As a film programmer myself, I am sometimes led by film programs to explore byways of cinema that would not otherwise come to my notice. Two recent examples are a Film Forum (NYC) series on Otto Preminger, and a Turner Classic Movies feature on Val Lewton -- with both I just scratched the surface without surprising any urge to dig deeper.
Preminger is definitely notable for his cussed independence and attraction to controversy, and ultimate ability to work on his own terms, but I do not engage with his directorial sensibility. By reputation his keywords are “objectivity” and “ambiguity” -- which are somewhat at odds with his dominating personality. Certainly his career has enough different stages to attract critics of different stripes. I remember being impressed by Advice and Consent (1963) and The Cardinal (1964) in my teen years, as well as two classics I caught up with on video, Laura (1944) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959). Following Film Forum, I watched a few more on DVD but turned up no strong recommendations, though each is not without interest.
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) is a noir subject but not in noir style, the shadows are within the characters rather than within the frame. Dana Andrews is a detective with Oedipal rage, who kills a suspect and courts his wife (Gene Tierney, in a typical Preminger pairing in that period), but his behavior is observed dispassionately, so he’s as hard to take sides for or against as Jimmy McNulty on The Wire.
Angel Face (1952) has another Freudian howler in Jean Simmons, as the title character with a maniacal crush on her father, a femme as fatal as they come, who enlists a bemused Robert Mitchum into her schemes -- the supposedly shocking ending seems a foregone conclusion.
The Man with the Golden Arm (1956) was a breakthrough depiction of heroin addiction, but seems old hat now, just a small extension of boundaries from The Lost Weekend. Frank Sinatra is quite good as the junkie card dealer who wants to become a drummer, held back by a scheming shrew of a wife but encouraged by adoring girlfriend Kim Novak (surprisingly believable). So we can leave it that Otto Preminger is a good filmmaker, but not a director I feel compelled to attend to.
And I might say the same about Val Lewton. A generous appreciation of the low-budget producer as auteur is offered in the new documentary, Val Lewton: Man in the Shadows (2007), presented by Martin Scorsese and directed by Kent Jones (with whom I have had a friendly acquaintance). In conjuction with its premiere, TCM programmed a Val Lewton retrospective, which I sampled selectively, and determined that Lewton was indeed more than just a predecessor of b-movie mogul Roger Corman -- he was an estimable artist of limited means. His films may transcend genre and budget but are still limited by it; at this stage of film history, they’re definitely more than a goof but still require a large suspension of belief not to laugh at.
Cat People (1942) is yet another Freudian howler, complete with villainous shrink. Simone Simon is suitably kittenish as the Serbian immigrant with an odd family tree, who fears that if she gives way to passion her feral forebears will manifest in her. Given the crazy premise, the film is surprisingly subtle in its use of suggestion for suspense, and its failure to take sides for or against the characters’ fantasies, except for that really creepy psychiatrist. Like Corman with Scorsese and others, Lewton gave Jacques Tourneur his first chance as director with this film.
He also got Robert Wise started with The Curse of the Cat People (1944), an ingenious twist to the requirement of a sequel after the earlier film’s success. This film almost dispenses with the horror genre altogether, in presenting the fantasy world of a young girl, though the threats seem real enough. To me it ranks with The Night of the Hunter as an evocation of childhood fears. Simone Simon returns as the imaginary friend of the young daughter of her former husband and the woman he has married after the action of the first film. Though the thread is tenuous, the films are connected, but I would definitely recommend this sequel even if you haven’t seen the originial.
Faced with the demand to make a film with zombies, Lewton turned to Charlotte Bronte and remade Jane Eyre in Haiti as I Walked with a Zombie (1943), directed by Tourneur. It’s a film that weaves a visual spell out of simple elements, and doesn’t overstay its welcome at 69 minutes, but still the atmosphere it creates does not linger in the mind, dissipating into airy nonsense.
Lewton’s aspirations are even more on view in The Body Snatcher (1945), which he adapted himself from a story by R.L. Stevenson. Boris Karloff is a “resurrection man,” digging up bodies for medical professor Henry Daniell, and both familiar faces give nuanced performances, with a bit role for Bela Lugosi to give the film genre appeal. But the approach to the unhappy marriage of medical science and ghoulish means is amazingly serious. Director Wise offers a fair evocation of Edinburgh in 1831, and the only low-budget flaw in the film is the inept actor who plays the young doctor in the middle of the action. Otherwise it’s far from a laughable period piece.
The Seventh Victim (1943) wears its literary aspirations on its sleeve, opening with an epigraph from John Donne, and taking place mostly in a building with a restaurant call The Dante. The story anticipates Rosemary’s Baby -- about a fashionable young woman in the clutches of a Manhattanite devil cult -- but first time director Mark Robson is no Roman Polanski. It’s easy to see why some say it’s Lewton’s most personal film, or his masterpiece. But neither the actors nor the film itself have the resources to bring it off, to make sense out of a dense and convoluted story, heavy with dread and ambiguity.
One film I did have to laugh at was Paul Schrader’s remake of Cat People (1982), in which the Freudian subtext is made risibly overt. Nastassja Kinski is again suitably kittenish, and Malcolm McDowell heads a cast that seems amazingly familiar in retrospect, but the film makes no sense at all in its heat and gore -- the horror seen rather than imagined -- yet it retains a strange attraction. So do you laugh at Nastassja in her birthday suit padding like a panther through a forest at night, or do you have some other somatic reaction? Your call.
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