1
Chill beneath a cadaverously gray Autumn sky, the tiny New Mexico town. That slate moment in the seasons when everything begins to grow dark. The epileptic scratching of fallen leaves hurled along sidewalks. Mad sounds from the hills. Cold. And something else:
A leopard, escaped, is loose in the town.
Chill beneath a crawling terror of death in the night, the tiny New Mexico town. That thick red moment in the fears of small people when everything explodes in the black flow of blood. A deep-throated growl from a filthy alley. Cold.
A mother, preoccupied with her cooking, tells her small daughter to go down the street to the bakery, get a loaf of bread. The child shows a moment of fear…the animal they haven’t found yet…
The mother insists, it’s only a half block to the bakery. Put on a shawl and go get that bread, your father will be home soon. The child goes. Hurrying back up the street, the bread held close to her, the street empty and filling with darkness, ink presses down the sky, the child looks around, and hurries. A cough in the blackness behind her. A cough, deep in a throat that never formed human sounds.
The child’s eyes widen in panic. She begins to hurry. Her footsteps quicken. The sound of padding behind her. Feet begin to run. Focus on darkness and the sound of rapid movement. The child. The rushing.
To the wooden door of the house. The door is locked. The child pinned against the night, with the furred sound of agony rushing toward her on the wind.
Inside, the mother, still kitchened, waiting. The sound of the child outside, panic and bubbles of hysteria in the voice, Mommy open the door the leopard is after me!
The mother’s voice assumes the ages-old expression of harassed parenthood. Hands on hips, she turns to the door, you’re always lying, telling fibs, making up stories, how many times have I told you lying will—
Mommy! Open the door!
You’ll stay out there till you learn to stop lying!
Mommy! Mom—
Something gigantic hits the door with a crash. The door bows inward, and dust from between the cracks sifts into the room. The mother’s eyes grow huge, she stares at the door. A thick black stream, moving very slowly, seeps under the door. Madness crawls up behind our eyes, the mother’s eyes, and we sink into a pit of blind emptiness…
…from which we emerge to examine the nature of terror in the motion picture. Fear as the masters of the film form have shown it to us, and fear as the screen has recently depicted it, with adolescence and cheap thrills. Fear in three guises, with an attempt to understand its value, note its proportions, taste it, sink a hand into it and draw out a vital organ if possible. First, a memory of fear from a childhood spent in the dark, watching Lugosi, watching Lorre, watching Richard Dix as the Whistler, watching—among others, and most notably—the films of Val Lewton.
The scene depicted at the outset of this examination, a scene shot in small screen, in black and white, with a minimum of production values (as currently conceived by the LARGER film-makers), with unknown actors, shot by indirection and subtlety rather than the sound of hands clapping sharply in your ear to startle you, that scene was from a 1943 RKO Radio Picture, The Leopard Man.
I may have recalled it completely inaccurately. I wouldn’t know. I saw the picture only once, when I was nine years old, at a Saturday afternoon matinee in the Lake Theatre in Painesville, Ohio.
That scene, that thick, glutinous flow of little girl blood beneath a heavy oak door, has stayed with me for twenty-two years. It scared me. It scared me at the time. It scares me now. I was afraid, and when I recount this scene to listeners today, I can impart the same fear to them, merely in the retelling.
When was the last time you were frightened by a film? Truly frightened. Frightened enough to worry about it much later, when your thoughts were elsewhere, and suddenly that came back to you? The shower sequence in Psycho? The unmasking in Phantom of the Opera? The discovery of the bloodless sled-dog in Hawks’ The Thing? Bette Davis serving Joan Crawford her canary in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? or possibly a fillip from Polanski’s Repulsion? If it was this last, part three of this examination may annoy you. If it was any of the others, then perhaps you have already thought the thoughts I will offer next.
But it is a progression. Before a dissection can have any worth, we must examine the whole organism, and for the first part of this discussion of the anatomy of fear, I offer as the finest example of terror in its most natural, unsullied, incarnation, the oeuvre of Val Lewton.
To afficionados of all that is worthy and touched by glory in the film medium, the name Lewton will be no great surprise. To those who play at understanding movies, who ride with the tide, or who take their cues from slickpaper yellowsheets such as Time or Newsweek (and I level this derogation with calculation to be elaborated upon later), I would better have struck the responsive kitsch chord by citing the early Dassin, or Hitchcock.
But as a truer barometer of the centigrades to which horror can inflame a filmgoer, I find no contest with what Lewton produced in merely eight films from 1942 to 1946, with budgets so ludicrous, achievements so startling and studio intentions so base that they stand as some sort of landmark in the landscape of cinema.
Lewton began as a story editor for Selznick and shortly thereafter was placed in charge of a new low-budget production unit at RKO, expressly created to specialize in cheapjack horror films. It was born out of the need for lower-half double-bill films to accompany big-budget vehicles, with a sort of antediluvian “exploitation” approach and very little else to recommend its product. But RKO had no idea of the nature of the monster they were creating. Lewton was given titles such as The Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, Isle of the Dead, The Ghost Ship. He was then set to the (supposedly) inglorious task of making schlock fit only for Times Square scratch-theatre gleaners.
In his first film, The Cat People, Lewton explored the psychiatric and emotional implications of lycanthropy through the medium of a beautiful young girl who thinks she has inherited the taint of animal transvestism—her alter-ego a panther. It is the foremost of only three films Simone Simon made in this country that can stand today as having been worth the doing. Many have called it a classic.
In The Body Snatcher, made in 1945, Lewton used the incomparable Karloff to full advantage in a thinly-veiled retelling of the Burke & Hare grave-robbing story. (How did that old tot-terrifier go? “Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief; and Knox the boy who buys the beef.” Well, however, it was the strange story of the doctor who needed cadavers for autopsy purposes, who bought his meat from a pair of unsavorys not above catching the anatomical visual aids while they were still very much alive and kicking.)
In Bedlam, 1946, Lewton opened with a full-screen medium closeup of Hogarth’s famous painting of the Eighteenth Century English madhouse, dollied in on it to extreme closeup and then did a wax-dissolve to a letter-perfect real life scene, precisely as the painting showed it. The credits on the film nodded to Hogarth, possibly the only time in the history of film that a painting (rather than a play, a novel, a song, or a title) inspired a motion picture. Lewton went on to explore the conditions in lunatic asylums with Karloff, and what later institutional liberals exposed about the criminal conditions in our asylums, was all there for them to see, years before the hue and cry for reforms.
Of I Walked With A Zombie, Lewton is reported to have said, “They may never recognize it, but what I’m going to give them in I Walked With A Zombie is ‘Jane Eyre In The West Indies’.” (The author must at this time bow in the direction of scenarist De Witt Bodeen, from whose article in the April 1963 issue of Films in Review that quotation—and much of the minutiae of this section on Lewton—emanates.)
To show the incredible broken-field-running of Lewton as a producer, against odds calculated to produce nothing but merde, I Walked With A Zombie was inspired by a Hearst Sunday supplement series. If you don’t think what he brought forth was remarkable, catch a re-run of this film on a Saturday afternoon tv showing, and compare it (bearing in mind what inspired it) with what horrors of an entirely different stripe have been produced by moviemakers with acrome-galic budgets, e.g., Moby Dick, Cleopatra, Mutiny on the Bounty, King of Kings, 55 Days at Peking, Circus World, Ship of Fools, the list goes on with truly terrifying overpopulation. (I refer, of course, to the most recent incarnations of each of the foregoing films.)
Praising Lewton has become, in recent years, an “in” game of the “in crowd.” There is no great bravery on my part to single him out as the perpetrator of the ne plus ultra in horror films. Yet in all of these huzzahs, there has never been a satisfactory explanation of precisely what it is in those films of fear that makes them perfect models for the sluggards currently infesting the genre. Nor has there been a rationale for why these films are always referred to as “Lewton’s films” rather than Karloff’s films, or Jacques Tourneur’s films—though he directed three of the finest—or Mark Robson’s films—though he directed four—or Robert Wise’s films—though he did two, of which one, Curse of the Cat People, remains today as one of the most original plumbings of a child’s mentality. They are always called Lewton’s films, and therein lies the secret not only of successfully producing films of fear, but of the art of producing, itself.
Lewton’s role as producer was anything but that of the stereotyped fat-cat, thumbs hooked in the pockets of his velvet vest, cigar masticated between gopher teeth, eyes on the till and heart of blackest anthracite. He was a creator.
In a recent conversation with actor Robert Blake (incidentally, another immense talent Hollywood has done ill to ignore), the point was made that in every successful production, whether television or feature film, the presence of one strong man can be seen: whether the lead actor, or the head writer, or the director, or the producer, if there is one man with balls enough to swing his weight in the cause of artistic integrity, what emerges, nine times out of 9.89, is worth viewing, while the reverse proportion holds for those efforts born of Art by Committee Decision. This, I think, is the secret of why Lewton’s films were always Lewton’s films, and why they bore an unmistakable stamp of continuity of talent.
What he thought about his work, and how he conveyed these thoughts to men like Tourneur (still another fine talent who, while he works regularly, has been denied access to top production directorial chores that would have placed him with the best in the field), was the cornerstone of Lewton’s success, the vitality that brought more than animation to his creations—that brought life to them. One example:
In The Bad and The Beautiful, Kirk Douglas, playing a producer who has been advised his first film will be a horror film (very much like The Cat People) convinces his staff that blatant visualizations of horror must be avoided by the simple expedient of flicking off the lights in his office, and telling them the story in the dark. It is a remarkably effective scene, and the strongest cinematic argument ever made for subtlety and indirection in film-making. He is thoroughly convincing, of course.
This incident was precisely what Lewton did with his staff on The Cat People. The story became Hollywood legend, and has now been preserved as fiction.
Thus, portrait of a producer.
Producing, I submit, is not primarily a matter of budgets, schedules, manipulations or politics (though in the latter stages no producer succeeds in this arena without knowing how to move them pieces around the board). It is, in the gestation period, a matter of instincts, insights, the eye of Art—and I’ll damned well use the cap “A” every time—and gonads. The producer whose sole concern is “product” is doomed merely to make money.
Pause, while the fat-cats chuckle on their way to the bank. Yeah, we know that bit. Nice talking to you, fellahs. Move on, so we can get back to the business of creating, as opposed to producing.
Lewton typifies the creative producer, with an instinctive love and appreciation of form, grace, direction, and message. His films were never polemics, nor were they studiedly “arty.” But they were always meaningful, had something important to say about people and the Times, and they were always artistic.
Much of this, I contend, came from the fact that Lewton was filming fear and terror and horror, and that way lies a touchstone for the motion picture audience.
Since the first night of Man, hunkered down hairy and hungry by the primeval lightning-borne food fire, fear has been the prime mover. Forget momma love and posterity and man’s unquenchable curiosity. Fear is the primary mode of locomotion of homo sapiens, as Mel Brooks suggests. Show hairy Man a pair of yellow eyes just outside the ring of light thrown by that first fire, and within twenty minutes he’ll have invented the crossbow, the arbalest, the mace, Thompson submachine guns and klieg lights to chase that mother away.
We walk through all the days and nights of our lives terrified. Of the world that surrounds us, of one another, of the unknown, of ourselves. Fear is the hammer that leaves us stunned and speechless. Fear is the goad that sends us to places we fear to be in, to find out things we’re scared witless to know. Fear.
Of this simple fact, Lewton was a master.
He knew there was more monstrousness in the sound of a killer cat slinking through the branches of a tree that brushed the top of a graveyard’s stone wall, than all the Godzillas or Rodans ever pulled by puppet strings. He played like a Landowska on the stops and keys of the psyche. He let you build the monsters in your mind, in that terrible nightland of individual torment no studio special effects man could ever visit. It was the visual application of the secret of old-time radio. (What some call the sense of wonder. The reason why no tv can ever rival a radio program for opulence of sets.)
It was suggestion, the use of the power of the mind, that made Lewton’s films so terrifying. It was an instinctive regard and respect for the imaginations and mentalities of his audiences—as he respected his own imagination, intellect, and originality—that led Lewton surely and surefootedly to the one infallible path of fear. He thought he could make intelligent films for intelligent people. This is a concept largely ignored in Hollywood, these days, by producers of the Stanley Shapiro/Ross Hunter cadre, who make movies as intellectually demanding as a Giant Golden Book, and who seemingly visualize their audiences as microcephalics fit only to salivate over the constantly-imminent deflowering of Doris Day, or the shade of puce in a Jean Louis gown.
Lewton did not merely invite the filmgoer to use his gourd, he demanded it. He led them up to the door of terror and commanded them, “KNOCK!”
As with all work that either approaches or becomes Art, there is a specific and enormous demand on the observer, by the very nature and dimensions of the work itself, to commit; to participate; to bring something very individual and personal to the work, to expand it, in effect. To add to it. To enlarge it. To color it and intensify it, to personalize it, if you will.
Fear is undeniably a subjective affection. It is personal. What scares you, may not scare me. Fear of spiders. Fear of drowning. Fear of immolation, being buried alive, suffocation. Fear of snakes. Fear of needles. In 1984, Orwell’s Winston Smith is finally broken by being led to Room 101 of the Ministry of Love, the room containing that which most easily can break a man—the thing he secretly fears most. In Smith’s case…rats. Each of us has his own Room 101 (which was, in many ways, what Orwell was trying to say in his novel) and each of us can find himself as insensible, as useless as a bag of shattered toys, if the proper subjective stimuli is employed. This was Lewton’s secret for terror.
He was, in many ways, a consummate student and applicator of gestalt psychology. He opened all the doors to all the rooms numbered 101.
But Lewton employed a much more mature and subtle approach to the concept of fear. His was a second-level psychology, different from the typical “sharp noise” or “sharp movement” of most horror films, where you are momentarily frightened by a (for instance) hand suddenly jumping into the frame. He must have had knowledge of the reversal-of-impulse concept, either unconsciously or by study. To explain:
From Köhler on fear: “When a sudden event is felt to cause fright, a very strong impulse to move away from the event arises at the same time…Does anyone believe that the child feels his fear of the object, and the impulse to withdraw his hand, as two unrelated experiences? Or that, in his fear, the child might just as well feel a tendency to embrace or to swallow the disturbing object? [Italics mine.]…Just as an impulse of withdrawal arises directly from certain situations, so the opposite tendency is felt to be adequate in other situations.”
Thus, when confronted by Lewton’s horrors, we cover our eyes. And peek.
In The Cat People the fiancée of the hero is trapped in a swimming pool by a creature we do not see. It circles the pool, and she screams again and again. We are petrified with fear, but we are drawn to the scene inexorably. For long moments as the very long scene is played, we do not breathe. And not once do we see what it is we fear. The child in us walks to Room 101 and stares in numbed terror at the darkness beyond.
This was Lewton’s secret, and the thread that made of his tapestries works of Art rather than just momentarily amusing cartoons. The fears inside us, the fears of the dark, of youth, or of the unknown. The modern terrors that outstrip all the werewolves, vampires and ghouls Transylvania ever exported.
Explaining what terror is becomes a bore. It is akin to dissecting humor or honesty or love. Easy enough to cite examples of each, but murder trying to explain why they work.
Lewton’s films worked. Nothing more need be said. They were the heartmeat of fear. The apotheosis of true mortal terror. What we get these days is something that exists elsewhere, and does not work in the same way, nor nearly as well. I have gone into some detail on Lewton, to set the reader up for the tirade that follows, for without knowing what a critic stands for, it is impossible to validate what he is against.
I am for Lewton’s brand of terror.
I am against what Polanski did in Repulsion, in many ways. But between the two poles, there lies a no man’s land of films that should have employed terror, and did not, and before we reach Polanski, I beg your indulgence for a brief detour through counties not generally considered haunts of terror.
For in the traveltalks we may suffer through these unfamiliar counties, we may discover something not only of the nature of failure in current Hollywood fear-films, but of the general nature of boredom and failure in much of the cinema we get these days.
Onward.
2
Let’s shake ’em up a little:
King Rat, as a film, is a failure. The Loved One, as a film, is also a failure, but for entirely different reasons. Bunny Lake Is Missing is the biggest failure of the three, again for different reasons.
And all three fail because they were lousy films of fear.
Fear? King Rat a film of fear? The Loved—what the hell is he talking about? Are they reeling? Let’s hit them a little harder.
Bunny Lake is a cheat, from start to finish. King Rat is a wretched bore. The Loved One not only cheats and bores, but is in execrable taste, but not in the way its campy makers intended. It’s just a very sick series of private jokes, and misses vivisection of the horrors it originally intended by at least six feet deep. And all three of them could have profited from Lewton’s rules of terror. From which point—as we departed from section one of this triptych—we invade the Country of the Blind. Namely, the big fear moviemakers.
King Rat was taken from an excellent novel by James Clavell. It should never have been a movie. The fat-cats live in constant trepidation; it is the climate of Hollywood. You are only as good as your last film. Ergo, insure the next one. Pick something that was a success on the legitimate stage, or a best-selling novel, or a remake of something popular. (Because of this last, we have been “treated” to such displays as new versions of classics like Mutiny on the Bounty, Three Coins in the Fountain and Rashomon [as The Outrage; a film made purely for money, so plagiaristic in execution that it could not even be redeemed by calling it the sincerest form of flattery]. And we can look forward to a remake of Stagecoach with current lightweights of the Ann-Margret school mocking parts made memorable by Claire Trevor, John Wayne and Thomas Mitchell. One day soon we must discuss the venality and stupidity of producers who have the temerity to revamp films done to perfection the first time, merely to cash in on their perennial popularity.)
Thus, every novel that sells over sixteen copies becomes a film, without artistic regard for the suitability of a property for translation to the visual medium.
(And occasionally we get winners like Sex & The Single Girl, made from a title. How lucky we are.)
There are some books that were born to be read, not filmed. LORD JIM was one of these. SHIP OF FOOLS was another. Even Welles, in filming The Trial, came a cropper; and though he produced a film of excellence in his own vision, the mass of criticism leveled against him was based on the fact that it was not Kafka’s version or attitude. That’s tough, for the critics. They were not flexible enough to understand that THE TRIAL was not a book to be filmed, but a book to be read, as conceived by Kafka. But of the recent crop of “sure-fire money-making properties” translated by emasculation and amputation into second-rate films reaping box-office disaster, and deservedly so, King Rat is the prize example. It was a helluva book; it was a terrible film. Terrible, because it commits the one crime no work of art or entertainment should be allowed to commit unpunished.
It bores. It bores! Jeezus, to tears, it bores!
Now how—he asks, with incredulity in his voice—could a film about men suffering privation and each other’s basest moralities in a Japanese prison camp, be boring?
The element of fear was missing.
Ah. Back to the point. Roundabout, but back, nonetheless.
The scene is Changi Prison, 1945. A prison whose bars and locks are invisible, yet no less binding than those of cast iron, for Changi’s topological features are such that to escape is to die. There is no place to go. In the compound live ten thousand men who eke out a minimal existence by their wits and the tenacity to go on breathing just one breath longer, chiefly because it’s built into the machine. But there is King. He lives high. He is an entrepreneur, he is a mover, he is a provider, and in that strange way that only asserts itself in times of deepest tribulation, a leader and molder of men. But King wants only to make it for himself. He wheels, he deals, but he does not crawl on his belly like a reptile. He trades with the enemy for favors, and for the best of all reasons, Bryan Forbes’ intention to make him loathesome to us, fails completely. He is the only smart one in the pack. He wants to do more than subsist, he wants to live with a certain style, and a great deal of comfort. Most of the men (if not all) hate him, but they serve him, for the residue favors that are left behind when King has had his fill. Now from this intrinsically exciting and emotionally ineluctable situation, it would seen impossible to derive anything but a film of tension and passion and importance.
But it was a novel of complex inner motivations, on a personal level, and to portray merely the outward, physical actualities of these dark drives, was to strip a story of psychological imperativeness down to the level of a shadow-play. All chiaroscuro. For in playing the story at the skin-level, Forbes and his cast eliminated the one thing that was dominant in the book: fear.
Because of the fact that Changi was a prison in which no one could contemplate escape, there was never the omnipresent fear of the brutal Japanese guards, nor of imminent death. It became a study of men merely trying to hang on. Now that is a reasonable subject for a novel, in which we penetrate the skulls of the principals, and experience the terrors to which they were heir, day by day, moment within moment. But eliminate that internal fear, all the Room 101’s, and we are left with a landscape devoid of motivated, fearful particulars. All we have is an empty carcass.
Had Forbes understood the nature of fear, the nature of terror, he might have been able to save the film. But—and I will expect those of you who have not already seen the picture to see it, rather than accept my theory as some sort of Obiter Dictum—he had not studied his lessons; Lewton’s lessons, mind you; and so all those heavy areas of light and dark were moved around like so much earth and gravel. This was a potentiality for a film of fear, in the same category with Lewton’s subjects, but it was passed over in favor of more dubious “quality” elements. Nowhere in King Rat do we get the feel, the heft, the weight of trepidation, from anyone in the cast. Not even by cinematography or sets or direction is there the suspense of fear, the clutch of abiding terror. We have placidity, we have torpor, we have boredom.
And that is why King Rat fails.
Bunny Lake Is Missing, however, deals in fear and suspense and a kind of psychological horror that Lewton would have understood and approved. Yet as baldly as King Rat misses its impact-points for lack of fear, it is a modern classic compared with the stumbling, falling-down silliness and ineptitude of Otto Preminger’s latest carcinoma.
(Note to my mother, in Miami Beach: Dear Mom, I know I work in the industry, and I know they won’t hire me, but there are times when the sensible writer in me finds himself outshouted by the Ivory Tower writer who deplores bad movies and the men who continue to make them on the strength of reputations ill-deserved. On the other hand, Mom, I’ve always had a tendency to bite the hand that feeds me. Check your own. Much love, Disraeli.)
Because of the total misapplication of the strictures and freedoms of the implement fear, Bunny Lake becomes an exercise in hoodwinkery. We are led down all the wrong garden paths, without even the justification of a valid denouement.
Given: a pretty young woman and her pretty young brother, who have recently arrived in England. The young man attends to his journalistic employment, and the young girl (whose husband is confusedly referred to on occasion, but, it is made clear, is no longer on the scene in any way) puts her child Bunny in a day nursery. When she goes to pick her up, the child is missing, and no one remembers seeing her at any time. The police Inspector who handles the case is forced further and further toward the conclusion that the girl is hallucinatory, and the child never existed.
Given: a mounting strain of hysteria on the part of the girl, who fights to convince the Inspector and the world at large that Bunny does, indeed, exist, and is in terrible danger. The brother continues to drop inadvertent hints that Sis may be around-the-bend, despite his reiteration that Bunny does exist, and he will stand by his sibling come what may.
Given: a long, drawn-out crawl toward fifteen minutes of madness at the end of which we discover the brother is the whack, and has kidnapped the child himself, to keep his sister beside him, keep her love and attention for himself. A case of arrested adolescence. Or something.
Taken from a suspense novel by Evelyn Piper (which I must confess I have not read), this would seem to be a fulsome subject for a film of fear. Yet no one I know who saw this picture, myself included of course, felt anything but cheated when it was done. Why? I submit it was in the misunderstanding of the tenets of fear, and what is permissible in directing the logic of an audience in this area. If there was an internal consistency in the novel, it does not show up in the film.
Rather than merely solidify the points I am about to make by my own instinctive reactions, I approached the cornerstone of the structure of Bunny Lake—the madness of the brother—with an open mind, and consulted several texts on abnormal psychology. Everything I found led me to believe the character had been twisted to serve Mr. Preminger’s ends. Even so, it seemed feasible that in the swampland of the deranged mind such a syndrome might be possible, and so I consulted an expert in the field, Dr. Eugene A. Levitt, Clinical Psychologist of the Peterson-Guedel Family Center, in Beverly Hills. After a lengthy discussion of the motion picture, and the aberration as delineated by Keir Dullea in the part of the brother, Dr. Levitt came to the following conclusions:
“Given a deviant personality structure as grossly pathological as that of the brother in Bunny Lake, it would seem highly improbable that it would be manifested solely in the area of his feelings about his sister. One would certainly expect to see signs of deviancy in his behavior toward the sister; not just at the dramatic moment when it best suits the purposes of the plot-makers of the film, but consistently, throughout. And possibly more important, because of the clearly psychotic personality with which we are presented at the final stages of the film, indicating an aberrant childhood relationship to his parents, additionally there should—reasonably—be visible symptomatology in his relations with all adults, most particularly with such authority figures as the Inspector, who in this situation most specifically parallels a father-image. The absence of these ‘clues,’ if you will, connotes an intentioned deceit on the part of the story-tellers.”
Thus, we come to another pillar that must be present in the superstructure of the fear film, lest it fall down about the makers’ ears, as does Bunny Lake. Fear must carry with it, its own internal consistency and logic. It is not merely enough to say The Martian carries off the beautiful girl, kicking and screaming.
If the Martian’s body chemistry is completely alien to that of an Earthwoman, if he is a methane-breather, with a reproductive cycle closer to that of a chicken than to that of a human, then by all rights he should be raping a Rhode Island Red, not Kim Novak.
We are more terrified by the plight of Dorian Gray than all the Creatures who ever bubbled up from Black Lagoons, because we see reflected in Gray the terrors to which we are heir. The logic prevails in the one, and flees in the other.
We are led by the hand, by Mr. Preminger and his group, down a dark hallway toward a Room 101 that promises to hold unspeakable horrors. But when the door is opened, we find someone else’s terror there, and we feel we have been subjected to flummery. Had Preminger wished to make the film honestly, he would have carried the psychotic nature of the brother through the film, but obviously that would not have been dramatic enough, and the shock ending would have been pre-revealed. So Preminger lied to us. He altered the logic, made it inconsistent, and hoped that the pyrotechnics of the denouement would blind us to the cheat.
He failed, and with the failure comes the inescapable logic that if the film could not be made honestly, it should not have been made at all. We see in the stance of commercialism herewith adopted by Mr. Preminger, a similarity to the posture adopted by those who made King Rat. A neck-craning attitude, much like that of a flamingo, on one foot, precariously arching toward the money. It is an undignified stance.
Now we seem to be getting somewhere. We have set up a model of successful fear, the oeuvre of Lewton; we have established several seeming truths about fear’s application in the visual medium: it must not bore, it must reflect the personal terrors of the audience, it must contain its own internal logic and consistency, it must employ the imagination and powers of expansion of the audience, and it must view (ideally) through new or original visions.
We have examined a film that failed in that it did not use fear when it should have. We have examined a film of fear which completely misunderstood and misused the tools of terror it needed to succeed. Now we will go all the way to the far wall and examine a film of humor that somehow strayed into the Country of Cold Chills when it should not have done so; and failed thereby.
The Loved One, based on a novel of biting satire by Evelyn Waugh. Which I have read. (Two out of three is pretty good.)
No one who has even scanned Jessica Mitford’s incredible study of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death, can be oblivious to the horrors passim the trade in coffins and coagulants. It would seem impossible to produce a film around Waugh’s shredding dissection of these latter-day ghouls that would not bring forth raves of delight, and kudos for honesty. To even contemplate a motion picture in which the saccharine sanctity of the down-the-hole boys is stripped away (revealing them as used car salesmen in mourning rags), automatically incurs the not-inconsiderable wrath of the Funeral Lobby and its local leech-lines. The question of honesty would seem not even to arise. The question of suicide, perhaps, but not honesty.
How then, is it possible that Tony Richardson and his high camp followers made such a dishonest film, such a disastrously unsuccessful film, such a depressing and off-the-mark film? A film about as funny as an acrobat in a polio ward? A film about as funny as a turd in a punch bowl?
The answer, from this corner, lies in the intrusive shadow of fear that Richardson and his cast found themselves unable to dispel. Under a constantly-darkening veil of horror, the bizarre and the ludicrous intermingled with the hilarious and the hideous. In an attempt to make a film of humor about something basically ghastly, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s The Loved One wandered slantwise into the Country of Terror and could not find its way out. Trapped on a landscape of gore and grue, dealing with the carrion-flesh of those who live off the dead, Richardson was forced to the outer edge of sanity and visual imagery, in a frenetic attempt to stave off the encroaching phantom of horror that permeated the film.
He was not able to escape. The picture was forced to adopt advertising that proclaimed, SOMETHING TO OFFEND EVERYONE! and I suppose in Coshocton, Ohio, they will be offended. But we are not dealing with the chauvinism and naïveté of the Bible Belt in these pages. (The presumption that first-level film criticism and fan magazine goshwow need not enter into our considerations may be unwarranted, but if that is what you, gentle reader, are seeking herein, one of us ought to be elsewhere.) The picture is offensive, but not in the way the producers intended.
As I said earlier, it is offensive because it substitutes cute for cutting, weird for witty, and camp for clever. If MGM wishes to cop-out, it may well save its critical bacon by proclaiming this one of the first of the pop art films. (Though I contend Godard’s Alphaville is the front-runner in that category.) But that fear and terror permeated this film, in a way surely no one could have anticipated, is something Metro cannot deny.
Snap! We see Bobby Morse and Sir John Gielgud lunching in the studio commissary. Gielgud orders “the breast of Chicken, Lolita” and Morse orders “a Goldwater nut flip.” Funny. Snap! Morse discovers Gielgud’s body hanging grotesquely from the diving board of the weed-infested pool. Not funny. Snap snap!
The juxtaposition is alarming. We are made to laugh, then to shrink back in horror.
Snap! Anjanette Comer (surely one of the comeliest creatures God ever set down on this weary cinder to delight our eyes) wrestles about on the lawn with a salivating Morse, hellbent intent on invading her underwear. Amusing. Snap! Anjie Comer jams a pair of tubes of embalming fluid into her veins and dies slowly, slowly, very slowly. OhmiGod, not funny at all. Snap snap!
We are shown beauty, and it is tainted with madness. The juxtaposition is ghastly in its spectacle, in its roiled commingling of pure and foul.
The vomity obese mother of Rod Steiger. Steiger’s muscular faggotry. (There is sufficient reason to call it such, despite Steiger’s obvious lust for Miss Comer, because of the almost rampant homosexuality of almost all of the other principals in the cast, in every scene, in every gesture, in all of the private jokes so blatantly put on display for the gay crowd. I’m not knocking it folks, I’m merely saying that it served to deepen the unconscious strains of unrest and nausea for those of us who don’t happen to ride that particular hobby horse.) The Air Force romp with the tarts in the coffin room. The grotesqueries after grotesquerie piled one atop another. The dead dogs in the ice boxes. The very scent and smell of the funeral industry that reaches us through celluloid, through soundtrack, through flickering posturings of the players.
There is brilliance here, no question about it. But it is the deranged brilliance of a de Sade, the mad joy of an Octave Mirabeau or a Rimbaud. It is thoroughly decadent and debased brilliance. It is the invoking of the demons of fear and insanity, the creation of monster that, like a lynch mob, went berserk and devoured its makers. Consumed by their own creation, Richardson and his company now must exist in the blazing belly of the horror, knowing they somehow inadvertently cast the runes and read from the grimoire of terror, and brought forth they knew not what.
Here, in The Loved One, we see the incalculable power, the torment for producer and audience alike, the numbing quality of the implement fear. This was a partial awakening of the demon, and it managed in its somnambulistic sleepwalk to destroy a film of some importance. Loose, unfettered, uncontrolled, the fear Richardson came to work with, can be a juggernaut that lays waste the most honestly-intended film.
But with full knowledge, with the chains of understanding firmly wound in place, fear can be used to woo and capture the elusive mind-balance of an audience. In what particular areas Richardson’s helplessness before the mad face of the God he unleashed can be observed, lies a vivid warning to other film-makers who would toy without understanding with the single most potent implement a film-man can employ. Richardson played with it, tried to tame it with guffaws and outrage, but it destroyed his film.
In part three of this survey, I will attempt to analyze the struggle of yet another St. George, who may not have slain the Dragon Fear, but certainly dealt it a helluva bruising. And in that direction, I suspect, lies the hope not only of the film of fear, but of the entire motion picture industry.
Room 101 is just ahead of us. After you.
3
Roman Polanski’s Repulsion is the closest thing to a Lewton-oriented film of fear to which we have been treated in recent memory. Many there may be who will cite Psycho and others who will say segments of Charade suit better the appellation. (Most noticeably in the latter, the frightening scene of James Coburn tied to a radiator, his face blue and distorted from suffocation, head gently wrapped in a common plastic clothing sack, of the type we are warned to keep away from children.)
There is validity in their points, but for overall terror—albeit flawed, as I will delineate further on—the Polanski vision of a beautiful young girl’s progressive psychopathia is monumentally right for our attention here. I cannot quibble with the horror of the shower sequence in Psycho, nor of the final scene in which Tony Perkins talks with the voice of his mother (though I think the subliminal flashing of the death’s head was a bit much), but match these against the subtle horror of Catherine Deneuve’s performance, her sudden start of fear as the walls symbolically rend asunder overhead, the vagrant mad rubbing of the nose as she walks down a street in daylight, the head of the rabbit in her purse, the casual murders, the slatternly deterioration of the lovely girl…all of it, in totality, a numbing portrait of insanity in our times, laid out bare and quivering as the severed arteries of her victims.
Polanski is a man to watch.
It is entirely possible we have with us in the person of this young Polish director, another Lewton. From what we have seen of his first two films, it is obvious that Polanski’s interests lie in the area of human motivations and interpersonal relationships. In Knife in the Water Polanski brought tension and originality to the time-worn theme of the eternal triangle. Alone on a small yacht, two men and a woman act out a drama of hate and frustration, of decadent lives and brutality, all on the most subtle of levels, all inextricably involved with the symbolic search of each man for his masculinity. This, told in the framework of a love / sex story as simple as any folk tale. In Repulsion we go very much into the mind of a girl going insane.
These are the topics Lewton might have explored, had he lived longer. In point of fact, the similarities between The Cat People and Repulsion, each with a heroine living with delusions and murder, are uncanny. It would be interesting to know if Polanski is familiar with Lewton’s work.
But whether consciously aware or otherwise, what Polanski does in his films, to a marked degree, is what Lewton did. The movement, the easy manipulation of great masses of light and dark, the emphasis on the dark mind of the contemporary man and woman, the force of study on the terrors that beset us all…these are the trembles and trinkets Lewton found indispensable to the production of small classics of fear.
Polanski seems unerringly to find the way of most terror, in the same vector of talent that was Lewton’s. But there are differences—both in motivation and technique—between Polanski and Lewton. Differences that occasionally mar and blight what Polanski has brought forth, and against which Polanski hurled his talent, not always successfully.
Earlier I snapped at Time and Newsweek, and promised I would elaborate on the attack. My reasons are simply considerations of honesty and the inherent values of serious criticism. When I am manic, it is my belief that we need critics: sober and dedicated men and women who will remind us of the heritage of the past in the Arts, who will try to keep our level of attention and achievement at highest tide. (It hardly needs more demonstration than a flicking on of the TV set to prove that if left to its own devices, the taste of the mass—per Sturgeon’s Law—will inevitably sink to the lowest possible common denominator.) Both Time and Newsweek, and the soporific little journals that imitate their approach to reviewing, debase the act of criticism. They become exercises in cleverness; turns of the phrase with tongues in cheeks…admittedly making for garble. They are first to follow the trend of what is “in,” and first to condemn what they do not understand. The shabby need to appear street-smart, cutting edge, in the know, au courant, hip…at all costs; and the spiteful vengefulness when they realize they don’t understand the film, that they are dunce-cap befuddled! They turn their reviews into something like popularity contests, and where the function of constructive criticism is most needed, it is absent in their approach. Both Time and Newsweek praised Repulsion outrageously, without taking the time or indulging the cerebration that would have recognized its flaws, and thus enriched the lessons Polanski might have learned, thus benefitting his methodology in future films. Thus, my fury at the newsmagazines. They chose the way of the cop-out, the line of least resistance, the dazzlement of technique that should not have kept the serious critic from his craft. For Polanski pulled a rabbit out of a hat, and no one so far has bothered to notice that the rabbit was dead.
And in their hurry to add another film to the Recommended listings, the clowns failed to serve the artist who needed their comments, needed their attention, needed the benefit of their critical faculties.
It is altogether too easy to say that Repulsion is the closest thing to a perfect film of fear we have had since Lewton. Too easy, because of the obviousness of the comment. It is a fine film, a close-to-perfect film. But as I noted earlier, I am against what Roman Polanski did in Repulsion, in many ways. For he chose to substitute effect for logic, he chose to substitute adolescent fear for mature fear, he chose to be blatant rather than subtle, and in the final analysis, his genius carried him when he should have been relying on skill and craft.
What follows, these observations, are made in a spirit of camaraderie, with honorable intent. For it is my belief that Roman Polanski is one of the most adventurous and stimulating directors in the world of the cinema today. What they like to call a “promising” director. It is entirely possible that he bears within him the seeds of authentic greatness. And to the end that he not be whiplashed by sycophants, that he escape the too-soon adulation of those who toss away all critical objectivity in the sack-race to praise him soonest, that he not sacrifice growth for easy success, these comments are offered with respect and gratitude for bringing to the screen an individual and important talent.
But a talent that still needs comment.
Repulsion functions almost entirely on two levels. The first, a purely physical level of progression of events that sends the heroine through a series of emotional and psychological ambivalences. The second, a completely subjective fantasy-world that is reflection and refraction and distortion of the mental state of the girl. Where these two impinge, where they bisect each other, we have the most stunning and successful moments of the film. When we are helplessly drawn into the mind of the young girl and find ourselves staring down at the severed head of a raw rabbit in her purse we are assaulted by an admixture of nausea and horror. Like the child-in-fear to which Köhler referred in Part One of this article, we are both repulsed and attracted. We cover our eyes when Catherine Deneuve grapples with the lecherous landlord, but we peek between our fingers to see the moment she will slash him across the neck with the naked straight-razor.
Polanski plays on our feelings of fear toward sharp instruments, blades, knives; on our loathing of slippery men who attempt rape; on our ambivalent pity for the girl assaulted and trepidation for the man whom we know cannot stand for a moment against the assault of her insanity. We are tossed and turned by our own fears and the conditioned impulses of our upbringing.
In these areas, Polanski is a master.
But in the areas of motivation and logic, he opts rather for scintillation and pyrotechnics than for plotting.
We must line-out the basic story, first, however, before we can explain where Polanski did not do a full job: Catherine, a Belgian manicurist working in a Harriet Hubbard Ayer-type beauty salon in London, lives with her highly-sexed sister, who in turn shares bed-space with a rather hairy salesman. They make it frequently, and on the night silence comes the off-screen moaning and panting that sends sleepless Catherine under the covers in the next room. We understand almost immediately that the pretty Dresden figurine that is Catherine, conceals a mind that is torn with ambivalence at the thought of sex. She is attracted to, and repulsed by, the sight of her sister’s paramour. Catherine has a boyfriend. He is a gentleman, but she is so strange, so distant at times, that he suffers the ribbing of his pub-crawling friends with ill humor. Finally, Sis carts off to the hinterlands on holiday with her Lothario, and Catherine is left in their small flat with an uncooked coney on a plate, and the stench of encroaching lunacy. As she exists there in the somnolence, we see her illusions—great cracks suddenly ripping down the walls, hands thrusting out of a hall corridor that has turned to mud, rapists breaking down her doors, lurking under her bedsheets. Finally, as her mind disintegrates before our very eyes, she uses the razor on the landlord who comes to get the rent and stays to paw her shape. (Prior to this she has clubbed her boyfriend to death and dumped him in the bathtub, when he broke down the door to find out if she was all right or not. Hell of a way to find out.) In the end, the sister and lover return, to find Catherine in a catatonic state, and the joint surfeited with dead meat, not all of which is rabbit. Final shot, we dolly slowly in on an old photograph of the family, and we see Catherine-the-child. Her eyes. Quite mad. A twinkle of lunacy as she sees the world.
In his overwhelming impulse to show us the progression of Catherine’s madness, the rapid overtaking of her mind by a desire / revulsion of sex, Polanski handles the delusions with startling facility, presenting them so realistically, that for moments after they are over, we have to reorient ourselves that they were only wraiths of Catherine’s mind. In this, he employs the Lewton technique with great facility and impact.
But it is all demonstration, without motivation.
Questions, never asked, much less answered:
Which brings me to my final point, on the nature of fear in films, its use, and the dangers therein present.
Fear in the hand of a motion picture maker, like a shotgun in the hands of a baby, need not necessarily be properly aimed to make a helluva bang. But to hit the target dead-on, requires maturity and thought.
Polanski, to my mind undisputed heir to the throne left vacant by Lewton, is a master of technique and hoodwinkery. He substitutes effects for the deeper logic of the situations his stories imply. Fear in his hands is a weapon that he uses to stun the audience, to reduce them to adolescent trepidation. But when the theatre has been left alive, the fear vanishes. Instead of making us understand the nature and impetus of the horrors that grip Everyman, he has dazzled us, and when the sparklers fade, we depart untouched and our sight restored.
To be entirely successful, a film of fear must deal with logic and the explanations that logic demands.
Polanski came closest to the superlatives with which Lewton dealt. Closer than Hitchcock, closer than Dassin, closer than anyone who has attempted the film of fear in many years.
There is a lesson to be learned here. Not only for Polanski who, God willing, will persist in improving himself and create finer films of fear, but for the entire motion picture industry, currently glutting its production schedules with vapid comedies, senseless extravaganzas and ludicrous spy dramas as improbable as the Loch Ness monster. The lesson is simply that the intelligence of film audiences is a fine-honed tool, an additive that can be used to enrich any film. Moviegoers are ready to laugh, ready to shriek, ready to involve themselves to the eyeballs with films that demand something of them, as Polanski and Lewton demanded something of them.
They are saying, in the way they spend their money at certain box-offices, “There is nothing to fear but the lack of fear.”
A word to the wise ought to be sufficient. Ahead of you lie all the corridors with all the Room 101s, numbered. All that is required is that you knock.