Experiment Perilous (Jacques Tourneur, 1944)

George Brent, Paul Lukas, and Hedy Lamarr in Experiment Perilous

 Cast: Hedy Lamarr, George Brent, Paul Lukas, Albert Dekker, Carl Esmond, Olive Blakeney, George N. Neise, Margaret Wycherly. Screenplay: Warren Duff, based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Jack Okey. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Roy Webb. 

Cary Grant was the original choice to play the male lead in Experiment Perilous and Gregory Peck was the second. If the role had gone to either of them, the film might be remembered as more than just the other gaslighting movie of 1944, but it has been eclipsed by George Cukor's Gaslight. The part of the psychiatrist Huntington Bailey went to the stolid old reliable George Brent. Dr. Bailey gets caught up in the drama of the Bederaux family when he has a chance encounter on a train with the slightly dotty Clarissa (Cissie) Bederaux (Olive Blakeney), who tells him she's writing the biography of her brother Nick (Paul Lukas), who has a beautiful wife named Allida (Hedy Lamarr). Bailey is intrigued, but not much more, until a mixup in luggage puts him in possession of one of Clarissa's bags. That, and the enthusiasm of his artist friends Clag (Albert Dekker) and Maitland (Carl Esmond) for Allida's beauty, draws him into the Bederaux circle and arouses his suspicions that Allida is not the mentally fragile woman that her husband and others say she is. When he learns that Cissie has died of a heart attack, he opens her valise and finds the manuscript of her biography and her diary, confirming his suspicion -- and putting him in jeopardy. This is solid melodrama stuff, and director Jacques Tourneur, who directed the Val Lewton romantic horror movies Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943), knows just what to do with it. He's hindered a little by an over-complicated screenplay based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter, which necessitates a lot of flashbacks and switches in point of view, so the film doesn't proceed as smoothly as it might. But he maintains the right atmosphere as the plot moves to its resolution, which involves literally lighting gas as well as gaslighting. There's a goopy happy-ending coda to the main story that strikes the wrong note for the film, but Experiment Perilous deserves to be known as more than an also-ran.

Nightfall (Jacques Tourneur, 1956)

Anne Bancroft and Aldo Ray in Nightfall

Cast: Aldo Ray, Anne Bancroft, Brian Keith, James Gregory, Rudy Bond, Frank Albertson, Jocelyn Brando. Screenplay: Stirling Silliphant, based on a novel by David Goodis. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Art direction: Ross Bellah. Film editing: William A. Lyon. Music: George Duning.

Nightfall is a well-made thriller strengthened by ingenious plotting: It never lets the viewer know too much too soon, keeping the motives and even the identities of its characters hidden until the right time to reveal them. Beefy Aldo Ray plays the protagonist, whom we know as Jim Vanning until his past is disclosed. Vanning, it turns out, is on the run, accused of murder but also trying to dodge the real killers, a pair of bank robbers played by Brian Keith and Rudy Bond, who think that Vanning has absconded with the loot from their heist. But Vanning doesn't know that he's also being tailed by an insurance investigator, played by James Gregory. In a bar, Vanning meets Marie Gardner, played by Anne Bancroft a few years before The Miracle Worker (Arthur Penn, 1962) won her an Oscar and made her a star. She's a model and he's a freelance magazine illustrator, so they hit it off, not so fortunately for her because at that point the robbers show up, ready to beat the location of the money out of Vanning. Marie gets caught up in the plot as Vanning eludes the thugs and hides out with her. Eventually, they go on the run, joined by the insurance investigator, who is perfectly happy to help Vanning recover the money and prove his innocence. It all moves along swiftly, thanks to Jacques Tourneur's direction, and handsomely, thanks to the  cinematography of Burnett Guffey, who is equally adept at filming the noir shadows of the city and the bright snowy landscape of Wyoming where the chase winds up.

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.

Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)

Cat People is so fraught with subtext about the fear of female sexuality that it's amazing that critics once treated it as a mere "horror movie," while admitting that it was an effective one. Starting with the image drawn by Irena (Simone Simon) of a panther impaled on a sword, which is a version of the even more phallocentric statue in her apartment, it's clear that Tourneur, screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen, and producer Val Lewton have more on their minds (or subsconsciousnesses) than just spooking the audience. But then subtext was about the only way filmmakers could get away with sex under the Production Code, even when the point is that Irena and her husband (Kent Smith) are not having sex because she's afraid she'll rip him to shreds if they so much as kiss. I'm not a big fan of the horror films produced by Lewton, one of the few producer-auteurs, partly because they're more fun to talk about than to watch. The casting of such vapid actors as Kent Smith doesn't help.