Phffft (Mark Robson, 1954)

Cast: Judy Holliday, Jack Lemmon, Jack Carson, Kim Novak, Luella Gear, Donald Randolph, Donald Curtis. Screenplay: George Axelrod. Cinematography: Charles Lang. Art direction: William Flannery. Film editing: Charles Nelson. Music: Friedrich Hollaender. 
 

Isle of the Dead (Mark Robson, 1945)

 

Isle of the Dead (Mark Robson, 1945)

Cast: Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Marc Cramer, Katherine Emery, Helene Thimig, Alan Napier, Jason Robards Sr., Ernst Deutsch. Screenplay: Ardel Wray. Cinematography: Jack MacKenzie. Art direction: Albert S. D’Agostino, Walter E. Keller. Film editing: Lyle Boyer. Music: Leigh Harline.

Two famous works of art haunt (I use the obvious word intentionally) the film Isle of the Dead. The obvious one is Arnold Böcklin’s painting of that name, five versions of which he painted from 1880 to 1901, the year of his death. The image is re-created early in the movie, when the Greek Gen. Nikolas Pherides (Boris Karloff) and an American reporter, Oliver Davis (Marc Cramer) row out to a Greek island to visit the grave of the general’s daughter. But the other, less obvious work that comes to my mind is Francisco Goya’s aquatint etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, one of the images he created for the series Los caprichos in the late 1790s. In it, a man slumped at his desk is surrounded by menacing bats and owls. Producer Val Lewton’s celebrated series of moody psychological horror movies in the 1940s typically depict conflicts between the scientific, rational mind and manifestations of superstition and myth. In the film, the island is swept by what a doctor (Ernst Deutsch) diagnoses as septicemic plague, but the superstitious resident of the island, Madame Kyra, believes it’s caused by a vorvolaka, a vampire-like creature she thinks is embodied in the pretty young Thea (Ellen Drew), who is nursing the sickly Mrs. St. Aubyn (Katherine Emery). And when the doctor himself dies, the superstitious view begins to win out, especially with the general. But the narrative track of the movie, which inevitably includes a romance between the reporter and Thea, and which tends to come apart at the seams a little toward the end, matters less than the creepy effect it creates, including such horrors as the fear of being buried alive. Karloff gives the best performance, of course, as he degenerates from the imperious general who calmly sends a delinquent officer off to commit suicide into a man gripped by terrors he can’t face. 

Peyton Place (Mark Robson, 1957)

Lana Turner and Diane Varsi in Peyton Place

Cast: Lana Turner, Lee Philips, Diane Varsi, Hope Lange, Arthur Kennedy, Lloyd Nolan, Russ Tamblyn, Terry Moore, David Nelson, Barry Coe, Betty Field, Mildred Dunnock, Leon Ames, Lorne Greene. Screenplay: John Michael Hayes, based on a novel by Grace Metalious. Cinematography: William C. Mellor. Art direction: Jack Martin Smith, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: David Bretherton. Music: Franz Waxman.

Take the sex away from Grace Metalious's lurid novel Peyton Place and what you have left is a portrait of small-town narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy, very much in the tradition of fiction by much better writers, from Mark Twain to Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and William Faulkner. Squeezed by the strictures of the Production Code, the film version of the novel becomes a kind of reworking of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. There was narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy in Wilder's Grover's Corners, but only in the background. It bubbles to the surface in the adaptation of Metalious's novel, which replaces Wilder's heroine, the romantic Emily Webb, who loves her family and her town, with the embittered Allison MacKenzie (Diane Varsi), who hates not only the gossip-ridden town but also her mother, Constance (Lana Turner), for having withheld the information that Allison is the product of Constance's liaison with a married man. The film version of Peyton Place turns what in the novel was sexual molestation of a girl by her father into a rape by her stepfather, side-stepping the incest issue a bit, and converts an abortion into a miscarriage. The randy teenagers of the novel do nothing more shocking in the film than make out a bit and go skinny-dipping. The film hints a little that the shy mama's boy Norman Page (Russ Tamblyn) may be gay -- he refers to himself as a "sissy" once -- but relieves him of that stigma by having him join the paratroopers when war breaks out and come home bold and no longer shy. (It would never occur to Hollywood or its audiences of the day that a gay man could be bold and masculine.) In short, Peyton Place makes today's viewer do a lot of decoding. Which, aside from the fact that at 157 minutes it's overlong and a lot of the dialogue is heavy-handedly expository (and sometimes just banal), doesn't fatally undermine it as entertainment. There are some very good performances: Varsi, Turner, and Tamblyn received Oscar nominations, as did Arthur Kennedy as the slavering rapist stepfather, and Hope Lange as his victim-stepdaughter. Metalious, of course, hated it all the way to the bank.

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.

Journey Into Fear (Norman Foster, 1943)

Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles in Journey Into Fear

Cast: Joseph Cotten, Dolores Del Rio, Everett Sloane, Ruth Warrick, Orson Welles, Agnes Moorehead, Jack Durant, Eustace Wyatt, Frank Readick, Edgar Barrier, Jack Moss, Hans Conried. Screenplay: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, based on a novel by Eric Ambler. Cinematography: Karl Struss. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Mark-Lee Kirk. Film editing: Mark Robson. Music: Roy Webb.

While they were working on The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten used some spare time to rewrite a screenplay by Richard Collins and Ben Hecht for a property owned by RKO, Eric Ambler's spy novel Journey Into Fear. Welles would have directed, but he was still tied up on Ambersons, so he assigned the job to Norman Foster, though he still had time to play the secondary role of Col. Haki, and as producer to see to it that many of the actors he had worked with -- Cotten, Dolores Del Rio, Everett Sloane, Ruth Warrick, and Agnes Moorehead -- played key roles. The result is a film whose complicated plot never quite resolves itself into clarity, but which abounds in Wellesian moments, such as the desperate struggle on the rainswept ledge of a hotel at the film's climax. Unfortunately, Welles's battle with RKO over the editing of Ambersons resulted in his firing, and the editing of Journey Into Fear was similarly taken out of his hands.