A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, October 8, 2019

I Walked With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)


I Walked With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)

Cast: Frances Dee, Tom Conway, James Ellison, Edith Barrett, James Bell, Christine Gordon, Theresa Harris, Sir Lancelot, Darby Jones. Screenplay: Curt Siodmak, Ardel Wray, based on a story by Inez Wallace. Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Walter E. Keller. Film editing: Mark Robson. Music: Roy Webb.

I feel a little sorry for the viewer who watches I Walked With a Zombie expecting the lurid thrills of a certain popular TV show or even the campy ones of Hammer horror films, and encounters instead a moody, dreamlike tale that borrows heavily from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. The tone of the film is set at the very beginning, when the narrator -- Frances Dee's Betsy Connell -- says in a subdued, almost matter-of-fact manner, "I walked with a zombie." The low key restraint of her narration pervades the film, which has an insidious way of working on your nerves without subjecting them to sudden shocks. I like, too, the way in which the crime of slavery works its way into the fabric of the story as a source of horror. The coachman driving Betsy to Fort Holland reminds her of "the enormous boat [that] brought the long ago fathers and the long ago mothers of us all, chained to the bottom of the boat." Betsy burbles out the white folks' familiar defense: "They brought you to a beautiful place, didn't they?" To which the coachman can only reply with a long-learned submissiveness, "If you say so, Miss. If you say so." Betsy hasn't yet learned the lesson Paul Holland (Tom Conway) tried to teach her on the ship that brought her there. As she looks out at the stars and the sea, he tells her, "Everything seems beautiful because you don't understand.... There's no beauty here, only death and decay." A shooting star streaks across the sky. "Everything good dies here," he says. "Even the stars." I Walked With a Zombie doesn't quite deliver on that premise, in part because it's too restrained and poetic in its storytelling, but it makes a good go at it.
Posted by at
Links: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)