Val Lewton’s films are so exceptional, and I feel the need to say so much about them, that your wisest move might be to stop reading now, to access and watch one or both of these films, and then to come back to reading this essay, if seeing the films has made you want to find out more. It might not; Lewton’s films, though utterly remarkable, are not to everyone’s taste. As the White King said to Alice about a dry biscuit after you’ve been running, “I didn’t say there was nothing better, I said there was nothing like it.” And even if you find yourself not liking Val Lewton’s films, I suspect you will come away thinking that there is, indeed, nothing like them.
Nominally, Lewton was a producer, not a director. If you swear by the auteur theory at its purest, the first of these films is by Jacques Tourneur, the second by Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise. None of these men will be ignored in the discussion that follows, but it is worth noting that the two who had long, sustained careers as film directors, Tourneur and Wise, both frequently spoke in later years of their indebtedness to Lewton, and both tried to create, on their own, films that recaptured some of the extraordinary spirit Lewton brought to his RKO projects. Both of those later films—Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1957, renamed Curse of the Demon in U.S. release) and Wise’s The Haunting (1963)—have excellent qualities. But neither has the disconcerting magic with which Lewton’s RKO films were somehow infused. That magic came from a time and a place as well as a person. The time was World War II; the place was the B horror unit at RKO’s Gower Street studios in Los Angeles; and the person was the producer Val Lewton.
He was, as I said, not a director or screenwriter. Though he understood—and sometimes invented—the details of every shot, and though he knew, from retyping, and sometimes rewriting, every line of each screenplay, he declined any credit for those aspects of his work. (On the two occasions when he was obliged to take a screenwriting credit, he used the pen name Carlos Keith.)
He was a very odd duck to find in studio-era Hollywood—quiet, soft-spoken, cultured, well-read, introspective, and something of a workaholic. To many in the movie industry, he must have seemed like an emissary from a foreign culture, and in some respects he was. A Russian Jew who spent his early childhood in Yalta, he was born Vladimir Hofschneider, but when his mother left her husband and emigrated to Berlin with her two children, she reverted to her maiden name of Leventon. The family duly made a further migration to New York, where young Vladimir Leventon got Americanized into Val Lewton, growing up on his rich aunt’s estate near Rye.
If the phrase his rich aunt’s estate sounds like something out of a Russian play, it should: Vladimir Leventon’s aunt Adelaida was the famous actress Alla Nazimova, a star on Broadway and, in the 1910s and early ’20s, a silent-film star who produced her own movies. Visually innovative and with a strong intellectual sense of theater’s power, Nazimova had an extraordinary career. An early graduate of the Moscow Art Theatre’s school (she had made her professional debut playing a small role in the world premiere of The Cherry Orchard), after emigrating, she had become one of the stars who established writers like Ibsen and Chekhov as fixtures on the American stage. In her later years, in between small but significant movie roles, she had enhanced her résumé by playing Ranevskaya to Eva Le Gallienne’s Varya, and creating the role of Christine Mannon in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. Though she was never directly connected with Lewton’s film world, Nazimova’s image and her flamboyant theatricality hang over his films like faintly seen shadows. Strong-minded women, often troubled and restless, are recurring figures in his works.
Lewton himself grew up with the kind of paradoxical sensibility often found in Americanized children of Eastern European emigrants, sensitive, bookish, and poetic, but with a strong appetite for the jaunty trashiness of American popular culture. Early on, he tried his hand at hot pulp novels, one of which, No Bed of Her Own, actually became a bestseller and was later made into a film (which bore the more decorous title No Man of Her Own). But the early 1930s were no time for a novice to expect to earn a living as a novelist. Lewton’s mother, who through her own enterprise and her sister’s connections had gotten a job as a story editor, in turn got her son a job in MGM’s publicity office. (One of his tasks was to write novelizations of the company’s current films.) From this, he graduated to writing a screen treatment for the producer David O. Selznick. Soon he was working as Selznick’s chief assistant. Though enormously influential, this position featured no upward mobility and no screen credit. After helping Selznick through the difficult birth of Gone With the Wind (which he had urged Selznick not to produce, viewing the book as unfilmable kitsch), he looked for greener pastures.
An unverifiable anecdote of the time says that RKO executive Charles Koerner saw Lewton at a party and asked the hostess who he was. “Oh, that’s Val Lewton,” she said, “he writes horrible novels.” Koerner, who apparently thought she said “horror novels,” was delighted: RKO was looking for someone to head the B-picture horror unit the studio was setting up to compete with Universal, which was raking in buckets of cash from its recyclings of Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Wolf Man in various combinations. Whether the anecdote is true or not, Koerner offered the job and Lewton took it. There was no ill feeling in his prior office; Selznick negotiated his contract with RKO.
Whether RKO realized what it was getting is an open question. B pictures, intended to play at the bottom half of double bills in neighborhood movie houses, were made with minimal budgets ($150,000 maximum) and limited shooting time, to run no more than 75 minutes each. RKO’s marketing department picked through the trash in the story department’s files to find what they deemed salable horror titles, studio executives threw in ideas, and Lewton found himself being told to make a movie called Cat People.
He also found himself—or arranged to find himself—teamed with the young director Jacques Tourneur. The two had worked together as second-unit producer and director on the Revolutionary scenes of Selznick’s A Tale of Two Cities (1935), which supplied Lewton’s only onscreen credit while working for Selznick. (The tumbril taking Ronald Colman’s Sydney Carton to the guillotine also carries one of Lewton’s favorite actresses, Isabel Jewell.) Tourneur, like Lewton, was a longtime Hollywood figure with a European background; he had grown up partly in France, where his father, director Maurice Tourneur, had returned to make films (and would remain there throughout the Occupation, making films that included the Gothic horror tale The Devil’s Hand). Lewton’s and the young Tourneur’s sensibilities meshed, and Lewton’s desire to do something with more distinction than the usual scares to make the teenagers shriek found enthusiastic response in Tourneur.
They planned smartly and worked quickly. With DeWitt Bodeen, who provided the screenplay, they worked out a narrative that could pass for a traditional horror story but had its grounding in contemporary psychology and in the upheavals wrought by the war. The film became the first affirmation of Lewton’s belief that the horror in horror films was always better left unseen than put onscreen with globs of makeup and foam-rubber prosthetics. Cat People’s two most famously thrilling scenes—Alice’s creepy nighttime walk through Central Park and the swimming-pool sequence—prove how right he was.
The first of these scenes ends with a fright that is quickly revealed to be harmless: the sound of a crosstown bus’ brakes squealing. Audience reactions to the moment were so strong that it entered the unit’s working vocabulary. Thereafter, Lewton and his colleagues referred to any scary moment onscreen as a “bus.”
Though the resulting film might not have been what RKO executives had expected, they didn’t complain. Lewton and Tourneur had worked with exceptional efficiency and economy, reusing sets left over from big-budget pictures. Orson Welles’ fans sometimes wince a little when they see in Cat People the elaborate staircase to Irena’s apartment, which had previously belonged to the mansion at the center of Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons. (Lewton permits himself a small in-joke about it: When we, and Oliver, played by Kent Smith, see the staircase for the first time, he says, “I never cease to marvel at what hides behind a brownstone’s front.” The line is of course metaphoric too: Humans, like old brownstones, have their hidden surprises.) The film’s total cost was $134,000, a savings of $16,000 on the studio’s standard estimate for B budgets. Its runaway success grossed $4 million, and is generally supposed to have saved the always financially shaky RKO from bankruptcy.
Another way Lewton and Tourneur economized was a convenient match for their joint sensibility: They liked shadows. The darkness that shrouds many scenes in Lewton’s films not only conceals the extent to which the sets are only fragmentary, but also provides an atmosphere that is both potentially scary and morally equivocal. In this regard, Lewton is sometimes credited with having invented film noir, though it would probably be more accurate to say that he was among the first to capture aesthetically what was undoubtedly a mood of the moment. Having shakily emerged from a terrible depression, America was in the midst of an even more terrible war, and not always certain of the rightness of its choices, despite all the patriotic yelping to which many wartime films stooped. Compared to such shrill assertiveness, the morally ambivalent dark into which Lewton’s characters often retreat is a relief. “I like the dark,” Irena (Simone Simon) says in Cat People, “it’s friendly.” Undoubtedly her creators often felt the same way.
The war per se has little presence in Lewton films, but the characters’ moral dilemmas and doubts reflect those being enacted on a global scale outside the circumscribed world of each film. Because he was making what were officially categorized as horror movies, Lewton took up the supernatural as a way of challenging Americans’ resolute denial of the deep and turbulent inner life that could lead people—or by implication, whole nations—to contradiction, cruelty, and violence. “All this trouble has made me think,” Oliver declares at a key moment. “I don’t know what love really is. I don’t know if I love Irena.”
The motif will repeat itself in many of Lewton’s films. The nice, simple, clean-cut Americans who think everything can be easily settled find themselves in a chaotic world where the big questions cannot be so glibly resolved. Europeans, and others, who come bearing the burden of ancient histories and ancient superstitions, do not find life decisions such an easy call. It’s notable that Lewton made a point of including African-American actors—Theresa Harris in Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie, the calypso singer-actor known as Sir Lancelot in three films including The Curse of the Cat People—whom he and his directors treat as articulate human beings with reasonable things to say, and not as the stereotype cartoons that were near-universal in Hollywood’s treatment of Blacks at the time. Harris’s role in Cat People, as a friendly but sassy waitress in the coffee shop near Oliver’s office, is not large (and she’s uncredited), but it’s enough to establish her as an independent human being, with concerns and ideas of her own. The same is true for the other small-part players: the Bible-quoting zookeeper, the chatty woman who runs the pet store, the overly helpful desk clerk and manager at Alice’s residence. These people are white, but without white privilege; Lewton took care that they would bring more than a cartooned eccentricity to the world of his films, so that their presence would deepen rather than flatten its background.
Mentioning the pet shop owner reminds me that rewatching Cat People makes clear the enormous influence Lewton’s films exercised on Alfred Hitchcock, in small specific ways as well as in the creation of an overall atmosphere. Hitchcock is known to have admired Lewton (whom he must have met when both men were working for David Selznick); he has said that the startling shower scene in Lewton’s The Seventh Victim was a particular inspiration for the very different shower scene in Psycho 17 years later. Among similar inspirations in Cat People: The reaction of the birds when Irena comes into the pet shop is an obvious precursor for the analogous scene in The Birds; and the nightmarish walk through Central Park, where the camera shows us first Alice’s legs and then Irena’s, apparently stalking her, undoubtedly inspired the similar use of the two men’s legs at the opening of Strangers on a Train. I should emphasize that this is not a matter of mere craven imitation. Hitchcock’s British films show that he was already an accomplished master well before Cat People appeared, and he uses the devices he borrowed from Lewton in very different ways and for very different purposes. It is simply the old case of an artist seizing on a good idea and “making it his own”; that is how artists work. That Lewton’s films supplied Hitchcock and others with such a profusion of good ideas is the point. His films are a repository of influences.
Lewton and Tourneur designed Cat People for Simone Simon, a French star who had had a bumpy time in Hollywood. Imported by Twentieth Century Fox after her international success in Marc Allégret’s Lac aux dames (1934), she had gotten a huge publicity buildup, in the midst of which the studio discovered that it had no roles to fit her abilities and that her then-limited English severely circumscribed their options. She gained a reputation for being temperamental, probably due at least in part to language difficulties. After making little impression in a series of mediocre Fox films by mediocre directors, she went back to France—where she immediately scored a triumph in Jean Renoir’s La bête humaine (1938). She returned to Hollywood under pressure of necessity—she was Jewish—and she wound up at RKO, which was, like Fox, at a loss as to how to “place” her: Other than her work with Lewton, her only notable appearance for RKO was as a temptress in William Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941).
Lewton and Tourneur literally spoke her language. Like all cultivated Russians, Lewton had grown up knowing French; Tourneur had been born in Paris and had in the early 1930s even made movies there. And Simon’s English had become less of an obstacle. Lewton was also the only American producer to find a use for Simon’s attractive singing voice—she had been an operetta star on the Paris stage before going into films—with her eerie humming of a folk tune in Cat People and her rendition of a French Christmas carol in its sequel.
Something else about Simon that may help explain why Hollywood hacks had viewed her as temperamental: She practices a kind of peculiarly European understatement that might have puzzled American directors looking for a more extroverted emotional expression, or even for outright indicating. Simon could easily radiate emotion—as her scenes with the little girl in The Curse of the Cat People readily demonstrate—but her contained quality was of particular use to Lewton, whose interest always lay in the inner life behind the mask. Irena, the heroine of Cat People, is a Serbian woman haunted by the superstitious legends told in the small village of her childhood. We hear nothing about her adult life or what drove her to come to America, but for movie audiences in 1942, it was easy to read images of much more contemporary horrors into the ancient legends that Irena narrates. Lewton’s gift for balancing the modern story (about a woman traumatized by war who needs psychiatric help) with the supernatural one (about a woman who fears if she gives herself to a man she will turn into a vicious panther and claw him to death) rings out like a modern-music trumpet call, a bitonal fanfare announcing a theme that will trouble his audiences for seven movies to come.
The first few scenes of Cat People suggest a different, more “normal,” story altogether. An attractive young woman, presumably an artist, sits in the Central Park Zoo, repeatedly sketching a panther as it paces back and forth in its cage. She is dissatisfied with the sketches and keeps tearing them off her pad. A handsome young man, intrigued by her activity, intrudes on her—in a way that might be thought inappropriate today but was common enough in 1940s film conventions. She invites him to her apartment for tea, which also would seem unlikely today. In the course of their conversation, we learn about Irena (Simon) and Oliver (Smith), and she makes the significant remark, “You might be my first real friend.” A fadeout and a change to darker lighting reveals Oliver asleep on Irena’s couch, with her sitting close beside him. A ’40s audience reading this, accustomed to the rules laid down by the Hays Code, would assume that the two have had sex, which the dialogue immediately reveals not to be the case. The hints we have had that something is wrong with Irena, initially ascribable to her being foreign and an artist, will grow in number as the action progresses. At Oliver’s office, his employer (Jack Holt) and his assistant, Alice (Jane Randolph), both practice, like him, the peculiarly American kind of direct statement that clearly contradicts what the speaker is actually feeling. Alice masks her disappointment at learning that Oliver is in love with another woman by expressing an unconvincing pleasure at the thought.
As Oliver’s relationship with Irena progresses, we learn more about its limitations and receive more hints of Irena’s growing disturbance, particularly when she learns that Oliver has been confiding their problems to Alice, who has recommended the psychiatrist Oliver sends Irena to consult, Dr. Judd (Tom Conway). As more signs of Irena’s troubled condition occur, they get increasingly entangled with cat imagery of uncertain provenance: Is that an actual big cat or just a shadow prowling Oliver’s office when he and Alice work late? What exactly causes the sound that makes Alice scream in the swimming-pool scene? What looks like tangible evidence of dangerous cats—the dead sheep in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, Alice’s bathrobe torn to shreds—could admit of multiple explanations irrelevant to Irena’s problem. In the climactic violence—brought on by a wholly unethical act on its victim’s part—we can momentarily glimpse something that looks like the shadow of a cat, but we can’t be sure; too much is happening too fast. Even at the very end, we can’t be entirely certain what we’re seeing. The movie invites us to doubt the visible world even as it asks us to challenge and question our inner worlds.
Lewton and Tourneur made two more movies together, I Walked With a Zombie and The Leopard Man. Studio executives handed down the titles, based on properties RKO owned for which its marketers perceived box office potential. The former film, the more remarkable of the two, gave rise to what is probably the best-known uncorroborated anecdote about Lewton’s approach: He called his staff together, shutting all the windows in the production cottage (not something commonly done in sunshiny Los Angeles before air conditioning) so that no one passing by on the lot could overhear. Then he announced, “They think we’re making something called I Walked With a Zombie, but we’re going to fool them. We’re going to make Jane Eyre and set it in Haiti.” Which is, in substance, pretty much what he and Tourneur did. The studio rewarded Tourneur for his brilliant beginnings—The Leopard Man, was a more equivocal success, but all three made money—by promoting him to A features, which priced him out of Lewton’s budgets. Offered a budget increase if he would work with more established directors, Lewton declined. His solution was to look for young, untried directors whose minimal salaries he could afford. Two of them, whom he found on RKO’s editing staff, went on to substantial directing careers: Mark Robson, who directed five films for Lewton, and Robert Wise, who might be said to have directed two and a half. When RKO began pressuring Lewton to turn out a sequel to the hugely successful Cat People, Robson being unavailable, Lewton’s first choice fell on the relatively inexperienced Gunther von Fritsch, who had directed only a small number of short films. It seems to have been an unhappy choice: The pressure to churn out B films rapidly on limited budgets was apparently too much for von Fritsch, who fell grievously behind schedule. He was dismissed and Wise, whose work Lewton knew, was called to step in.
The result bears two directors’ credits, and trying to guess who directed which scenes without access to studio records would be a futile game. Suffice it to say that the finished film bears witness to Lewton’s impress in that it looks like the product of a single—and singular—sensibility.
Both Wise and Robson have an equivocal reputation with cineastes, because, as editor and assistant editor respectively, they had been responsible for the extensive and damaging cuts the studio demanded on Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons. (Parts of the Amberson mansion will again show up in the “old dark house” in The Curse of the Cat People.) Additionally, Wise had shot, and Robson had edited, the retakes RKO demanded to give Ambersons a more upbeat ending. Lewton, whose demands were less grandiose than Welles’, seems to have gotten on well with both men; after The Curse of the Cat People, he made two more pictures with Wise, including another of his finest works, The Body Snatcher.
How much oversight RKO executives exercised on The Curse of the Cat People is also hard to guess. It’s scarcely imaginable that they had any foreknowledge of what they were getting when Lewton screened the rough cut for them. It was wartime, the demand for new films to keep the public distracted was unremitting, and perhaps B horror movies were a less than vital concern. No doubt the studio expected a cheesier reworking of motifs from the first Cat People, with maybe a touch of Lewtonian class. What they got was something quite different. In Lewton’s typically contrarian fashion, when ordered to make a film called The Curse of the Cat People, he turned out a work with no curse and no cat people in it.
It is, however, a sequel in the most literal sense: Following the traumatic events with Irena, Oliver and Alice (once again Smith and Randolph) have gotten married; they now live in a picture-perfect home in suburban Tarrytown with their 6-year-old daughter, Amy (Ann Carter). In place of the stereotypical bossy-but-motherly Black housekeeper, they employ a Jamaican manservant (Sir Lancelot in his third film for Lewton). Irena, the traumatized Serbian refugee haunted by ancient legends, being gone from their lives, does not appear, but lonely Amy, a dreamy and imaginative child, badly adjusted to her peer group, has seen a photo of Irena and learns her name from Alice and Oliver’s conversation, so that Simone Simon gets to appear, dressed as a fairy princess from a child’s storybook, and declare to the astonished little girl, “I’m your friend.” (The echo of Irena’s talk about friendship in Cat People is surely intentional.)
The movie that follows—scripted, like Cat People, by DeWitt Bodeen—is largely a realistic psychological drama, pitting little Amy’s need for her imaginary friend against the parental pressure that insists she face reality, admit the “friend” to be a fantasy, and instead play with other children like a “normal” well-adjusted child. A subplot, which entwines itself with this main story at the film’s climax, shows Amy befriended by another lonely soul with an active fantasy life, the elderly actress Julia Farren (Julia Dean), an invalid kept a semi-prisoner in the “old dark house” she inhabits with her unhappy daughter, Barbara (Elizabeth Russell). Julia has a senile fixation that Barbara is an “impostor,” and that her “real” daughter died at age 6 (Amy’s age). The fraught parent-child situation in the spooky Farren mansion becomes a distorting-mirror version of the increasing tension in Oliver’s cheery modern suburban home, to which the casting adds extra weight. Lewton apparently relied on Russell to play inexplicably malevolent-seeming roles; she also has a significant cameo in the original Cat People, as the woman who addresses Irena in Serbian as “my sister,” and also appears in three other Lewton films. Dean, making her sound-film debut after a long stage career, came equipped to supply her dotty character’s 19th-century flair: her stage experience had included touring with Joseph Jefferson and James O’Neill, and she had worked for most of her era’s leading Broadway producers, including George Broadhurst, George C. Tyler, and David Belasco. (Her character’s name, Farren, harks back to an even earlier era: Nellie Farren had been one of London’s reigning musical comedy stars in the late 19th century.)
Dean gets to show her stage skills when her character entertains Amy by acting out the legend of the Headless Horseman. The movie is set in Tarrytown, near where Lewton himself grew up, and the script is shot through with local references—it begins with Amy and her schoolmates being taken on an excursion to Sleepy Hollow—and with autobiographical material that Bodeen could only have culled from Lewton himself, including the “magic mailbox” hollow tree which is the source of Amy’s birthday-party mishap. Steeped in the traumas and discomfitures of an imaginative child, the film shimmers with the poetry and the personal pain of a child’s private world.
The studio may have been perplexed at being handed this phenomenon—they refused to let Lewton change the title on which they had pinned their marketing hopes—but at least one segment of the educated audience was not so puzzled: social scientists. During the late 1940s and 1950s, the film became standard viewing in college child-psychology classes, particularly after 1950, when the sociologist David Riesman, with two colleagues, published the bestselling study The Lonely Crowd, an examination of the ways America was evolving from an “inner-directed” culture, in which individuals derive their norms from their parents, to an “other-directed” one, in which, under the growing influence of the mass media, their norms are shaped by the need to conform to peer-group pressure for the sake of “social adjustment.” Riesman devotes several pages of his tome to the many points in The Curse of the Cat People that match those his study sought to make. It certainly made The Curse of the Cat People the only picture ever classed as a B horror film to hold such a distinction. To view the movie after reading Riesman’s astute analysis of its implications is to admire doubly both the richness of Lewton’s work and the strength of its intellectual underpinnings.
Lewton and Bodeen set out Amy’s confusion not only by dramatizing the seeming contradiction in her father’s demands—the “magic mailbox” isn’t real, but it’s OK to make a wish when you blow out the candles on a birthday cake—but also by building a magpie’s nest of superstition and folklore in which the story of that confusion could thrive with natural ease: children’s rhyming games, fairy tales, the servant’s Jamaican folk songs, the legend of Sleepy Hollow, and even a battle of conflicting Christmas carols. When Oliver invites carolers into the house and they sing “Shepherds, Shake Off Your Drowsy Sleep,” Amy hears, in the garden, Irena singing the French carol “Il est né, le divin enfant.”
In a further affirmation of Lewton’s assurance in handling his material, he has Miss Callahan (Eve March), Amy’s teacher, explain Amy’s condition to Oliver by citing a book that any Teachers College graduate of the time was likely to have read: The Inner World of Childhood, by Frances Wickes (1927), the 1931 reprint of which carried a foreword by no less than Carl Jung.
What Miss Callahan doesn’t say, although she’s heard the story from Alice, is that the source of Oliver’s pressure on Amy to conform is his own anxiety: He has not yet fully recovered from his trauma over Irena—another sense in which The Curse of the Cat People is indeed a true sequel to its predecessor. (And Oliver is actually the only person to use the word curse, complaining that it feels as if Irena has left his house under one.) Despite Alice’s gentle disapproval, Oliver has filled their home with memories of Irena, including the photograph that Amy finds. (Her questions drive Oliver to search through his desk drawers and burn all such photographs.) Hanging prominently on the living room wall is a reproduction of Goya’s full-length portrait of a small boy, Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga, with his pet birds and cats; the cats are gazing hungrily up at a magpie which holds the artist’s calling card in its beak. This, we learn, was Irena’s favorite painting. (Interestingly, the actual painting, owned by the wealthy stockbroker Jules Bache, was not yet on public view when the film was made; Bache left it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on his death in 1944.) The picture of the wide-eyed child, surrounded by the warring birds and cats, evokes many images from the earlier film as well as providing a metaphor for this one.
Two invaluable members of the support team that enabled Lewton to ride triumphantly through the directorial problems on The Curse of the Cat People were cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, who shot five Lewton films, including both this and its predecessor, and composer Roy Webb, who scored seven of them, including these two. Both men worked with the exactitude that low budgets demand and with the subtlety that was Lewton’s hallmark. It says something about the team’s group sensibility that, though both Musuraca and Webb have literally hundreds of credits each, many of them on notable films, what always comes to mind first when discussing their artistry is their work with Lewton. In the shabby precincts of RKO’s B budgets, using secondhand scenery and test-marketed titles, Lewton and his crew were able to create something so extraordinary that, if it were not art, it would have to be called magic.
When Lewton showed signs of wanting to break away from the horror genre, RKO thought to lure him back within its boundaries by dangling in front of him what executives perceived as a box-office prize: They proudly announced that they had signed Boris Karloff to appear in his next three films. Karloff, weary and fed up with Universal Pictures’ monster-meets-monster cycle after years of sweltering under the makeup of Frankenstein’s creature, was desperate for a change. A literate man and serious actor who despised the junk he had been doing, he later said that Lewton had literally saved his career, and rescued his soul. The two men became fast friends, and the three films they made together offered Karloff acting opportunities of a kind that had not occurred at Universal since Karloff’s early outings with James Whale. The Body Snatcher (1945), directed by Wise, is the most distinguished of the three films—a work that is both morally searching and genuinely chilling in the way one expects horror films to be.
That one can call a horror film distinguished is an anomaly. The adjective applies to very few films in the genre besides Lewton’s. The directors he nurtured—Tourneur, Robson, and Wise—all went back to the genre in later years, trying to duplicate in other circumstances the effect their films with Lewton had produced. But none of them could re-create the pressure-cooker circumstances in which Lewton’s artistry had so improbably flourished. The three of them went on to lavish but artistically perhaps less than enthralling careers. (Wise in particular gained immortality as director of two giant blockbusters based on Broadway musicals, West Side Story and The Sound of Music.)
Lewton himself, after parting ways with RKO, found only misfortune (some of it brought on by Robson and Wise, but that story is too long to tell here). Years of struggle with his circumstances at RKO had weakened his heart. He died in 1951, aged only 46, his RKO masterworks having been followed by a string of misfires and frustrations. They detract not at all from his achievements, which have been enshrined as a touchstone for anyone who cares about film—an object lesson in what a producer can do while the writing, acting, and directing are done by others. Lewton would have been the first to give his collaborators credit, but all of them would concede, as most of them said in later years, that what they had worked on in that brief intense time were “Val Lewton films.”
Read more Feingold on Old Movies for Theater Lovers:
Preston Sturges’ ‘The Palm Beach Story’
Charles Laughton’s ‘The Night of the Hunter’
Clarence Brown’s ‘Intruder in the Dust’
Rouben Mamoulian’s ‘Love Me Tonight’
Ernst Lubitsch’s ‘To Be or Not to Be’
Marcel Carné’s ‘Children of Paradise’
William Wyler’s ‘Counsellor-at-Law’
