VAL LEWTON AT R.K.O.
by CHRISTOPHER WITTY
IN THE EARLY 1940s film studio RKO’s new business-minded head of production, Charles Koerner, planned to repeat the success of Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein films, but not their reliance on literary adaptations. Thus Koerner assigned his man, Val Lewton, to the B-unit to produce a string of low budget horror films, giving Lewton a title to work with, thought up and designed simply to attract an audience. The first of these titles, Cat People , was created because “nobody has done much with cats.”
Since 1942, Cat People has gone on to be recognised as one of the most influential horror films of all time. Its less-is-more approach to terrifying audiences became a model for filmmakers in the horror genre until relaxed censorship allowed more graphic violence. It was a method Lewton and his directors (Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson and Robert Wise) would repeat with each successive film, becoming synonymous with Lewton films. During the ‘60s and ‘70s Lewton drew more attention, chiefly from Martin Scorsese, who cites Lewton, alongside that other great horror maestro Mario Bava, as a major influence. Critic-turned-filmmaker Paul Schrader, though somewhat dismissive of the original, chose to remake Cat People in 1982. Joe Dante, one of the more notable genre directors throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, paid lip service to Lewton, heaping praise especially upon 1944’s sequel The Curse of the Cat People . Contemporary imaginers like Guillermo del Toro and Neil Gaiman are also quick to acknowledge a debt to Lewton and his unique brand of horror. To appreciate his unique-ness, it's important to emphasise the fact that he was not a film director, but creator and producer, fulfilling the roles which usually earn a filmmaker a writer-director credit.
Thematically, Lewton’s films nestle somewhere in the liminal spaces found in psychological terror. His personal phobias influenced and informed how characters acted towards one another, and especially how they reacted to situations beyond their comprehension. A desire to face that which scares us is a key component in Lewton’s stories, even when we only dare face it enough through parted fingers. Throughout his films are moments Lewton recalled to memory from a childhood spent nurturing an already fertile imagination. These seemingly innocuous memories nevertheless imbued his films with a unique quality that can only come from an individual’s personal journey.
Born in 1904 in Yalta, Russia, Lewton arrived in America in 1909. With his father absent, he was raised by two strong, imperious women: his mother Nina and his aunt Adelaide, a successful actress on Broadway and in American silent movies under her stage name Alla Nazimova.
A voracious reader from an early age, Lewton absorbed the classics alongside the Russian fairy tales that would go on to significantly impact his work. Nina, who by 1928 was head of the story department at MGM, got her son a job writing publicity for the studio. It was here he was trained to write radio dramas and serials before embarking on a career as a writer of pulp novels for Vanguard Press.
In between churning out five books per year under contract, Lewton's short story ‘The Bagheeta’ was published in Weird Tales in 1930. Did Lewton recall his story in writing Cat People ? Reading it now, it’s easy to see how it could easily have been adapted into a screenplay, with its descriptions of a “breeze, straying through the pine boughs, [striking] deep soughing chords” as “some current of the upper air swept the cloud from before the moon’s face.” Classic horror sound and imagery.
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AT MGM LEWTON SERVED under David O. Selznick for eight years, and learned filmmaking. When he signed to RKO Pictures in 1942, he used his new skills to give his films a professionalism absent in most B-movies. Lewton brought together a team of dependable talents, including writer DeWitt Bodeen, cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, editor Mark Robson, composer Roy Webb, and director Jacques Tourneur. Under advisement from Tourneur, who felt that true terror is best experienced when grounded in a familiar setting, Lewton and Bodeen ditched their plan to adapt Algernon Blackwood's story ‘Ancient Sorceries' for one of Lewton's own. His idea for Cat People centred on a love triangle, incorporating themes dealing with phobias, jealousy, and fear of ancient folklore.
With Tourneur, Lewton developed a formula that made sure every character, from protagonist to background extra, was recognisable to the audience–clothes, living and work spaces, and dialogue were designed to reflect the everyday lives of people. The hackneyed masquerading of Universal’s monsters who inhabited the castles and villages was old hat. Lewton wanted horror implied through the use of sound and shadows, understanding that emotions can be wrought more effectively in the minds of an audience than through the use of make-up, special effects or expository dialogue, especially when working to a tight schedule under a small budget.
Cat People tells the story of Irena Dubrovna, a Balkan-born emigre wooed by Oliver, an American everyman ignorant of his new bride’s powers of transformation. In two of the film’s most celebrated sequences, Alice Moore, Irena’s love rival, is stalked by an unseen predator. In the first, we see Alice passing in and out of the light as she walks under street lamps, the sound of her stalker close behind. Throughout the scene, Alice’s predator remains invisible, keeping to the shadows as it draws closer and closer until…a bus suddenly pulls into view, the sound of its brakes giving the audience both a jump scare and the relief of the familiar. It’s an astonishing piece of filmmaking, and one that led Stephen King to declare Cat People the best horror film of the 1940s.
The second sequence–the only one that Paul Schrader revisited almost shot for shot for his inferior 1982 remake because, by his own admission, he couldn’t see how it could be bettered–is the swimming pool scene. Alice, stripped down to a swimsuit and vulnerable as she treads water, struggles to retain her senses as the light from the water casts shadows across the walls and ceiling. Growls can be heard from somewhere deep within the building. When the predator reveals itself in the form of Irena, we are forced to question our fears alongside Alice’s–have we been overreacting, allowing imagination to take control, or does Irena, mocking, pose a real threat?
It's a duality that Lewton plays on expertly, warning us to face our fears (something his characters attempt repeatedly), as dismissing them out of hand may come back to haunt us.
Another example of this can be found in The Leopard Man (1943), in which a young girl pleads with her mother to let her stay home instead of running an errand to buy flour. The girl is fearful of the stories passed down of a beast roaming the countryside that may have powers of transformation. Ignoring her daughter’s pleas, the mother forces the girl outside, bolting the door behind her–a decision she regrets when she later hears her daughter being butchered from the other side of the door. In another example of Lewton’s power of suggestion, he focuses on the mother as she attempts to unbolt the door from the inside. A puff of flour seeps through a crack in the door, as we hear the daughter’s pleas turn to screams. Because of this perspective choice we’re left not feeling horrified (to be horrified implies being repulsed), but sharing the fear and guilt felt by the mother.
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INBETWEEN Cat People and The Leopard Man came I Walked with a Zombie (1943). With its provocative title bestowed on Lewton by Koerner, cinemagoers expected cheap thrills and lurid horror. What they got instead was an intelligent, oblique take on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre .
Lewton’s idea to relocate Brontë’s classic to a plantation on the island of San Sebastian was inspired. To ensure the film hit the exact note, all involved were well versed on Haitian voodoo practices, resulting in an authenticity that avoided Hollywood’s usual stereotypical pitfalls. Daring to add weight to its themes, I Walked with a Zombie couples the very real horror of slavery with the prejudicial fear of foreign customs, at once displaying a forward-thinking approach to horror without losing the gothic tonality of its source material.
Frances Dee plays Betsy, the nurse assigned to look after the catatonic wife of Paul Holland (Tom Conway), a wealthy plantation owner. While the Holland family (Paul, wife Jessica, half-brother Wesley, and mother Edith) blame their woes on voodoo, they come to realise that it is their anxieties and secrets that are their own undoing. The plantation house is lit to look as though the family are trapped behind bars, a reversal on who is being held prisoner on the island–is it the white plantation owners or the slaves? As usual with Lewton’s films, there is a depth to every character, each carrying with them their own view on proceedings, from Betsy’s blindly naïve comment to the black carriage driver that “they certainly brought you to a pretty place,” to the calypso singer who reveals the family’s secrets through song.
Lewton once stated that his mission at RKO was to make A-pictures on a B-movie budget, and with Tourneur he achieved exactly that. Koerner wasn't blind to what Lewton was trying to achieve, but it was Tourneur who was promoted to the A-list, while Lewton remained in the B-unit. And so, for his next two pictures, The Seventh Victim and The Ghost Ship , both released in 1943, Lewton chose his editor Mark Robson to direct.
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POORLY RECEIVED on its release, The Seventh Victim is now regarded as one of Lewton’s finest films. Mary Gibson, a young girl taken from her comfortable boarding school environment, is forced to search the streets of Manhattan when she learns that her elder sister, Jacqueline has gone missing. Gathering together a group connected to Jacqueline in varying degrees (her psychotherapist, her husband, her neighbour), she discovers that her sister is a member of a Satanic cult called the Palladists. Scripted by DeWitt Bodeen and an uncredited Lewton, The Seventh Victim is an assured directorial debut by Robson and something of a minor masterpiece, with the recurring themes of paranoia and reality-versus-superstition that marked the Tourneur pictures. It also has one of the most downbeat endings you could find in a film made under the impeding authority of the Production Code.
Most notable in The Seventh Victim is a shower scene that remains inexplicably overlooked whenever Hitchcock’s Psycho comes up for discussion. Though, admittedly, it lacks the technical brilliance that ensured Norman Bates’ frenzied attack on Marion Crane implanted itself in cinemagoers’ memories, Lewton’s low-key handling of a woman’s violation is just as unnerving.
Also of note is Tom Conway’s reprisal of his role as Doctor Judd from Cat People , creating with The Seventh Victim a brief internal chronology in Lewton’s oeuvre. With the hindsight of witnessing Judd’s attempted manipulation and subsequent fate at the hands of Irena in Cat People , Judd’s apparent trustworthiness in The Seventh Victim comes under question in the viewer’s mind, hinted at when he chooses to walk up the left-hand staircase, commenting that he finds “the sinister side” more appealing.
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DEFLATING The Ghost Ship 's title, any supernatural elements are only hinted at and quickly discarded in order to allow for a premise rich in narrative possibilities: third mate Merriam’s attempts to convince the crew that the ship’s captain is insane. Lewton and Robson skillfully convey the air of superstition and paranoia in an isolated setting through a series of incidents that leave the audience as unsure of Merriam’s claims as his crew mates. To RKO, however, who only measured success by a film’s performance at the box office, it was deemed the second failure in a row from Lewton. And so was born the task of producing a picture designed to cash in on the success of Cat People under the ready-made title The Curse of the Cat People . To satisfy Koerner, Lewton drafted in Simone Simon, Kent Smith and Jane Randolph to reprise their roles. But the focal point of the film was Amy (a magnificent young Ann Carter) and her imaginary friend, the ghost of Irena, whom she summons with the aid of a magic ring.
A sequel in name only, The Curse of the Cat People is an examination of a lonely child’s imagination and her yearning for the recognition her parents (Oliver and Alice) fail to provide. Drawing on his own childhood memories, this was perhaps Lewton’s most personal film (a scene with Amy depositing birthday party invitations into a ‘magic tree’ was something Lewton himself did as a child), and such was his handling of childhood on screen that the film was revered and studied by child psychologists. Joe Dante called it “a disturbingly Disneyesque fairy tale,” while film critic James Agee, writing in The Nation, noted the “poetry and danger of childhood” threading through the film, going on to name The Curse of the Cat People and Lewton’s next film, Youth Runs Wild , as the best films of 1944.
A chiaroscuro dream as seen through a child’s eyes, it's a truly magical experience. Nicholas Masucuru’s photography lends the film the same ethereal quality that made Stanley Cortez’s work on Night of the Hunter (1955) so wonderful, yet at the same time so terrifying. Filmed on a sound stage, most of the action takes place in the family’s back garden, with glimpses of Irena shifting with the change of seasons, as though time itself has lost all meaning. Highlights include the sound of hooves and shadows passing by Amy’s window after she’s been told the story of Sleepy Hollow , and, in a typical Lewton touch, a slow pan as we follow Amy to where Irena is standing by her window. Our vision momentarily obscured by the back of a chair, Amy comes out the other side, the window is open, and Irena is gone, seemingly carried away on the breeze that drifts through the curtains.
Agee wasn’t alone in his praise, with further recognition of Lewton’s genius echoed unanimously by critics. One can only imagine the accolades the film would have received if it was released under Lewton's preferred title Amy and Her Friend instead of the ludicrous title Kroener saddled the film with.
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AFTER The Curse of the Cat People , Lewton departed from the horror genre with Youth Runs Wild , directed by Robson, based on a Look Magazine article titled ‘Are These Our Children?' Under fire from the censors, fearful of its portrayal of juvenile delinquency during wartime, the studio butchered Lewton’s original cut and the film met with an indifferent audience and predominantly negative reviews. It has since sunk into obscurity, the only footage widely available being a trailer splashed with attention grabbing sensationalist headlines that do little to offer a glimpse into Lewton’s original vision.
Lewton’s second departure was Mademoiselle Fifi , released in 1944. Set during the Franco-Prussian War, Lewton's ability to utilise a meagre budget is evident: using sets left over from RKO's 1939 production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame , Lewton and his team created a character-driven piece that commented on class division and the meaning of patriotism. Released during the Nazi occupation of France, it nevertheless failed to strike a chord with audiences and critics alike. All except for Agee, who, along with a small handful of other critics, championed the film, praising Lewton for his ability to produce heartfelt films that defied their budget and scheduling constraints.
The box office returns spelled failure, and RKO was quick to put demands on Lewton to return to horror. They brought in a bankable star in Boris Karloff. Lewton was dismayed and saw this as anathema to everything he had sought to achieve. Fortunately, Lewton and Karloff hit it off immediately, as the two recognised in each other a desire to elevate their films to something close to high art.
The three films Lewton made with Karloff would be his last assignments at RKO. Karloff meanwhile was gifted with three of his most accomplished acting roles, clearly relishing the dialogue he was given, turning in performances that were a far cry from the lumbering monsters and grotesques he played in James Whales' Frankenstein films and The Old Dark House between 1931 and 1935; roles which, by the time he left Universal for RKO, had turned into self parody.
Filmed while production on Isle of the Dead was postponed, The Body Snatcher (1945) was as much a departure for Lewton as Youth Runs Wild and Mademoiselle Fifi . Gone is an original story and the modern setting; in its place an adaptation of a Robert Louis Stevenson story set in 1831, a story in turn informed by the exploits of the notorious grave-robbers and murderers Burke and Hare.
After concerns over the script being too graphic, Lewton was forced to undertake extensive rewrites, but despite his efforts to appease the censors The Body Snatcher is notably more violent than his previous films. A prolonged murder by smothering and the killing of a dog are just two of the scenes that led to the BBFC in the UK to demand seven minutes of cuts. As if to contrast this, one scene sees a young woman make her way home through lamp-lit Edinburgh streets. Unbeknownst to her she is followed by a carriage driven by Gray (Karloff), a grave robber who procures corpses and victims for medical experimentation. As the woman becomes one with the shadows, so too does the carriage. The audience knows Gray's intent, and braces itself for a violent confrontation. But all Lewton and director Robert Wise allow for is the sudden silencing of her voice mid-verse. The stillness that follows is more haunting than any image of murder could possibly convey.
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RELEASED the same year, Isle of the Dead feels more like a typical genre picture, and in spite of the studio interference that led Lewton to decry the film as a “hodgepodge of horror," it displays three of Lewton’s preoccupations that made his best films so unique: the ancient sorceries of Cat People , the nihilism of The Seventh Victim , and the isolated paranoia of The Ghost Ship . Add to this a universal fear of being buried alive, and Lewton's “hodgepodge" works on the nerves on multiple levels, resulting in one of the earliest and most terrifying ‘buried alive’ sequences in cinema.
Released the following year, the Robson-directed Bedlam is the culmination of Lewton's efforts to produce meaningful films against almost impossible odds, combining the social commentary and keen eye for period detail found in Mademoiselle Fifi with the horror of The Seventh Victim . The story of how the ill treatment of mental patients at Bethlehem Royal Hospital led to a review by Whig politician John Wilkes is handled sensitively by Lewton without losing sight of the fact that he was hired to produce a horror film, though I would argue Bedlam is as far from horror as Shock Corridor (1963) or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), highlighting as it does the best and worst in human nature. It's an exemplary film, and though Karloff's performance surpasses those he gave in both The Body Snatcher and Isle of the Dead , it's Anna Lee's portrayal of a conscience stricken Tory that gives the film its heart.
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WITH EACH film garnering more favourable reviews and increased takings at the box office, it was inevitable that Lewton's skill as a filmmaker would eventually lead to him being forced to leave RKO to pursue a career as an A-list producer, a decision met with disappointment as he struggled to get studio support for his projects, and which undoubtedly contributed to his death by heart attack at the age of forty-six. As Robert Wise himself stated, “[Lewton] was not immune to the pressures of this town."
It's a sad end to an incredible career by a true auteur. As well as overseeing almost every aspect of the filmmaking process, including research, lighting, wardrobe, and script revisions, it’s Lewton’s projection of his own phobias and anxieties onto his films that I believe earns him his auteur status. In Cat People , Irena is unable to become intimate with a male, as sexual attraction and physical contact reawaken an ancient curse that sees her transform into a leopard. Lewton’s phobia of being touched clearly has a bearing on this aspect of the story. He was also an insomniac who would take to wandering, his night-time excursions reenacted on screen via Mary in The Seventh Victim , or Betsy in I Walked With a Zombie as they search for that elusive something, moving towards their fears in order to make sense of them, rather than run screaming in the opposite direction. His upbringing in a home dominated by women resulted in his writing female leads for Cat People , I Walked with a Zombie , The Leopard Man , The Seventh Victim , The Curse of the Cat People and Mademoiselle Fifi. The shadows of his mother and aunt are also present in other ways: Mrs. Redi’s dominance over the Gibson sisters in The Seventh Victim echoes his aunt’s imperiousness, while Irena’s attempts to erase her ethnicity in Cat People echo his mother’s decision to anglicise her name.
While Lewton’s films may not have a single overriding theme, they do tap into the audience’s psyche: suspicion, paranoia and fear are used to manipulate in much the same way Alfred Hitchcock did in his films. These psychoses serve as tools to leave the audience feeling exposed, that a stranger has managed to discover and project their fears on screen.
Lewton’s status as filmmaker-auteur only becomes apparent when the body of his work is taken as a whole. To further the argument that Lewton deserves this status it’s important to remember his in-depth experience with film production under Selznick. Coupled with his penchant for giving credence to black characters (see, for example, the repeated casting of the wonderfully named calypso singer Sir Lancelot in significant roles), his films are also comparable to John Carpenter’s, with whom he shares roles as producer, writer, and editor. Based on these factors, Lewton was a filmmaker in the truest sense of the word.
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Bibliography & References
The majority of information on Lewton, particularly regarding his childhood, was derived from two major sources: Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror, Joel Siegel's exceptional 1973 biography/critique of Lewton's career. Secondly, Kent Jones' documentary Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (2007) proved to be a worthy visual accompaniment to Siegel's work, enhanced by Martin Scorsese's narration, giving a filmmaker's perspective and appreciation of what Lewton was trying to achieve with his films. Also, the episodes featured on Adam Roche's 2017 podcast The Secret History of Hollywood titled ‘Shadows – The Val Lewton Story' were an entertaining addition, delving deeper into the individual films and the influences that brought them to light. The final episodes detailing Lewton's downward slide after leaving RKO, I hope, informed the tone of the piece. As with all great cinema, I recommend watching Lewton's films first (good luck finding Youth Runs Wild!), reading Siegel's biography, then rewatching them. The Kent Jones documentary is superb.
Books & Articles
1. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre (non-fiction). 1982.
2. Lewton, Val. ‘The Bagheeta' short story, Weird Tales, 1930. <https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v16n01_1930-07/page/n33/mode/2up?view=theater>.
3. Nochimson, Martha. ‘I Walked with a Zombie,' Senses of Cinema (website article), August 2007. <https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/cteq/i-walked-zombie/>.
4. Siegel, Joel E. Lewton: The Reality of Terror. Viking: 1973. <https://archive.org/details/vallewtonreality0000sieg/mode/2up?view=theater>.
– James Agee’s best films of the year, p.58; Robert Wise quote re: Lewton, p.82.
Media
1. Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy (Documentary). Directed by Constantine Nasr. Narrated by James Cromwell and William Friedkin, 2005.
–“Contemporary imaginers del Toro and Gaiman"
2. Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (Documentary). Directed by Kent Jones. Narrated by Martin Scorsese, 2007. <https://archive.org/details/martin-scorsese-presents-val-lewton-the-man-in-the-shadows>.
–Scorsese cites Lewton as major influence; Lewton leaving birthday invites in a magic tree; Lewton quote: “hodgepodge of Horror"; Lewton's night-time wanderings
3. ‘Shadows – The Val Lewton Story Part 1: The Boy From the Black Sea.’; ‘...Part 2: The Cat Strikes.’ The Secret History of Hollywood (podcast), 31st May & June 26th, 2017. Hosted by Adam Roche. <https://www.attaboyclarence.com/the-secret-history-of-hollywood/>.
The Films of Val Lewton at R.K.O.
Cat People (1942) — dir. Jacques Tourneur
I Walked with a Zombie (1943) — dir. Jacques Tourneur
The Leopard Man (1943) — dir. Jacques Tourneur
The Seventh Victim (1943) — dir. Mark Robson
The Ghost Ship (1943) — dir. Mark Robson
The Curse of the Cat People (1944) — dir. Gunther von Fritsch & Robert Wise
Mademoiselle Fifi (1944) — Robert Wise
Youth Runs Wild (1944) — dir. Mark Robson
The Body Snatcher (1945) — Robert Wise
Isle of the Dead (1945) — dir. Mark Robson
Bedlam (1946) — dir. Mark Robson
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