by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at about 9:45 I ran my husband Charles what I thought would be one documentary on the great 1940’s horror-film producer Val Lewton, Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (2007), narrated by Martin Scorsese and written and directed by Kent Jones, which I remember seeing on Turner Classic Movies in 2008 on the day Heath Ledger’s death was announced. In fact this was a different Lewton documentary from two years earlier with a similar title, Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy, directed by Constantine Nasr and co-written by him and Steve Haberman. The two cover much the same ground, though Shadows in the Dark begins with a photo of Orson Welles, whose connection with Lewton was an odd one: though they never worked together, it was the financial debacle of Welles’ two masterpieces at RKO Radio Pictures, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons (now considered two of the finest films ever made, despite the horrible butchery wreaked on the latter by cutters and alternate directors at RKO after Welles left for South America to make his unfinished documentary It’s All True) that jeopardized RKO’s very existence as a movie company. George Schaefer, the RKO studio boss who had hired Welles, was fired and replaced by Charles Koerner, who announced that from then on RKO films would be based on “showmanship instead of genius” – an obvious slap at Welles. Koerner also demoted the crack team of artists and technicians Welles had assembled to make his films – including editors Mark Robson and Robert Wise, who between them had edited Citizen Kane – to the studio’s “B”-picture unit “because of our love for him, because of our hopes for him,” as Robson later recalled to interviewers Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their book The Celluloid Muse. Then Koerner looked at the enormous grosses Universal was making on their horror films in general and The Wolf-Man (1941) in particular. He wanted some of that box-office gold for his own studio, and hired Val Lewton to supply it.
Lewton was then West Coast story editor for David O. Selznick, who had hired him in the first place because Selznick had wanted to produce a screen version of Taras Bulba by 19th century Russian author Nikolai Gogol. If he were going to make a movie set in a foreign country, Selznick liked to hire writers who were from there in hopes of making his films more authentic – and Lewton qualified because he’d been born in Yalta, which was then part of the Russian empire and is now part of the Crimea in Russian-occupied Ukraine, on May 7, 1904. His parents divorced when Lewton, born Vladimir Leventon, was just two and his mother moved to Berlin and ultimately emigrated to the U.S., where she hoped to emulate the success of her sister, the internationally known actress Alla Nazimova. (The character of the aging, reclusive actress Julia Farren in Lewton’s film The Curse of the Cat People is clearly based on Nazimova.) In the 1920’s Lewton made his career as a journalist (where he was fired by one paper for making up a story about a crate full of kosher chickens dying of exposure after the truck containing them was run off the road by another driver) and pulp-fiction writer, where he got a story called “Bagheera” – after the panther in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book – into Weird Tales in 1930 at a time when H. P. Lovecraft was one of their star writers. As Selznick bounced around from Paramount to RKO to MGM, where in 1935 he filmed an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities in which his second-unit director was French-born Jaqcues Tourneur (once again Selznick was hiring someone from the country where his film was set!), Lewton ultimately became not only his story editor but one of his associate producers, and he and Tourneur took charge of the second unit on A Tale of Two Cities that shot the storming of the Bastille and other action scenes of the French Revolution.
Lewton advised Selznick against producing what became his magnum opus, Gone with the Wind, and as a result he was ordered to stand outside the restrooms during the film’s one preview screening and keep a tally of how many people used them. Selznick was having an argument with Al Lichtman, head of MGM’s distribution department, over whether the film should have an intermission, and he wanted to document that so many people would need to use the bathroom during the film that an intermission would be necessary. I was about to type that story two years ago, when I had just seen Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie for the umpteenth time, and I suddenly realized that if I Walked with a Zombie was the movie Lewton wanted to make about slavery and the plantation system, in which even though slavery had been abolished in the West Indies since the early 19th century Lewton, Tourneur and writers Curt Siodmak (whom Lewton brought over from Universal, where he’d written The Wolf-Man) and Ardel Wray clearly depict the family at the center of the story as a bunch of privileged white people morally corrupted by the slave labor that produced their family’s fortune, no wonder Lewton didn’t want Selznick to make Gone with the Wind. Maybe it wasn’t because he didn’t think a film based on Gone with the Wind would be commercially successful; maybe Lewton gave Gone with the Wind what would today be called a “woke” reading and didn’t want Selznick to film it because of its racism. In fact, one of the aspects of Lewton’s films I like best – and it was oddly unmentioned in either documentary – is the extraordinary sensitivity and complexity with which he treated people of color. Characters like the Black calypso singer Sir Lancelot, whom he used in three movies (I Walked with a Zombie, The Ghost Ship and The Curse of the Cat People), or the native American Charlie How-Come (Abner Biberman) in The Leopard Man, emerge as rich, deeply drawn creations, a far cry from the racist stereotypes most Blacks and Natives were shown as in almost all other American movies. And as Charles observed when we watched Lewton’s first film, Cat People, and its (sort-of) sequel The Curse of the Cat People back-to-back not long ago, at least some of Lewton’s films would pass the “Bechdel test,” named after Lesbian writer Alison Bechdel, defined on Wikipedia as “whether a film features at least two women talking to each other about something other than a man.”
Lewton felt stuck at Selznick’s operation in 1941 and newly appointed RKO chief Charlie Koerner made him an offer to head a production unit to produce “B” horror movies, with three conditions: the films couldn’t cost more than $150,000, they couldn’t run longer than 75 minutes, and the titles would be given him by RKO’s marketing department based on their ideas of what would draw horror-movie fans to theatres. Lewton realized that with budgets so small he couldn’t do the kind of in-your-face horror films in which Universal specialized, so he wouldn’t try. Instead he would figure out ways to scare the bejeezus out of audiences by suggesting monsters with shadows, eerie lighting and sound effects. (One of the things that shaped Lewton’s approach was all those technicians who had learned the evocative use of sound from radio-drama master Orson Welles.) One of the Lewton legends debunked here is that he was drawn to his first assigned title, Cat People, by his own fear of cats – here the debunker is his son,Val E. Lewton, who says in this documentary that the Lewton family actually owned a cat and, while Lewton never bonded with it, he never seemed scared of it, either. Using a no-name cast starring a French actress named Simone Simon (she was supposed to be Serbian, but in 1940’s Hollywood one accent was considered as good as another, which is how the Swedish Ingrid Bergman played a Frenchwoman in Adam Had Four Sons) and his old friend Jacques Tourneur as his director and DeWitt Bodeen as his writer, Lewton turned out a horror masterpiece that cost $135,000 and reportedly grossed $4 million. (Actually, as some of the interviewees in Shadows in the Dark acknowledged, it’s hard to measure how much a “B” picture made because they were essentially sold like yard goods. Theatre owners paid for “A” movies with a percentage of the box-office take but “B” movies were sold on a flat-fee basis, so the studio made the same amount of money on them whether they were any good or not.)
Lewton’s second film as producer was I Walked with a Zombie, and elsewhere I’d heard that the title came from a magazine article that was merely a travel piece about Haiti – and he and Tourneur came up with an anti-racist masterpiece that disappointed a lot of later film watchers who were expecting more like a traditional zombie movie and got a work of art. The one personal quote attributed to Val Lewton on his imdb.com page was from a letter he wrote to his sister saying, “You shouldn't get mad at the New York reviewers. Actually, it's very difficult for a reviewer to give something called I Walked with a Zombie a good review.” After one more film together, The Leopard Man, RKO decided to separate Lewton and Tourneur (which one of the talking-head interviewees compared to the breakup between John Lennon and Paul McCartney that ended The Beatles) and assign both of them to movies with bigger budgets. But Lewton blew his chance because he insisted that Mark Robson direct his first big-budget feature and RKO wanted him to use a better-known director. So Lewton remained mired in “B” movies and Robson made his directorial debut with The Seventh Victim, which was supposedly the first Lewton film to lose money (though, again, it’s hard to say because “B” movies weren’t separately accounted and how much money they made – or lost – didn’t necessarily depend on how many people paid to see them). According to Robson, it didn’t achieve a following in the U.S. but it did in Britain. British producers “John and Roy Boulting came out here about that time, wanting to meet the fellow who had directed it. They used to bicycle a print of The Seventh Victim around London, among [directors like] Carol Reed and [Alberto] Cavalcanti and people like that, thinking it an advanced, weird form of filmmaking.”
Lewton’s next film, also with Robson as director, was The Ghost Ship, which could not legally be shown for over 50 years after its initial release because of a plagiarism suit the studio lost. They had worked out a small settlement with the writers Samuel Golding and Norbert Faulkner, who claimed to have written the story and offered it to Lewton. Golding and Faulkner were nuisance claimants who were well known to RKO and the other major studios, and RKO’s legal department thought it made more sense to give them a little money so they’d go away, but Lewton insisted on taking the case to trial and lost. (As I noted when I finally saw The Ghost Ship and posted about it on moviemagg, The Ghost Ship is simply a generic story about a group of sailors on board a ship with a crazy captain, and had RKO’s legal department been savvier, they could have dug up plenty of similar stories safely in the public domain, like Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of A. Gordon Pym and Melville’s Moby Dick.) After that came The Curse of the Cat People, which aside from that lurid title is Lewton’s most personal film; the incident in the movie in which Amy Reed (Ann Carter) invites the neighborhood kids to her sixth birthday party but none of them show up because instead of a real mailbox she put the invitations in a hollowed-out tree because three years earlier her dad had told her that was a “magic mailbox” actually happened to Lewton during his childhood, and as I noted above the eccentric retired actress in the movie is clearly based on Lewton’s aunt, Alla Nazimova.
Then Lew Ostrow, Lewton’s supervising producer at RKO, died suddenly and his replacement, Jack J. Gross, signed Boris Karloff to a three-film contract and insisted Lewton use him. Lewton wanted no part of Karloff – he epitomized the in-your-face Universal style of horror he wanted no part of – but when the two finally met they hit it off perfectly and, according to Val E. Lewton, became close friends until Lewton’s death io 1951. In one respect the advent of Karloff (and Bela Lugosi, whom Gross signed for one film, The Body Snatcher) changed Lewton’s style; while his previous films had been set in the modern world, he reasoned that Karloff’s more formal acting style would mean he would work better in period pieces. Lewton and Karloff made three movies together – The Body Snatcher (based on a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson but, in my view, a deeper and richer work than the Stevenson story), Isle of the Dead and Bedlam – and there was going to be a fourth, Blackbeard, with Karloff as the notorious real-life pirate Edward “Blackbeard” Tench. This film was supposed to be the one that finally got Lewton out of the restricted world of “B” movies and gave him bigger budgets. Then Lewton did his usual meticulous historical research and learned that the pirates of Blackbeard’s time hadn’t sailed in large, ungainly vessels. Instead they had commanded fleets of small, fast, maneuverable cutters, much like the speedboats used by modern-day pirates in Somalia, and used them to surround the ships they meant to rob. RKO’s “suits” got a look at the script Lewton submitted and said no; they weren’t going to give Lewton an “A” budget for a film starring Boris Karloff as captain of a fleet of fishing boats.
Between that and the financial disaster of Bedlam – it did O.K. in America but the British Board of Film Censors slapped an absolute ban on it that lasted until the early 2000’s and thereby, as Karloff biographer Donald Glut put it, prevented Karloff’s countrypeople from seeing “perhaps his finest film since Frankenstein” – Lewton lost his job at RKO. He secured a production deal at Paramount that was guaranteed for two years, but he only made one film there – a romantic comedy called My Love Came Back – and then went to MGM for another romantic comedy, Please Believe Me. (Why Lewton didn’t aim his sights at making the sorts of crime movies that came to be called film noir is beyond me; certainly Lewton’s dark, shadowy style was well suited to film noir, and as I’ve argued before The Seventh Victim is on the cusp between horror and noir.) Lewton’s final film – and the only one of his post-RKO films I’ve actually seen – was a 1951 Western at Universal called Apache Drums, a brilliant film fully the equal of Lewton’s RKO movies for sheer creativity and artistry. It’s about an Army garrison being besieged by a band of Apaches, but the Native Americans seem to have been watching Lewton’s previous movies, because they decided to surround the camp and persuade the garrison to surrender mainly by playing the titular drums incessantly until they get so spooked they give up. It’s also a quite beautiful film for its use of color – the only time Lewton ever used it.
Shadows in the Dark features a quite impressive set of interviewees, including directors like William Friedkin, Joe Dante, Guillermo del Toro, George A. Romero and John Landis, and writers Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, and Richard Matheson, as well as director Robert Wise (who co-directed The Curse of the Cat People and was sole director on The Body Snatcher and was therefore the only person featured here who actually worked with Lewton), Lewton’s son Val E. and Karloff’s daughter Sara. If anything, however, the film overstates Lewton’s influence on contemporary horror films; all too many horror directors today go fro gross-out effects, and if Val Lewton had produced Friedkin’s The Exorcist he’d probably have asked him, “Do we have to have Linda Blair throw up pea soup and her head spin around on her neck?” I remember when I saw Wes Craven’s film Scream and was delighted by the first hour and a half of it – it seemed neo-Lewtonian and marvelously done in terms of translating Lewton’s less-is-more approach to horror to the modern era – and then in the last half-hour Craven symbolically threw his hands up in the air and apparently thought, “O.K., I”ve proven I can be an artist. Now I’m going to give my audience what I know they want and spurt blood and gore all over the screen” – which, alas, he did.
