-and-out iconography and therefore bound to be reproduced in © the films themselves. “The screen image is often out of plumb, the house

lights are half left on during the picture, the broken seats are only a minor annoyance in the unpredictable terrain,” he wrote of certain Man-

hattan theaters. “Yet these action-film homes are the places to study Hawks, Wellman, Mann, as well as their near and distant cousins,” including Lewton.”

, Several factors about Lewton’s career support this idea. First, in the early 1920s Lewton worked as a reporter at various Manhattan newspapers including the New York Morning World, where he had become good friends with the hard-bitten journalist Donald Henderson Clarke, who went on to write the script for The Ghost Ship.” Clarke’s autobiography, Man of the World (1951), is filled with accounts of the sleazy Manhattan he relished covering for many years—the town of “poor, struggling thieves, dope peddlers, loft burglars, truck looters, smalltime gamblers,” of prostitutes who “swarmed along Broadway, Sixth Avenue, Forty-second, Twenty-third, and Fourteenth streets.””* Lewton’s brief

experiences alongside Clarke as a reporter clearly inform his fiction, since so much of it is set entirely or almost entirely in New York (The Fateful Star Murder, No Bed of Her Own, 4 Wives, A Laughing Woman, and This Fool, Passion) and since so much of it describes sordid situations: in The Fateful Star Murder, for example, sex in a taxicab and ina cheap Thirtieth Street hotel room “with a worn spot on the rug, the gray-

city.”” | ish pillow cases, the cracked water basin with dust caked inside.” No wonder the tawdry tale features an obvious homage to Clarke in the

character of Henry Deal, “one of the best newspaper reporters in the | | Lewton’s portrayal of lurid Manhattan extended into the unseemly in-

sides of the city’s movie palaces. In the best-known of his novels, No Bed of Her Own (1932), dedicated to Clarke, the heroine, Rose Mahoney, decides to give her feet a rest by going to a Columbus Circle theater to watch films. She buys a fifteen-cent ticket for the top balcony and heads upstairs, where she soon becomes bored by the movies and starts looking around her: Two usherettes, trim in their tightly-fitting uniforms, were gossiping. She watched them idly as one girl nudged the other, indicating the stairway with a nod of her head. A sailor, his little white cap perched over one ear, his hands buried deep in the breast pockets of his watch jacket, was climbing the last step.

88 The Power of the Minor Actor Rose watched the two girls and tried to overhear what they were saying. She caught the word, “mine,” and then watched one of the girls, a little, thin creature with carroty red hair, as she strolled up to the sailor, flashing her light before her. “This way please,” she ordered, and began to lead the way to the extreme left of the theatre, her light flashing on and off as she walked across the back of the auditorium. The sailor, rolling his shoulders, followed her. The light went off as the girl reached the dark corner where the last aisle and the back of the auditorium formed an angle. Rose tried to peer into the darkness and see what was going on. It was too dark. She could imagine, however, and it amused her. That was one way of making an extra dollar.”

The description, which extends to an account of the argument between the usherette and the sailor about payment, shows how the New York City “itch house” was as much a part of Lewton’s imagination as Farber’s. All this makes its way into The Ghost Ship’s opening. Clarke and Lewton aimed to conjure the gritty dock of the fictitious town of San Pedro, but to do so they drew on their copious experiences of down-andout Manhattan, including its movie theaters. There is another reason to think so. The Seventh Victim, another of

| Lewton’s films from 1943, literally represents the space outside a theater as the domain of brooding and fear, a direct contrast to the frivolous en-

tertainments taking place onstage. Near the conclusion of the movie, which Lewton filmed just three months before The Ghost Ship, Jacqueline Gibson (Jean Brooks) flees through the darkened alleys of Greenwich Village, pursued by a killer. Just as her assassin is about to strike, a stage backdoor opens, and a crowd of actors still in costume bursts into the alley, accompanied by laughter and bright light (fig. 28). The would-be murderer flees, and Jacqueline is escorted to safety by a jolly man clad in armor who the script says is “Gambrinus,” Roman god of fecundity and good humor.”” The frame reproduced here shows Jacqueline at far left as she accosts this actor, pleading for help. The scene not only makes explicit The Ghost Ship’s interest in the

, space outside a theater. It also explains why this exodus would be desirable in a home front culture of vapid entertainments. The scene in The

| Seventh Victim comments on comedy and tragedy—Jacqueline is a doomed figure, the chiaroscuro that gathers about her a contrast to the buoyant light of Gambrinus and the other carefree players. This division makes clear Lewton’s inchoate but powerful wish to escape the boisterous amnesia of the theater to discover and represent a more intense form of lived experience. The theater door may feature the masks of bothcom- __ edy and tragedy, but the frolicsome actors and the laughter we hear in-

ee

The Ghost Ship ' 89 . SE —s——

ae es eer net that capitalizing on the war is not only perfectly decent but downright _

- jackpot shrewd. Even as the singer maintains that “it still seems likea cheap and phony way to get ahead,” and even as we learn that the pilot with the monetary name of Pat Ransom comes from an old-money fam- | _ ily and is worth between four and five million dollars, these attempts to

| erase the crude commercial spirit in a bath of common decency and irreproachable old money do not scrub the stain the movie is all too happy

| to reveal. At the end of the war, getting ahead is the only waytogo. |

Bedlam , 145 The message is reprehensible by almost any standard. Even for those who grant the B-29s their vital strategic importance, there is no way to ignore their connection to the monumental loss of human life: the incendiary bombing of Tokyo in March 1945; the atomic bombs in Au_ gust, also dropped from B-29s; and the horrible fighting on islands such as Saipan and Iwo Jima in 1944 and 1945, conducted so that these tiny Pacific spots could serve as forward bases for the big bombers and their fighter escorts. But the point of The Bamboo Blonde is that it is wrong

| in 1946 to think of anything, even the war, as off-limits to commercial

| exploitation. Anything goes, as the executive producer Sid Rogell well , - knew, since he took the idea of a famous bomber and its pinup mascot from William Wyler’s pious war documentary, Memphis Belle (1944), | jazzing up Wyler’s sermon of the flak jackets and giving it a sales angle _

attuned to the new world of rampant product development. | | | Lewton’s fantasy of the new postwar world is more delicate but no less extravagant. Bedlam, shown in the same year and made by the same studio as The Bamboo Blonde and It’s a Wonderful Life, is as aware of

the new consumerism as both these movies, and Minnelli’s film as well. | Like Minnelli, Lewton intuitively looked to the history of bourgeois fairs == and pleasure grounds for an image of what postwar America would look like. Unlike Meet Me in St. Louis, however, Bedlam portrays a more

Capra-like hardening of morals. When Lord Mortimer and his guests laugh at the Gilded Boy’s fate, they are as cruel and insensitive to the suf-

fering of another person as, say, Nick the bartender in It’s a Wonderful _ Life when he sprays seltzer in the face of Mr. Gower, the drunken pan-

| handler, much to the amusement of the bar’s patrons. | Lewton’s debauched banqueters are wigged and waistcoated versions of a common theme of postwar films: brute greed and the coarsening of |

| public life in the new consumer culture. It was a rare work, like The _ Bamboo Blonde, that portrayed this outlandish capitalization as a decent thing. In other films such as Bedlam, the new culture was bombastic, outrageous, a desire beyond all bounds, as in the most famous portrayal of acquisitive lust in any movie from that time, Ann Blyth’s role as the “con- | sumer vampire” Veda Pierce in Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945) — or, as Graebner notes, in Humphrey Bogart’s maniacally greedy character Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948).*! In Bedlam the corpulent actor Billy House is the perfect postwar choice as the

pleasure-sated Lord Mortimer, so big that his horse-drawn carriage rocks and jiggles when relieved of his great weight.

Bedlam exaggerates postwar greed, but no more than it does the war ,

146 | | This Pretty World years. The grimness of the asylum is like a retrospectively embellished — view of the war’s privations and suffering, beheld from the vantage of peacetime. When the camera pulls back to reveal the sweep of misery in —

the hospital, the scene calls to mind not only the suffering of the | ~--- wounded but also some of the war’s most famous images of citizen solidarity and fetid confinement: the civilians of London spending the night in tube stations during the Blitz of 1940. The effect is still stronger when

we are treated to numerous scenes of the asylum at night, with the in- | mates sleeping or passing the time in idle pursuits. Again, they are shown © | in long shots that seem to draw on wartime photographs of those other

Londoners, the ones during the Blitz, crouching and snoozing and talk-

ing in a tube station’s cramped interior. | More generally, the squalor of the asylum—the sense of grievous, piteous injustice, of housing inmates in a stinking world of privation— | reads as a melodramatic treatment of the war’s hospitals and wards. The | cowering inmates, including young men such as Dan the Dog (Lewton’s

, friend Robert Clarke) and Tom the Tiger (Victor Holbrook), evoke the shell-shocked soldiers discussed in books such as The Veteran Comes Back (1944) and Psychology for the Returning Serviceman (1945) and —

featured in films such as Till the End of Time (1946) and The Blue , Dahlia (1946).22 Anna Lee, who plays Nell Bowen, visited wounded | American soldiers in hospitals in North Africa and Sicily for three | months in 1943 on a movie star tour, and the resonance between her

real-life wartime role and her ministrations to the afflicted of Bedlam adds to the sense that Lewton’s hospital bears the marks of the war years.”> (So does the odd fact that the last name of Lee’s character in Bed-

lam is also that of her character, Judith Bowen, the dutiful British ser-— vicewoman, in the 1942 war film Commandos Strike at Dawn.) Even the Production Code Office’s objections to Lewton’s original script—‘“thor- | oughly repellent and repulsive,” “completely unsuitable for public exhibition”—echo the War Department’s censorship of many photographs showing wounded, dead, or disturbed American servicemen.** “Chamber of Horrors,” the War Department’s name for its cache of censored _ photographs, coincidentally matches the original title of Lewton’s film,

Chamber of Horrors: A Tale of Bedlam.5 | |

, Bedlam treats the war in another exaggeratedly glum way—as a time of austere, self-sacrificing piety. Hannay (Richard Fraser), the Quaker mason, is an honest, God-fearing craftsman of measured temperament

: and solid morals. When we see him in prayer at the Society of Friends Meeting House, he and his fellow devotees evoke wartime depictions of |

Bedlam | | oe | «147 noble, frugal piety—the atmosphere described by Fussell in which virtu-

a ous people were expected “to teach lessons in correct thought and be_ havior.”?6 Rationing and restraint—always treated piously during the war years—are depicted even more reverentially as the war recedes. The | | idea of saving scrap metal and fat and buying war bonds comes to seem a matter of simple Quaker religiosity, and Hannay’s “thees” and “thous”

| are the language of quiet wartime moderation. Hannay wears simple _ dark clothes like Master Sims, and he, too, shows up black and looking out of place in the film’s pastel daytime scenes: neither ugly anger nor _ humble austerity has a place in the new world of rococo pleasure. With _ Hannay on-screen, it is as if we were back in the drab London at the start of Perfect Strangers, and no longer in the glimmer of the postwar city. Bedlam is structured around this sharp split: the chiaroscuro of self-ab-_ negation and sadism, on the one hand, and the pastel of plenty, on the

| other. What part does the Gilded Boy play in this division? The answer | is that he represents wartime tragedy in a peacetime world—the subject of Lewton’s next film, My Own True Love (1948), also set in London.

Made for Paramount after Lewton left RKO and filmed in summer 1947, , My Own True Love concerns Michael Heath (Philip Friend), an RAF pilot who lost a leg when he was shot down over Burma and spent three

| years in a Japanese prison camp before coming home, where his physical and mental anguish makes him an outcast. He has many reasons to

- be sad: we learn that he had married a Burmese woman and had a child with her before his capture, but that Japanese soldiers killed them both

before his eyes before transporting him to prison. Back in England Michael’s father, Clive Heath (Melvyn Douglas), and his father’s girlfriend, Joan Clews (Phyllis Calvert), have assumed that Michael died, but when he arrives back home, embittered and symbolically emasculated,

they all try to make peace. _ In many ways My Own True Love echoes Bedlam. When Clive and

Joan go to the Southampton hospital where Michael convalesces, they are shown into a dark hospital room full of patients, tended by a nurse.

The scene in which they enter the room is like the one inthe earlier film | when Nell Bowen is ushered into the asylum to see the inmates. The film | also reprises the strange, distant behavior of the Bedlam patients. | Michael goes out to dinner one night with some of Joan’s French friends,

| resistance fighters during the war who, the film makes clear, still bear the | mental scars of Nazi torture: it has made them irreverent, comical, even loony, in a sad way. “René, you’re a fool,” says one character, noting |

148 — , This Pretty World that the only place not on this odd Frenchman’s passport is the moon. Geraldine, another of the French friends, likes to tie knots in her macramé and confides, “I’m an incorrigibly useless person.” Each of these friends recalls Bedlam’s picturesque inmates, one of whom also __._ plays with skeins of twine, and like the inmates, these victims of the war

| remain outside the understanding of the postwar world. “You must | admit that his . . . chatter didn’t make a great deal of sense,” says Clive’s _ | disgusted friend Kittredge, played by Lewton’s friend Alan Napier, as he

sums up a disconcerting evening spent with René. As Kittredge fails to | understand the war’s still-suffering victims, so Clive fails to understand | his son’s ongoing bitterness. Only Joan perceives Michael’s grief, and her

compassion for the suffering young man is like Nell Bowen’s for the Gilded Boy. “He suffered imprisonment. He suffered the loss of a leg,

and he suffered . . . more than that.” | ,

| Two scenes emphasize a link across the films, and especially between

| Michael and the Gilded Boy. Each is captured in stills that closely match | the actual footage of My Own True Love. In one Michael prepares to sit __ . next to Joan on a crowded London bus (fig. 53). Standing there in the —

aisle holding the metal pole, he duplicates the upright, scepter-clasping | posture of Vernon’s character. Joan stands to acknowledge him in ex- | actly the way Nell rises from her seat at the Vauxhall banquet. Almost ! all the other passengers on the bus remain seated, like Lord Mortimer’s

guests. | a |

The second scene, at a lunchtime concert at the National Gallery (fig.

| 54), immediately precedes the one on the bus. It recalls the famous per- | formances of Myra Hess at the museum during the war.2”? The members of the audience are properly respectful and somber, all of them still as they listen to the music, and this is the greatest moment of immobility in

| My Own True Love, an ensemble curtain-call homage to the powers of , poignant stasis in all Lewton’s films. At the concert, the scene is the op- | posite of the profligate cheer of Lord Mortimer and his wine-soaked guests, a sober remembrance that helps us see just how forgetful the | Vauxhall fete is supposed to be. But it shares one key fact with the ear- | lier scene. Michael stands in the right foreground, directly beneath a copy of Giovanni da Bologna’s bronze sculpture of youthful Mercury _ clutching the caduceus. The script even calls for Michael to lean against

the bronze.*® The relation to the sculpture makes explicit Michael’s link | to the Gilded Boy, the London statue of a bronzed youth in Lewton’s pre- | vious film. Joan meanwhile stands at left center, like Nell Bowen a solitary figure in the crowd, attuned to the quieter note of solitary suffering

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