by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After The Old Dark House
on last night’s Hallowe’en haunted-house marathon Turner Classic Movies showed The
Haunting, a 1963 film made by director
Robert Wise two decades after his apprenticeships at RKO under Orson Welles and
Val Lewton. He and Mark Robson were film editors at RKO when Welles was signed
to the studio, and they got to do the editing of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons before George Schaefer, the RKO studio head who had
hired Welles, was fired. His replacement, Charles Koerner, fired Welles and
demoted everyone in his unit to the “B” ranks — where, fortunately, he hired a
producer named Val Lewton to make low-budget horror films. Lewton, a former
pulp writer of unusual taste and skill, decided that instead of trying to
compete with the in-your-face monster movies from Universal, he’d show as
little as possible of the horror elements in the film, often just hinting at
them with shadows or depicting them with sound effects alone. Lewton promoted
both Wise and Robson out of the cutting room and gave them assignments to
direct, and Robson had a good if not spectacular career as a director while
Wise rose through the ranks and ultimately made enough of a reputation he got
to direct blockbuster “A” films. In 1951 he made one of the all-time great
science-fiction movies, the original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and by the end of the decade he was making major
films like Somebody Up There Likes Me (with Paul Newman as boxer Rocky Graziano, a role intended for James
Dean but recast with Newman after Dean’s death), I Want to Live! (a melodrama about a female career criminal who
escapes punishment for her actual crimes but gets nailed — and executed — for a
murder she did not commit: Susan Hayward won an Academy Award for playing the
lead), and the multi-Oscar-winning musical West Side Story. Wise was in the middle of making the film Two
for the Seesaw when he picked up Shirley
Jackson’s haunted-house novel The Haunting of Hill House. At first he was just reading it for his own amusement
and to have something to do during the long breaks for set-ups on a film set,
but when a technician on Two for the Seesaw interrupted Wise’s reading to ask him a question,
Wise had got so worked up in the story he was upset — and he realized that if he found Jackson’s novel that engrossing, maybe movie
audiences would, too.
So he bought the rights to Jackson’s novel and asked to
set it up at MGM — only MGM would give him a budget no higher than $1 million.
However, their British subsidiary offered him a $1.1 million budget, so Wise
agreed to make the film there — with the odd result that, even though the story
takes place in New England, the locations and the largely British cast give the
reality of old England and it
would probably have been wiser for Wise and his writer, Nelson Gidding (the
same one he’d worked with on I Want to Live!), simply to relocate the story to the other side of
the Atlantic. A 20-minute prologue, narrated by the various characters we will
meet in the film — mostly by British actor Richard Johnson as Dr. John Markway,
a psychic researcher who’s looking for a genuinely haunted house so he can
uncover the scientific basis for psychic phenomena — gives us the story of Hill
House: it was built in the 1870’s by a wealthy financier (as, incidentally, was
the house in The Magnificent Ambersons, which it visually resembles) for himself, his wife and their daughter —
only the wife died on the day they were to move in without ever setting foot in
the place, and the man became an ever more bitter recluse. When he died the
daughter took over the place and became just as reclusive, and since none of
the residents of Hill House ever seemed to leave the place long enough to marry
and have families, whoever was in charge of probating the place had to look
longer, harder and farther afield for relatives of the original builder to
inherit the place. One woman took over after she’d got a job as caregiver for
the elderly female occupant, only she liked to fool around with the hired help
and was doing so when the old lady she was supposed to be taking care of
croaked. At least she had a son, Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn, who’d previously
played the white Jets gang leader Riff in Wise’s film of West Side
Story), who’s become a prissy and
unscrupulous real-estate developer (he begins after a while to look like Trump
in training!) who’s hoping Markway will validate that the house is indeed
haunted so he can make tons of money selling vacation rentals to credulous
tourists anxious to see the legendary place from inside.
Markway is married but
his wife Grace (Lois Maxwell) is totally disinterested in his researches and
deliberately stays away from Hill House until the movie is almost over. The two
women who, along with Markway and Luke, form the odd foursome that occupies
Hill House are Eleanor “Nell” Lance (Julie Harris), who’s walked out of an
unpleasant living situation with her mother and stolen the family car to get to
Hill House; and Theodora (Claire Bloom), a much more sophisticated woman (the
legendary London fashion designer Mary Quant gets a special credit for doing
Bloom’s clothes, three years before she shocked the world by inventing the
mini-skirt) who was originally drawn as a Lesbian out to seduce Nell, but aside
from one scene in which the two women are in bed together but not doing anything even remotely sexual, that was almost
totally lost in the film as it stands. Various typical haunted-house things
happen to the four during the movie, including them hearing thundering drum
sounds coming from out of nowhere (“Oh, that’s just the Hill House samba
school,” I joked), finding themselves locked in a room whose door mysteriously
bends in and out (I thought it looked like it was made of rubber, and according
to the “Trivia” section on this film’s imdb.com page, that’s exactly what it was), and a final climax straight out of
Hitchcock’s Vertigo in which
Nell, sure by this point that Hill House wants her to remain inside it no
matter what the other people do, walks up a spiral staircase and is startled at
the top by the appearance of a strange woman — in this case Markway’s wife
Grace (ya remember Grace?), who
after boycotting the study in the first place finally showed up to see what was
going on and in particular whether her husband was having an affair with either
or both of the other women.
The Haunting is the sort of horror film made for people who really don’t like
horror films, and while Wise’s direction shows how much he learned from Welles
and Lewton, what he didn’t seem
to have learned from them was any sense of pace. He also didn’t seem to have
learned — or if he had, he’d forgotten them by 1963 — Lewton’s skills at making
not only scary but classic films on teeny budgets. The fact that Wise didn’t
think $1 million was enough to make The Haunting the way he wanted to is an indication of what was
wrong with his sensibilities; by this time he considered himself a Major Director who’d won Academy Awards
both for himself and his stars on previous films, and a Haunting made on the Lewtonesque cheap wouldn’t have been
considered worthy of a Wise credit by 1963 even though I couldn’t help but wish
he would have made this film
along Lewtonian lines, with a running time two-thirds of its actual (and very padded-seeming) 112 minutes and about one-twentieth
of the budget. Wise also wasn’t helped by his casting decisions: of the four
leads only Claire Bloom really creates a vivid, complex characterizations.
Richard Johnson is overbearing, Russ Tamblyn surprisingly weak (especially
given how well he’d done in West Side Story under Wise’s direction, though the real stars of West Side Story were supporting players George Chakiris and Rita
Moreno, who stole the film right out from under its leads, the wretchedly
miscast Natalie Wood and the simply incompetent Richard Beymer) and Julie
Harris giving us yet another one of her introverted drips.
She’d been playing
these sorts of characters ever since her 1952 feature-film debut in The
Member of the Wedding, based on a
depressing Southern-gothic story by Carson McCullers in which she repeated a
role she’d created on stage, and she went on to play James Dean’s girlfriend in
his first starring film East of Eden
(Raymond Massey played Dean’s father, so TCM did back-to-back showings of two
films featuring East of Eden cast
members) and capped her long list of introverted roles by playing reclusive
poet Emily Dickinson on stage and in a TV movie called The Belle of
Amherst. (When she tried any other sort of
role she was even worse: she played Sally Bowles in the 1950’s nonmusical
adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories, I Am a Camera, and she was as utterly wrong for that part as Liza
Minnelli, in the 1971 film Cabaret,
was right!) The Haunting was
obviously trying to be a
sophisticated ghost story, but it simply isn’t an interesting plot — we never
get any explanation for why Hill
House should be haunted (usually fictional haunted houses are haunted because
of some ghastly crime that took place there generations before the main story,
but not this one) — nor are the characters very compelling, and neither are the
actors playing them (except for Claire Bloom, whose fascinating
characterization seems to belong to another, better movie). It also doesn’t
help that the film has a good but way overused musical score by Humphrey Searle, who composes in the tired
old film-music tradition of using his score to explain everything; particularly after James Whale’s total avoidance of
music in The Old Dark House and
his evocative use of sound effects (particularly wind, rain and the other
sounds one expects to be associated with storms), Searle’s overscoring seemed
even more irritating than it would have without Whale’s commendable restraint
still echoing in my eyes and
ears! — 11/1/17
